Cockcroft, Eva

COCKCROFT, EVA (1936–1999). Eva Susan Sperling Cockcroft, an accomplished and prolific American community muralist and artist/activist, used her outstanding visual talents to express her strong, lifelong commitment to progressive causes. Her themes included the quest for racial justice, the dignity of labor and indigenous populations, feminism, and opposition to police brutality and American imperialism, especially in Latin America, and many related topics. She painted murals in New Jersey, New York, Nicaragua, Germany, and Los Angeles. She was also a teacher and writer, creating a multifaceted career centered on the visual arts.

Born in Vienna, Cockcroft came as an infant to the United States when her physician parents sought refuge from Nazi tyranny. Her upbringing led her to Cornell University as a pre-medical student, but soon discovering that a medical career would fail to satisfy her personal needs. She changed her major to creative writing. After marrying James Cockcroft, a political activist and scholar of Latin America, and settling into a conventional family role, she found writing an important outlet for her artistic impulses.

Her watercolor classes soon revealed that painting was more gratifying. During the next decade, she studied art while raising three children and traveling extensively. She lived and worked in Columbia, developing detailed knowledge of Latin America, a background that significantly informed her future artistic efforts.

In 1970, several experiences converged to radicalize and transform her into a major mural artist. Civil rights, anti-war activism, and feminist consciousness led her to Chicago, where she met the artists who catalyzed the renaissance of US political mural painting. At Rutgers University, where she studied art, Cockcroft began her mural work in earnest. There she created several works that attracted major attention in the burgeoning mural movement.

Moving to New York, she intensified her creative and artistic organizing activities, painting many murals relevant to the lives of people in their communities. These established her as a premier figure in the contemporary community of political mural makers. That reputation followed her to her new location in Southern California in 1989.

Her public artworks there became monuments of social consciousness. Several––among many others––stand out because they address timeless radical themes resonating in the 21st century and because they have endured despite the ravages of time. These are iconic examples, widely known and often taught and reproduced.

A dramatic example is Cockcroft’s “History of Women and the Labor Movement in California.” The mural celebrates the lives and work of major women leaders of the 20th century: Communist Party leader Dorothy Healy; Rose Pesota, a key ILGWU organizer; Charlotta Bass, a Black community organizer and publisher and 1952 Progressive Party VP candidate; Dolores Huerta, United Farm Workers leader; and Luisa Moreno, cannery worker organizer deported to Guatemala during McCarthyism.

Eva Cockcroft was one of the first community muralists, moreover, to address environmental issues. She painted several compelling murals on this topic in the LA area. One powerful Long Beach example is her 1990 “Oil, Life and Ecology,” a critique of petroleum as a fuel that could no longer be viable. This dramatic mural emerged from her environmental activism following the 1989 Exxon Valdez wreck and its catastrophic oil spill.

Her final mural was “Homage to Siqueiros,” a precise reconstruction of the great Mexican artist’s censored mural “America Tropical,” which had been whitewashed shortly after he completed it in 1932. Working with Alessandra Moctezuma, she produced an amazing replica of that anti-imperialist artwork––far more impressive than the Getty Institute reconstruction available to the public.

Eva Cockcroft worked on that mural as she was dying from breast cancer. Her premature death was a major loss to the United States and world political art community.

Bennett, Alan W. Community Murals: The People’s Art. Plainsboro Township, N.J. Associated University Presses, 1984.

Cockcroft, Eva, John Pitman Weber, and James Cockcroft. Toward a People’s Art. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Dunitz, Robin J. Street Gallery. Bridgehampton, N.Y.: RJD Gallery, 1993.

Dunitz Robin J. and James Prigoff. Painting the Towns. Bridgehampton, N.Y.: RJD Gallery, 1997.

Von Blum, Paul. Other Visions, Other Voices: Women Political Artists in Greater Los Angeles. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994.