Insects such as locusts or wasps are morphed with modern military apparatus, while blood-sucking mosquitoes represent corporations drilling for oil.

Mural painting, or public art, is one of the oldest and most important forms of artistic, political, and social expression. From prehistoric cave paintings to the frescos of ancient Greece, humanity has demonstrated that art, in its true essence, is a communal enterprise. Picasso used the technique in 1937 to express his intense anti-war sentiment in the masterpiece ‘Guernica’. Mural paintings were used to communicate the political ideals of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and to promote China’s new cultural direction following the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Among the most famous political muralists of the 20th century were the Mexican social realist painters, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco who portrayed their vision of social justice in the 1920’s through fresco painting. Presently, a group of activists based in rural Eastern Maine known as the Beehive Collective have reinvented this form of visual imagery to create intricate, anti-copyright murals which communicate the dilemmas of corporate globalization. […]

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