By Jared Olar
Library Assistant
Many Pekinites will remember the former Pekin Mall with some fondness, and not a little nostalgia and regret for the Mall’s failure. It was a little more than 30 years from the Mall’s formal dedication on Sept. 28, 1972, to the beginning of demolition in late 2002 as the Mall was transformed into East Court Village.
Among the areas of the old Mall that fell to the wrecking ball was the Mall’s main entrance, which, as many will recall, had been decorated with a large mural, located on the left-hand wall as one entered the Mall. Entitled “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” the colorful mural was 14 feet high and 70 feet long, and was painted by New York artist Kenneth Munowitz and his assistant Sara Burris (who had studied art at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis).
The mural, which took four weeks to paint, was commissioned by Herb Simon, president of Melvin Simon & Associates of Indianapolis, the developers of the Pekin Mall, and was dedicated on Sept. 28, 1973, the Mall’s first anniversary.
In 1979 the Pekin Daily Times published a multi-page insert on the Pekin Mall that included information on the mural on page 10. This is how the mural was described in that insert:
“The artist Ken Munowitz of New York defines the murel (sic) as reflecting a ‘figurative, surrealistic fantasy world.’ In it, the people are green, beige, yellow, roy-poly (sic) Schmootype characters with page-boy haircuts, male and female alike. They smile, hug, dance, and just frolic amid pink, purple and red dogs, dinosaurs and other assorted happy monsters. A smiling yellow snake is curled around a palm tree sprouting green and blue footballs.
“A soft-as-putty pink dino displays his three-foot beige teeth and doesn’t seem to mind a red lizard popping from his pouch. Above all these goings-on, a giant yellow sun in a black sky keeps its eyes on just about everything.”
Munowitz’s mural bore the same title as Hieronymus Bosch’s better-known painted triptych. While the mural and Bosch’s triptych depict surreal scenes, Munowitz’s scenes were fanciful and fun, quite unlike Bosch’s bizarre and sometimes disturbing images.
Before painting the Pekin Mall mural, Munowitz studied at the Cooper Union in New York City for five years, exhibiting his work at the Cooper Union Gallery. As art director of Horizon magazine, Munowitz won several art and design awards. Munowitz also worked as a painter for the 1969 movie “Coming Apart” and was the credits designer for the 1973 movie “Werewolf of Washington.”
In the years after he painted the Mall mural, Munowitz co-wrote and illustrated three children’s books, all with a biblical subject: “Happy Birthday, Baby Jesus” (1976), “Moses, Moses” (1977), and “Noah” (1978), all three illustrated in Munowitz’s distinctive style that could be seen in the Pekin Mall mural. More recently, a Munowitz art exhibit, “Portraits Real and Imagined,” ran in May-June 2014 at Baruch College’s Sidney Mishkin Gallery at City University of New York.
Although Munowitz’s Mall mural is no more, a few black-and-white newspaper photographs of the mural are known to still exist (including one in the Pekin Public Library’s Local History Room collection). It is unknown if any color photos of the mural survive.
