There is a good side to bad traffic and I found it the other day. The 405 south of Century had slowed to inches per minute – not unusual – but, for a change, I was in the spot I would have chosen, right alongside the L.A. Marathon mural. I crept past, able to study the runners’ faces as they strode, clear-eyed and confident, through graffiti up to their chins. They were unconcerned and I was happy.

Los Angeles has so many murals that almost any little excursion will net you a view of some, whether you stay on the freeway or bolt desperately for freedom into unfamiliar neighborhoods. You can see a few murals from the freeway – the picture of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra in downtown L.A. comes to mind – but you’ll see more (and more safely) if you get off the freeway and browse the surface streets. It is a fine way to cope with traffic that has gone from bad to worse.

One of my better escapes was into Highland Park from the Pasadena Freeway. Figueroa Street was a virtual art gallery. The Arroyo Furniture Store’s long sidewall was crowded with Aztec, Mayan, Native American, and African American themes, including the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl and Cesar Chavez. The low walls of two parking lots bore sophisticated graffiti art. Farther along was a new construction site, with a link fence protecting little more than one wall, the lone remnant of a recently demolished building. On the street side of the wall was an angry mural protesting against politicians who spend money on the military but not on schools and libraries, and depicting them as book-burning Spanish conquistadors and Nazis. The protest must have worked because a new library was being built on the site and the mural was to be preserved. Down the road, however, was a mural full of marchers bearing signs commemorated the people who fought in vain against California’s anti-immigrant proposition 187.

Not long ago, in her Los Angeles Times column, Drive Time, Mary McNamara wrote about the joys of getting lost in L.A. and, in my opinion, these murals are one of those joys. Most of us are so oriented to our city in terms of freeways that we have forgotten about the roads people used 50 years ago to get across town. Seeking out murals, a pleasure in itself, can also introduce you to alternate routes to take for pleasure or expediency. Amaze your friends by veering off clogged free- ways and zipping across town on North Broadway, Cesar Chavez, or Martin Luther King. Point out murals along the way and savor the small town atmosphere where people still buy things in tiny stores. If you do not have the time or the money to visit foreign countries, just zip off the freeway for an hour or two, and try to guess what languages are printed on those store signs.

The first thing to do is to make a permanent home in your car for Robin J. Dunitz’s book, Street Gallery, a Thomas Guide, and some Auto Club street maps. I personally prefer big, conspicuous maps because they seem to invite passersby to stop and help.

The numbers and types of murals you see will depend largely on the area you choose to visit. For starters, don’t even bother cruising Beverly Hills for murals. Only two of the 13 that Dunitz lists

can be seen from the street. Ironically, though, the Beverly Hills post office still houses one of the few New Deal murals that illustrates the miseries of the Depression, and that alone might be worth the cost of parking.

In East L.A., on the other hand, you will find hundreds of murals. This is the mother lode of L.A. wall art. There’s everything from pre- Columbian designs, Virgins, Aztec warriors, tributes to dead brothers, current social commentary, revolutionary soldiers grappling with the powers of corruption. The large Hispanic population there has built on a legacy of the great Mexican revolutionary wall painters and their murals are powerful. Judith Baca, the artistic and organizational force behind many public mural programs, was born there and her energy and vision have flowed out over the rest of the city, inspiring and empowering whole communities.

Baca is responsible for many of the murals you’ll see elsewhere. In 1976, she and two other women (filmmaker Donna Deitch and artist Christina Schlesinger) started the Social and Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, a multi-cultural arts center that produces, exhibits, distributes and preserves public artwork.

HISTORY

Los Angeles, with well over 1500 murals, has been described as the Mural Capital of the World. This is a recent phenomenon, a happy combination of nationalities, ethnicities, social changes, and circumstances. Most of the murals have been produced since 1968. Prior to that there were about a hundred mosaics that Millard Sheets and others began designing for the Home Savings of America banks in the early 1950’s. Before that were the New Deal murals started during the Depression And even before that was the Mexican Revolution which would eventually have a tremendous effect on public art in the United States, especially in California.

Mexico’s bloody civil war started in 1910 and lasted for years. While revolutionary soldiers fought for economic progress and human rights, political and artistic activists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco – subsequently the three big names in Mexican art – were involved in their own revolution. They had rejected European Impressionism in favor of the strong colors and explicit forms of Mexican Indian traditions, and began appealing to the government for permission to paint murals on public buildings so that the new art would be available to the masses. When the country finally stabilized, the artists got what they wanted and more – commissions with freedom to paint what they wanted as long as they used Mexican themes. Mexico became famous as the place where art was happening and people went there to watch it happen, literally, stroke by stroke.

The effect on our country was two- fold. First, during the Depression, a painter named George Biddle, who had studied with Rivera, proposed that our government’s New Deal sponsor art projects along the lines of Mexico’s mural art. He said that not only would it help feed needy artists but it would also provide the people with a cultural back- ground from which more art would follow.

To create this cultural background, murals were painted in public buildings across the country– libraries, schools, and government offices, especially post offices because every town had one.

Although some projects made a point of using regional artists and encouraged them to paint authentic and meaningful local subjects, others tended to be idealized or elitist, presenting versions of history that ignored racial, class, and gender issues.

Many of us remember these as our first murals, huge paintings that swept across walls and soared to the ceilings. To children, they were just about as interesting as history texts, but they gave us a lot to look at while our parents checked out books and mailed packages. They were so large that we could focus on minor details – the buckles on shoes, the construction of a wagon wheel, the brush strokes on a face – and never trouble ourselves with any ethnic insensitivity or historical inaccuracies in the big picture.

The New Deal murals did what they set out to do: they gave work to artists; they demonstrated to the average citizen that art was important, and they supported American art. Twenty years later they were a starting place for the new murals, pro- viding styles to replace, attitudes to reject, and history to correct. They were like the parents of the new generation, and if the New Deal murals were the parents, the Mexican revolutionary artists were the godparents.

The concept of big, expressive art in public places percolated for two decades before the Civil Rights movement and the hippie culture both put it to work. Newly empowered ethnic groups, making-up for years of being ignored or misrepresented in the New Deal (WPA) murals, began painting their own versions of history. The Chicano population, with their heritage of the great Mexican revolutionary painters, led the way in demonstrating the political power in their brilliant public artworks.

In 1975, Judith Baca started the half-mile long Great Wall of Los Angeles project, a community effort to re-tell the history of California and include significant women and ethnic groups that had been more or less invisible in textbooks. Each summer, the young people who worked on it learned a version of history that had been largely ignored by society and then illustrated it on the concrete walls of the Tujunga Wash that parallels Coldwater Canyon Avenue. just north of the Ventura freeway. The same major events are shown that might be seen on a New Deal mural, but the people come in a wider range of colors.

For other artists, painting wasn’t especially political. Public walls were just an exciting new kind of canvas and a place to get more recognition than they would in conventional shows and gal- leries. They painted folk heroes — musicians, actors, writers and others — on fences and walls as simple acts of homage. They painted unknowns, neighborhood characters, and their buddies with the same reverence. They took their visions, psychedelically induced and otherwise, and made them into surrealistic paintings.

Many of the early wall paintings, during the 1960s and 1970s, were done by artists on private property, their own or someone else’s, with or without permission. Many of the hippie-era murals just sort of appeared overnight on a wall somewhere and many of them stayed because they were beautiful, quirky, captivatingly rude, fantastic, cynical, or surrealistic. In 1968, the well-known “Groupie” painting – the first “hip” mural in Venice — was painted openly in broad daylight on a wall the artist took a liking to. Sometimes this hit-and-run work is called “guerrilla art.”

The Pink Lady of Malibu was such a work. It is rumored that she was painted by a nervy woman who hung all night over the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road to create a real pick-me-up for the morning’s commuters. Bright pink and voluptuously naked, she upstaged every celebrity in Malibu. Fans visited the tunnel for several days, or weeks, how many I don’t know, but not many and not enough. However, community outrage got her abolished in record time. — would that potholes offended so many vocal citizens. She might be forgotten now except that her name lingers on as a cocktail served in coastal bars.

Venice has always had a large share of interesting murals, up and down the boardwalk (Ocean Front Walk) and all over town. On Venice Boulevard you can see two blue whales at Beethoven on the NW corner, a hip-hop/pop art/cubism hybrid at Venice High School, Jesus Roller-Skating with Friends at Venice Beach at the Lutheran Church, and an allegory about Los Angeles at the SPARC office in the old Venice police station.

Many old Venice favorites have been lost. The beloved snow scene with local characters wearing mittens and warm jackets because the boardwalk is covered with snow disappeared when a build- ing went up next to it and obscured the whole wall. Other old favorites, faded or damaged, have been replaced, usually with changes and updates. Botticelli’s Venus still roller skates along the boardwalk after “reconstitution” by the artist in 1989. Chagall Comes to Venice Beach returned after the 1994 earthquake with a new Moses and a black God, and Jesus still skates on convention- al skates but some of his friends have upgraded to roller blades.

Other areas have lost murals too. Two that Siqueiros painted in the 1930s were deemed so offensive that they were dispatched as quickly as the Pink Lady of Malibu was 40 years later. One contained an inter-racial theme. The other, América Tropical, at Olvera Street, made a blatant comment about American imperialism. This painting has been in the news recently because it is being partially restored.

Commuters on the Hollywood Freeway grieved so when the famous Freeway Lady was painted over that the building’s owner was sued. The court ruled that the mural be restored.

Many others have been lost to damage from weather, pollution, graffiti, earthquakes, and demolition. The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles was formed to document and preserve our city’s murals, but funding is insufficient to repair everything that needs it. Often when murals are badly damaged, the city just slops gray paint over them and then they are gone forever.

Some consider graffiti art an oxymoron however, in another curious juxtaposition of concepts, Gaijin Fujita from Boyle Heights blends graffiti with classical Japanese painting and is currently showing his paintings at the L.A. Louver in Venice.

Originally associated with marking gang territories and promoting individual egos, the angular, distorted lettering of graffiti taggers has long infuriated -people who find their property or favorite murals vandalized.

Organizations like SPARC hire many “at risk” kids to work on the murals they sponsor. They do this primarily so each mural will be a community effort but also because they believe that people who learn artistic skills and how to work cooperatively will be less interested in tagging. They are probably right. The taggers’ work has, indeed, become more artistic, complex, and colorful. Their background designs have depth and real beauty and their lettering has style, if not legibility.

My neighbor, Eric, is a 14 year old Mexican American who takes his artwork seriously. He gets good grades in school so he will be eligible to work on murals through SPARC and tells of informal groups or “crews” that do murals, or “’pieces” (short for masterpieces). They share techniques, teach skills to younger members, and critique each other’s work.

HOW TO SEE MURALS

One way is to pick an area from the Dunitz book and map out your own tour. Plan the route before you start driving. If you have a patient companion who can navigate well, take him or her along. Resign yourself to inevitable detours, one-way streets, unexpected changes of street names, and the occasional mural that has disappeared. Likewise, watch for brand new works of art.

The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles has offered many tours in the past. They are currently updating their tour schedule as well as their handy map and guide booklet. Their number is 323-512- 5697. It’s a volunteer organization, so be patient if you don’t get them immediately. Their web site is www.lamurals.org.

If you have a large group, you can arrange a tour through SPARC (the Social and Public Art Resource Center). Check prices and availability at 310-822-9560. You can also drop in at their office (the old police station at 685 Venice Blvd. in Venice) and get Street Gallery and many other books on murals. Check out their web site at www.sparcmurals.org.

Also, watch the calendar in the L.A. Times for other art and culture groups that occasionally tour the murals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Here are a few of the books listed by Robin Dunitz in Street Gallery, some of which you might find at the SPARC office.

• Barnett, Alan W., Community Murals: The People’s Art, The Art Alliance Press, Inc., Philadelphia, 1984
• Chalfant, Henry and James Prigoff, Spraycan Art, Thames and Hudson Inc., New York, 1987 Charlot, Jean, The Mexican Mural Renaissance 1920-1925, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1963
• Cockcroft, Eva and Holly Barnet- Sanchez, editors, Signs From the Heart: California Chicano Murals, Social and Public Art Resource Center, Venice, California 1990
• Community Redevelopment Agency, City of Los Angeles, Public Art in Downtown Los Angeles, 1986, (a pocket guide with maps)
• Dunitz, Robin J. and James Prigoff, Painting the Towns: Murals of California
• Dunitz, Robin J., Street Gallery: Guide to over 1000 Los Angeles Murals, RJD Enterprises, Los Angeles, 1993, 2nd ed. 1998
• Goldman, Shifra, Dimensions of the Americas: Art and Social Change in Latin America and the United States, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994
• Hager, Steven, Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Rap Music, Breakdancing and Graffiti, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1985
• Lewis, Samella, Art: African American, Hancraft Studios, Los Angeles, 1990 RJD Enterprises, Los Angeles, 1997
• Rochfort, Desmond, Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, Universe, New York, 1993
• Rolston, Bill, Politics and Painting: Murals of Northern Ireland, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1991

FolkWorks Volume 2 Number 6 March-April 2002

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Valerie Cooley lived in West Los Angeles when this was originally written. She currently lives in Coos Bay, Oregon. She still loves folk music, dancing, and crafts. She co-chaired the Banner Committee for the CTMS Summer Solstice Festival where she was able to indulge her love of pretty colors, fabrics, and the enthusiasm of the people who put them together.