Artist Makes a Last-Ditch Appeal to Save His Murals From Wrecker

It is Roberto Salas’ final plea to keep two giant murals on San Diego life from becoming a pile of rubble.

Salas, 31, a local artist whose fluorescent Night Visions mural adorns a Balboa Park wall and whose 18-foot concrete palm tree for Harbor Island awaits the approval of the San Diego Port Commission, says he is desperately seeking a home for the two billboards on F Street between 9th and 10th Avenues before a developer begins demolition this week to make room for a 300-unit SRO hotel.

‘Slated for Demolition’

Last week, Salas put up signs with his phone number near the murals he painted two years ago. The signs said: “Slated for Demolition. Help Rescue the Mural. 226-5128.” The project’s manager, Scott Brown, says the artist has had about eight months to find a new a home for the artwork, and that the property owner and developer--former City Councilman Tom Hom--is anxious to get started on the low-income housing project.

“I’d hate for it to happen,” Brown said of the demolition of the murals. “But we’re trying to get this stuff built as soon as possible. I have a business to run.”

Brown said the first agreement between Salas and Hom called for the artist to paint the murals as part of his graduate studies and that the art was supposed to stay up 60 days. “We allowed it to stay up approximately two years,” Brown said.

The contractor hired to do the demolition work has been told to bring the murals down last, Brown said.

Richard Kunze, the Spring Valley-based contractor who will demolish the old service station where the art work stands, said the murals were news to him.

“I’ll have to go down there and take a look at it,” Kunze said. “When you’re in the (demolition) business, you don’t look for aesthetics.”

The San Diego County Public Arts Advisory Council, which supports local arts programs, has used its extensive mailing lists to try to find a location for the murals but has been unsuccessful, executive director Carol Hobson said.

“We’re trying to find a community to embrace it,” she said.

Depictions of Culture

Salas said that through the council, a Linda Vista woman expressed an interest in moving the murals to a Genesee Avenue park but that he has not heard from her.

The artist says he would hate to see the murals reduced to rubble, especially considering the transformation that the whitewashed billboards underwent two years ago when he contacted Hom and got permission to paint the murals with the La Jolla Museum and several art galleries as sponsors.

“I was driving by there one day and the billboards were just sitting there with really nothing on them,” said Salas, who arrived in San Diego three years ago from New Mexico and is a graduate art student at UCSD.

He calls the two murals “depictions of some of the popular culture of San Diego.”

One shows a lean, faceless surfer with the ocean and a seemingly endless pier in the background.

“For me, it was much better to conceptualize surfing,” the artist said. “The piece is commending surfers, because it (surfing) is a real challenge.”

The other mural depicts the growing city of San Diego, with new development luring more traffic and changing the city’s face, Salas said.

“One of the things in San Diego that I noticed is that it’s constantly under movement,” he said.

Salas is hoping that somebody will offer a home for the 25-foot-high murals before the bulldozers move in.

“I would love for somebody to come in and say, ‘Let’s put this in a park,’ ” he said. “I guess it’s the last plea if nothing else can be done.”