Murals Resurface on City’s Arts Agenda : Revived Project Hopes to Complete 9 by Next Summer

As artist Judith Baca sees it, the resurrection of a city-financed mural program could mean nothing less than a “mural renaissance” for Los Angeles.

Baca and other organizers of the $250,000 Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited Program, revived when Mayor Tom Bradley signed the city budget July 1, plan to produce nine murals by next summer, employing young people to assist professional artists.

“There hasn’t been a city-sponsored effort to produce new murals since 1983,” when the new program’s predecessor ended, Baca said the other day. “This would again create a series of new works in L.A. and assure its prominence as a mural center internationally.”

Baca, artistic director of the Venice-based, nonprofit Social and Public Arts Resource Center which is administering the new venture, initiated its forerunner. That venture, the Citywide Murals Program produced about 250 murals from 1974 to 1983 before it lost its funding.

Thousands of youngsters worked in that program, Baca said, as did some 450 youths who helped her animate California history in the San Fernando Valley’s half-mile-long Great Wall of Los Angeles.

The new endeavor is part of a broad-based effort to prevent juvenile delinquency that includes graffiti cleanup programs, said Anton Caleia, the mayor’s budget director. It will pay minimum wage for up to 10 people (aged 14 to 21) per mural to help design and paint the grand-scale artworks.

“We’ve been working very hard to provide constructive outlets for kids who might be tempted to join gangs or experiment with drugs,” Caleia said. “This is one of them. We want to instill in every child a proprietary interest and a sense of pride in the work and in the child’s neighborhood.”

Thus, Neighborhood Pride youths, who will be referred by local agencies, schools or the juvenile justice system, will help create murals to be painted in their own neighborhoods, anywhere from Venice to South Central Los Angeles.

The murals will reflect the diverse cultures of the communities in which they are placed.

In addition to teaching youngsters about the 1,000 murals that have prompted experts to call Los Angeles the nation’s mural capital, organizers will teach the young people about their own communities to help “make history come alive” with paint and paint brush.

“So a mural might show Venice and the legend of Abbot Kinney, the crazy tobacco tycoon who dug its canals,” Baca said. “Or the works might be about current issues of concern to the people in Venice: Homelessness, redevelopment, pollution.”

Community members as well as artists may recommend a mural’s subject matter and site, Baca said. Artists, who will be given materials, equipment and $7,000 per mural, will be selected by a five-member panel that includes Baca, Armando Duron, president of the National Hispanic Media Assn., and John Outterbridge, artist and director of the Watts Towers Arts Center.

Oct. 3 is the start date for the first three murals, and artists who wish to paint them should submit 20 slides and a resume by Aug. 22 to Social and Public Arts Resource Center, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice 90291. Work on the next six murals is slated to begin next year.

In addition to making new murals, artists may repaint others that have been damaged or covered over, such as Kent Twitchell’s “Old Woman of the Freeway,” painted over in 1986, Baca said, noting that the resource center has also received $5,000 from the city’s cultural affairs commission to restore damaged murals.

(In a related matter, the Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to vote, probably in the fall, on a proposed ordinance to protect and preserve murals and other public artworks. In the last 16 months, at least five well-known murals have been painted over.)

The Neighborhood Pride program has received additional support from the ARCO Foundation (which contributed $20,000 to SPARC’s overall operations), and the National Endowment for the Arts, which granted it $25,000. That’s important, Baca says, as the life of the venture, beyond its first year, depends on another City Council vote. “And who knows what will happen if Mayor Bradley isn’t re-elected next year,” she said.

“I think this program is about awareness,” Baca added. “It will regenerate interest in this art form, engage another new generation in the production of murals, and keep L.A.’s place on the mural map.”