New Murals Blooming in L.A.

A fresh crop of six brilliantly colored murals are popping up on walls from Inglewood to East Los Angeles.

From a massive painting on the Westside depicting a pack of marathon runners to the portrait of an inspiring role model for children in Watts, the murals reflect the city’s multi-ethnic diversity and are intended to foster community pride.

“This is clearly an indication that L.A. will continue its prominence as a major mural center,” said Judy Baca, artistic director of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center, which is administering a program sponsoring three of artworks.

Joining about 1,000 murals scattered throughout the county, the new murals are the work of five locally based artists. Victor Henderson has recently finished two murals at a city animal shelter. Kent Twitchell is creating the largest of the six along the San Diego Freeway.

And Richard Wyatt, Roberto Delgado and Roderick Sykes are painting the first of nine works for Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited, an ambitious city-sponsored program, administered by the Resource Center, that employs neighborhood young people to assist mural artists.

Sleek Weimaraners, furry cats, a donkey, even an ostrich and a wart hog are among the animals that populate Henderson’s murals. He and Elizabeth Garrison have painted them on two walls of the North Central Animal Care and Control Center on East Los Angeles’ Lacy Street.

Both renderings, funded by the city’s Department of Animal Regulation, are vibrant and realistic. But distinct from any adorable dancing-cat TV ad, they emit an unsettling tension--through the frantic eyes of a Siamese cat that looks anxious to escape its owner’s grasp or the panting Weimaraners straining under their trainers’ demands.

“All interesting murals must deal with some kind of drama to really hold the public’s interest,” said Henderson, a member of the former Fine Arts Squad (1968-1973) of local artists “dedicated to making large, apocalyptic murals.”

“These animals are reacting to an environment that is often hostile. Animals are victims; people do abuse them. I’ve seen it, working here.”

There will be straining of a different sort going on in Twitchell’s mural, a 236-foot-long tableau of Los Angeles Marathon runners. The artist began the work this week on a retaining wall on the northbound side of the San Diego Freeway near the Manchester Boulevard off ramp.

The mural, commissioned by the L.A. Marathon, will feature about 24 racers, Twitchell said, including Chantal Best, winner of last year’s San Diego International Marathon.

“It’ll be like an explosion of runners sort of coming out of the wall,” said Twitchell, one of 10 artists to paint murals near city freeways for the 1984 Olympics. “You’ll get the feeling of being in the middle of the track, with runners rushing by.”

William Burke, president of the L.A. Marathon, to be run for the fourth time on March 5, said he plans to commission as many as 10 L.A. Marathon-themed murals and that this first one probably won’t be finished until September. Twitchell, does, however, hope to have three runners partially finished by marathon time.

“We’d like to literally ring the L.A. freeway system with the faces of the people of L.A.,” Burke said. “Every ethnic and socioeconomic group participates in this event.”

All three Neighborhood Pride murals will also emphasize the city’s diverse cultural makeup. (Program plans call for a total of nine new artworks in the city by June. They will be scattered among communities throughout the city, and each work is intended to reflect the character of the host neighborhood.)

Roberto Delgado, working on a wall of the Aliso Pico housing project at 4th and Gless streets in East Los Angeles, is creating an abstract collage of black and Latino youths superimposed over the image of Coatlicue, the Aztec earth goddess who bears a skull on her belly and wears a skirt made of snakes.

Richard Wyatt is more than halfway done with a portrait of Cecil Fergerson that he’s painting on a wall of the Watts Towers Arts Center near the famous spires.

Fergerson, who was born in Watts, worked his way up from janitor at the county’s Natural History Museum to curatorial assistant at the County Museum of Art before retiring from that post in 1985, Wyatt said. A lover of art and history, he still curates community exhibits featuring such black artists as Wyatt, Betye Saar and John Outterbridge.

“Fergerson is a role model for kids in the community, to show them that you can make it,” Wyatt said.

Roderick Sykes, who like Wyatt also painted one of the ’84 Olympic freeway murals, said his new project is also meant to uplift and inspire. The mural that he’s just begun on a Los Angeles Unified School District office at the corner of Highland Avenue and Pico Boulevard will show a black boy sitting against a mural-within-the-mural depicting the huge faces of a black, a Latino and an Asian youth. The boy, with a basketball between his legs, is absorbed in a book.

“Many of our young men (in the mid-city area) are lost--they don’t know who they are or the value of their lives,” Sykes said. “Many of them get into sports as a way out, but not so many make it big like Larry Bird or Magic Johnson. This mural is meant to say to them that education is another way--that there are alternatives, choices.”