Outdoor Picture Show : L.A.’s Distinctive Freeway, Building Murals Facing an Uncertain Future as Legislation to Protect Them Stalls

For a dozen years, the grandmotherly figure wrapped in a flowing crocheted afghan gazed down on passing motorists, and then, in November, 1986, the mural entitled “The Old Woman of the Freeway” was gone, painted over by a building owner.

Her disappearance sparked an outcry and a flurry of activity aimed at protecting Los Angeles’ murals from the whims of commercial interests and the ravages of time and graffiti.

More than two years after the furor, however, no murals legislation has been developed. City officials say they are stymied over how to safeguard these colorful artworks without discouraging private owners from allowing murals to be painted on their property.

Last year, a task force appointed by the City Council suggested that “significant” murals be treated like buildings of historical importance--an approach that some artists and politicians say could scare building owners and thus have a chilling effect on mural production.

“I’m wary of too much bureaucratic involvement with the murals,” said Terry Schoonhoven, one of Los Angeles’ earliest and most successful mural painters. “Basically, they’re trying to protect murals and muralists, but I think it could backfire, too.”

Sometimes described as the quintessential Los Angeles art form, exterior murals seem ideally suited to an area with a mobile population, a taste for fanciful decoration, a variety of ethnic groups and a climate conducive to outdoor work. Estimates of the number of murals vary, but a recent survey by the Los Angeles Murals Conservancy turned up more than 500 within the county, according to executive director Joy Nuell.

For fans of Los Angeles’ murals, the last two years have been a mixture of the disappointing and the promising. Not only has the preservation legislation stalled, but many murals are suffering from lack of maintenance, fading paint or vandalism. Graffiti mars murals from the ocean to East Los Angeles, and artists say the disfigurement is worsening.

At the same time, prospects for new murals seem brighter since the city, after several years of inaction, has resumed a funding program to encourage more murals. In addition, new technology is making it easier to erase graffiti and possible--fantastic though it sounds--to remove and transfer the murals themselves.

Nation’s Mural Capital

Although Los Angeles, home to many of the foremost muralists, is now regarded as the nation’s murals capital, the contemporary wall-painting movement did not originate here. It began in Chicago in 1967 as a protest against urban renewal and quickly spread to other cities.

In Los Angeles, murals turn up on freeway overpasses and flood control channels, on public housing and commercial buildings, on boardwalks and banks. Sometimes they are the work of solitary artists with a fine arts background, but often they are group efforts, in keeping with their Mexican antecedents.

The range of styles is enormous: from the passionate, richly symbolic paintings inspired the great Mexican muralists Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, to the arresting portraits of actor Steve McQueen and artist Ed Ruscha, to the whimsical “Venice on the Half Shell” sporting roller skates.

Many murals in East Los Angeles, such as “For the Love of Our Mothers, Let Us Unite,” have strong anti-gang or anti-drug messages; others, like Willie Herron’s “The Cracked Wall,” are designed to incorporate existing graffiti, making the mural--in the artist’s words--”an addition to what the community had already created.”

Taken Seriously as Art

Still others, such as those commissioned in connection with the 1984 Olympic Games, were meant as uncontroversial antidotes to freeway monotony.

Although murals seldom crop up in the more posh neighborhoods and are not universally admired, the wall paintings created by some of the better known muralists are taken seriously as art.

“I think the murals represent an important episode in the growth of Los Angeles as a major arts center,” said Susan C. Larsen, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Most muralists have known the disappointment of having a mural disappear. Roderick Sykes worked for a year painting musicians for the exterior of an electronics store. When his mural vanished without warning, Sykes said, the owners “tried to make me feel better by giving me a stereo.”

When a Shell gas station in East Los Angeles changed hands, the new owners tore down a wall, destroying most of a complex mural by an muralists’ collective, East Los Streetscapers, called “Filling Up on Ancient Energies.”

“We didn’t know how to contact you,” the company told the artists, according to Streetscapers member David Botello.

Lawsuits Filed

Frustrated, the Streetscapers filed suit last year against Shell Oil Co., citing a 1980 state law that prohibits mutilation or destruction of a work of fine art. The law requires a building owner to try to notify the artist before destroying a work of art that is attached to a building. In their complaint, the artists said their address was “displayed in plain view” on the wall.

A similar suit was filed by Kent Twitchell, creator of “The Old Woman of the Freeway,” against Koichi Kurokawa, owner of the building where the mural used to be. Attorneys for Shell and Kurokawa did not return telephone calls. A trial date has been set for Aug. 10 in Los Angeles Superior Court.

As Twitchell sees it, ownership of art should have its limitations. “If you own a Rembrandt, that doesn’t give you the right to cut it up in squares and send it to your friends as Christmas cards,” said the artist, who wants his mural restored at the building owner’s expense.

The so-called California Art Preservation Act’s application to murals may be limited, however, by a provision specifically exempting art that “cannot be removed from a building without substantial physical defacement, mutilation, alteration or destruction of such work.”

But Amy L. Neiman, the attorney for both East Los Streetscapers and Twitchell, said technological developments have made it possible for “everything” to be removed.

Chemical Removal

Conservator Nathan B. Zackheim, for example, has developed a complex process for chemically removing murals--now being painted in acrylics rather than oils--by “loosening the relationship of the paint to the wall,” as he explains it. After the separation, the mural effectively is transferred to a new surface.

“Everybody was looking at a mural as a big wall with decoration. I look at it as decoration with a wall stuck to it,” said Zackheim, whose skills are attested to by Twitchell.

Neiman points out that under the state law, it is up to building owners, rather than artists, to determine whether a work can be removed. “This is a good statute, but there are problems with it,” she said. “Most owners don’t . . . know about technology.”

Following the strong public reaction to the missing “Old Woman” mural, a task force was created to recommend approaches for protecting murals not owned by the city. The group, which included representatives of the 2-year-old Los Angeles Murals Conservancy, a consortium of artists’ organizations, with more than 300 members, suggested that the city create an inventory of existing murals and require a review of any plans to remove or alter a significant wall painting.

The panel also recommended that new murals be subjected to a permit process. Once a proposal is accepted by both the city and the building owner, the mural would fall under the city’s protection and an environmental review would be required before it could be removed.

Tax Breaks Suggested

Additionally, the task force said, property owners could be given tax breaks in exchange for preserving murals.

Forcing building owners to keep murals in place forever is unrealistic, said Glenna Boltuch Avila, the former head of the city’s murals program and the creator of the popular “L.A. Freeway Kids” near the Children’s Museum.

“The artists I’ve talked to don’t want an ordinance so complex that it will discourage a building owner from ever wanting a mural,” she said.

“That’s the delicate balance that the city is going to have to deal with,” said Deputy City Atty. Mark L. Brown, who has been assigned the task of drafting the much-delayed ordinance. “ . . . That will be very much at the center of the debate, whether regulating this is going to help murals.”

Even though an ordinance might lower property values, Ramiro Salcedo, general manager of Victor Clothing Co., a downtown store bedecked with huge murals by Frank Romero, Eloy Torrez, Twitchell and East Los Streetscapers, said he would welcome mural protection.

‘For Future Generations’

“Personally, I will suffer. The building will be worth less,” he said. “But for the city, I would like it. (Murals) are something that should be kept for future generations.”

Some artists said they would prefer a procedure that simply required building owners to give them ample notice if a mural is facing removal, and several said they were opposed to a permit process. “That’s just more red tape for the artist,” Sykes said. Protested Romero: “I think we’re talking about censorship.”

But City Councilman Joel Wachs, a mural enthusiast who chairs the Recreation, Library and Cultural Affairs Committee, said the city has no intention of controlling the content of murals. “The last thing you want is someone sitting in City Hall saying, ‘I’ve got 10 good ideas, I need 10 places to put them,’ ” Wachs said. “Fortunately, the Cultural Affairs Department is not thinking that way.”

After a moribund period lasting several years during which the city murals program ground to a halt, the Cultural Affairs Department has revived its interest in murals. The city program, which was launched in 1974, gave rise to about 250 murals, many of them produced with the help of local teen-agers.

City-Funded Program

Nine new Los Angeles murals have been created in the last year through a $250,000 city-funded program, and 15 more--one for each council district--are planned by next summer, said Joe B. Rodriguez, executive director of a community-based group, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, which runs the mural-painting program. The center has also received city money to restore and repair damaged murals.

Adolfo V. Nodal, general manager of the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, notes that money for murals will now be available through the new Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, which will raise money through a mix of fees on municipal and private development projects and a share of revenues from the city’s hotel bed tax.

“The murals are a major cultural resource in this city, and we need to figure out ways of preserving it,” Nodal said. But it would be a mistake, he added, to look on all murals as permanent.

“The issue is helping a community by providing those positive symbols,” he said. “Not everything has to be there forever.”