Painting a Portrait of a Riot : Mural by UCI Class Depicts the Anger . . . and the Healing

IRVINE — Omar Ramirez stood arm’s length from a 20-foot-long mural blending globs of red, yellow and orange paint into the colors of fire.

“We are trying to deal with what was going on in the riots,” said Ramirez, a sophomore in an intermediate painting class at UC Irvine taught by Judy Baca, an art professor and muralist whose large-scale work dots Los Angeles.

Thursday afternoon on a patio outside the fine arts complex, Ramirez and his four classmates stood before the mural applying brush strokes to an angry image of the city splitting wide open.

“This represents downtown Los Angeles,” he said, gesturing with his brush to rows of jade-colored buildings sagging below an ominous purple sky. Ramirez was the conceptualist behind the mural’s design. “I grew up in East L.A., so I saw these buildings every day.”

Among the skyscrapers awash in flames and a deep gulf dividing the city, the five art students had decided to express a tiny hint of optimism.

As a final touch to the mural, students brushed in several bridges across the gulf and attached what they called “words of healing.” Those words were submitted by students at the university and were collected in the five weeks since the class began work on the 8-by-20-foot mural.

One read: “I worried a lot but I never said a word.”

Another: “The mind is a hard thing to change.”

“This deals with anger but also healing,” Ramirez said. “Individuals finding the truth is what keeps the healing process going.”

The instructor, Baca, is a founder of Neighborhood Pride--Great Walls of Los Angeles, an organization of artists and muralists that has produced about 40 murals for the streets of Los Angeles. Before the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, she painted the amateur athletes that still decorate the 3rd Street exit off the Harbor Freeway.

The class mural, which was expected to be completed Thursday, was an assignment begun in late April before the riots erupted.

“We were thinking about the problems of university life and talking about significant events in our lives when the rioting broke out,” Baca said. The riots gave them a powerful vehicle to express themselves.

“This is a reaction to a violent society,” said Susan Corben, a junior studio arts major. “But what is important is what can be done” to heal the city.

The students have collaborated to mount the mural’s wooden surface to a structure of metal beams, sketching the design and finally applying the paint.

The mural will be on display outside the studio arts buildings for the summer but will probably be painted over.