Youths Wielding Spray-Paint Cans Learn Difference Between Vandalism and Art

Recruiting teen-agers to work in Los Angeles’ most unusual summer job program was a snap this year.

Youngsters caught scrawling their names on walls were asked to write them instead on the sign-up sheet for a graffiti instruction class.

Those who enrolled in the six-week program were paid wages to encourage them to learn the difference between vandalism and art. They were paid to design socially conscious murals and to seek out business owners willing to let them paint them on their walls.

The tax-funded program, using federal urban aid that has been appropriated to the city since the riots, is administered by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. It has produced 20 colorful murals that have been spray-painted on buildings across the city during the last six weeks.

Some of the artwork, such as a mural painted Wednesday in Hollywood, gently chides officials for post-riot posturing.

The painting in front of Hollywood Wholesale Electric Supply Co. in the 5700 block of Melrose Avenue depicts a giant leech grabbing a City Hall money vault. In the scene, a television camera with human limbs focuses on the leech. On a nearby screen, the leech metamorphoses into a proud bureaucrat boasting about “rebuilding” the city.

Graffiti class organizers are quick to insist that the teen-agers’ work is not a case of spray-painting the hand that feeds them.

“The common theme is thought-provoking, positive messages to encourage people to pull together,” said program coordinator John Rier, 42. “You can rebuild all the buildings you want. But we’re talking about spiritual rebuilding.”

Ten teen-agers ended up in the program, which ends Friday. They were paid $5.47 an hour and created their mural designs after analyzing issues and doing library research, Rier said.

“This is better than tagging,” said one of the program’s participants, 15-year-old Francisco Garcia. “You get better known doing this. And you don’t get arrested.”

Garcia said he has parlayed his newly acquired artistic experience into a job when the summer program ends. A store owner near his Pico Union home commissioned him to paint posters depicting the history of Mexican Indians, he said.

Spray-painting techniques were taught to the class by graffiti veterans Eric Walker, 18, of South-Central Los Angeles, and Xavier Villalobos, 20, of Koreatown.

The youngsters’ finished murals are bolder, more colorful and more legible than typical graffiti--especially the hastily scrawled monikers of taggers and street gang members common in many parts of town.

Muralist Paulina Frausto, 15, who lives in downtown Los Angeles, said she joined the program after a worker from the Conservation Corps saw her and a friend vandalizing a bus with a marking pen.

“They came up and said, ‘Do you want to do something better than writing on a bus?’ ” said Frausto, a high school dropout. “I’ve earned $158. I want to go back to school now. I’d like to be an architect.”

Final costs of the six-week program, in which teen-agers used up more than 600 aerosol paint cans, have not yet been tallied, said Martha Diepenbrock, executive director of the Conservation Corps.

As for the messages contained in some of the murals, Diepenbrock said officials have received only compliments about the artwork so far. “It’s not always easy to give young people a chance to express themselves,” she said Wednesday.

Back out on Melrose, the young artists were receiving approving honks and shouts from passersby. Electric supply store manager Mike Centeno stepped outside to praise the work.

“I like it, I like it,” he said, noting that vandals have attacked the wall with spray paint three or four times a week for the past three years. “Maybe they’ll leave it alone now.”

A woman stopped her car and handed Rier a $5 bill to pay for cold sodas for the young artists. The youths beamed.

Graffiti art was bringing them a kind of recognition that graffiti vandalism never did, Rier said.

“When you’re 14 years old, something like this means the world to you,” he said.