Parks Dept. Seeks Funds for Murals : Art: Two Echo Park graffiti works painted over before Christmas were financed by another city agency.

The City Recreation and Parks Department has offered to help secure funding to replace two Echo Park murals that were whitewashed by the department shortly before Christmas.

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The murals, including a graffiti work by William (A-One) Gomez and an uncompleted work by student artist Michael Blasi, were covered over by the department Dec. 22 after residents and City Council staff members reportedly complained about the works.

They were painted on a storage building adjacent to Echo Park lake as part of “The Tree of the Middle Place (El arbol del medio),” an exchange project between artist Barbara Benish and several teen-age graffiti artists. The project, ironically, had been funded by another city department--Cultural Affairs (through a $5,000 L.A. Endowment for the Arts grant).

The project stemmed from a separate mural of the same title created by Benish on an adjacent wall. When Benish expanded the project with the grant, the parks department believed it was approving additional murals by Benish, and not by graffiti artists, according to department spokeswoman Kathleen Polston.

“We were just really surprised when they were so startlingly different from what we had approved. . . . So what we really needed to do was return them to blank walls,” Polston said.

Benish said she would submit the same designs that have been covered over. This time, however, the designs will require not just approval from the cultural affairs and recreation and parks commissions, but “because it has engendered so much controversy,” approval from the community will also be sought, according to Polston.

“I guess this just shows what you have to go through with big-city bureaucracies,” Benish said. “I think (the Recreation and Parks Department) realized that (covering murals) was not a good thing to do, and now they’re bending over backward to help.”

Benish noted that her original mural dealt with the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas and the meeting of different cultures.

“And now that theme seems ironically perfect,” she said. “It’s almost like the city and the (graffiti) artists are trying to meet. . . . But it’s still going to take some time (for their acceptance as artists), because it’s a new form, and they’re still thought of as vandals.”