ECHO PARK : Board Pays Artists After Murals Erased

Kit Kollenberg was expecting to take an admiring maternal look at her son’s mural as she drove past Echo Park on her way to work one day last December.

Instead, she was stunned to find three men whitewashing his efforts to portray his Asian neighbors scavenging for lotus roots when the Echo Park lake was drained.

“It was devastating,” Kollenberg, a child-care counselor at UCLA, said of seeing her son’s artwork covered by beige paint.

The bureaucracy moved to correct the mistake at a Feb. 8 meeting of the Los Angeles Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners, which voted unanimously to pay her 17-year-old son, Michael Blasi, and another youth, William (A-1) Gomez, about $3,400 to restore their drawings to the Echo Park storage building at Echo Park Boulevard and Laguna Avenue.

“I really felt badly that the artists’ work was taken out,” said Manuel Mollinedo, assistant general manager for the Griffith-Metro Region of the Recreation and Parks Department, who gave the order to cover the murals.

The mural project began a year ago, when the Board of Commissioners approved putting a mural on one wall of the storage house. Artist Barbara Benish was commissioned to do the work, a gold-and-blue rendering of the theme “A Tree in the Middle Place,” or “El Arbol del Medio.”

Benish, who could not be reached for comment, apparently decided to get neighborhood residents involved in the project, including Michael, a senior at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and Gomez, a 20-year-old graffiti artist.

She encouraged the youths to expand on her theme, which comes from the Book of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are prohibited from eating the fruit from the tree in the garden.

Each of the youths came up with an original design.

“This is the most integrated neighborhood in the city,” said Michael, who grew up in Echo Park. “There’s everything here. Cambodian restaurants, Buddhist temples next to churches. A few years ago, they drained the lake and I remembered the Asian families picking lotus roots.

“I liked the idea of drawing something that showed people going back to their roots,” Michael said of his mural, which portrayed a large hand cradling a lotus root.

Gomez, of Silver Lake, dedicated his mural--a brightly colored rendition of his tag name, “A-1”--to graffiti artists who have run into trouble and to a 17-year-old friend with AIDS.

“The project changed and evolved into a different thing,” said Al Nodal, general manager of the Cultural Affairs Department. “Barbara Benish didn’t let us know what was going on, but the Recreation and Parks Department overreacted.”

Mollinedo said the Recreation and Parks Department got permission from Benish to erase the murals because they were not consistent with the original plan.

“There’s a formal contract process. You just can’t go in and paint a mural any place you want. I’m probably talking like a bureaucrat, but Barbara Benish should have explained the process to those kids.”