Street Gallery Works : A slide presentation and a tour will both emphasize women muralists and the many images they’ve made on the walls of Los Angeles.

Historians do not always present their ideas in books. In our city, they often use artistic talent and the walls of buildings and freeway underpasses to create colorful, exciting murals that tell the stories of those who have been left out of standard history texts.

Over the past 20 years, women muralists working in the Los Angeles area have spotlighted unsung women of various ethnic backgrounds who have enriched our culture and contributed to the health and vitality of their communities. They also have painted engaging, sometimes controversial pictures addressing environmental and social issues for people from all walks of life to ponder.

To celebrate the work of women muralists during March, deemed Women’s History Month, Robin Dunitz, author of “Street Gallery: Guide to 1,000 Los Angeles Murals,” will present a slide show and lecture, “Murals by and About Women,” and sign her book at 6 p.m. today at Sisterhood Bookstore in Westwood.

The book includes descriptions of 1,000 interior and exterior painted, mosaic and tile murals created between 1913 and 1992 in Los Angeles County, detailed street maps showing their locations and biographical information on more than 100 muralists.

On March 28, the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) will conduct a tour of some of the city’s most prominent murals by women artists. Stops will include the work of Noni Olabisi, Judith Hernandez, Barbara Benish, Yreina Cervantez, Judith Baca, Eva Cockcroft and Alice Patrick.

Cockcroft’s 1991 mural at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research pays tribute to the “History of Women in the Labor Movement in California.”

Alice Patrick’s 1991 “Women Do Get Weary (but They Don’t Give Up),” on the building that houses the National Council of Negro Women, depicts educator Mary McCleod Bethune, who founded the NCNW in 1935, and the current NCNW president, Dorothy Height. Standing behind them are entertainer Josephine Baker, TV personality Oprah Winfrey, singer Sarah Vaughan and Olympic runner Florence Griffith-Joyner.

Patrick was assisted by Daryl Wells, who received a commission this year from SPARC--one of several given to women--to paint a mural on the National Council of Jewish Women’s building in the Fairfax district. Wells will meet the tour to talk about her mural in progress.

“I love muralism because nobody can own it, it’s so much a dance with the public. Nobody can take it home and limit somebody’s view of it,” said Judith F. Baca, the artistic director of SPARC and grand dame of mural painting in Los Angeles. She worked on her first in 1969.

Then an art teacher at Alemany High School in San Fernando, she saw bringing students of varied backgrounds together to paint a classroom mural as a means of getting them to communicate and collaborate.

After being fired from her teaching job for her anti-Vietnam War activities, Baca said, she was hired as a youth counselor by the city. In 1974, she organized the Citywide Mural Project. Between 1974 and 1984, more than 250 murals were produced with the assistance of young people.

In 1976, Baca founded SPARC with Christina Schlesinger and Donna Deitch to produce murals and other forms of public art. Over five summers between 1976 and 1983, 50 artists and 350 youths worked with Baca to paint the Great Wall of Los Angeles, a half-mile history of ethnic peoples, located in the Tujunga Wash area of Van Nuys.

For her, bringing young people primarily of color together for this project about race and the history of race relations was as important as the finished mural.

“The community-organizing aspects of my work to me are of equal weight with the finished image. It is a byproduct--it’s a record of that process,” Baca said.

Since 1989, SPARC has sponsored the Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride Program, which has added 46 murals to various Los Angeles communities. Ten more will be completed this year.

Among the finished murals are “Madame Shin Saim-Dang” (1990) by Sonia Hahn, at Western Avenue and 14th Street. The mural’s subject is a 16th-Century Korean poet and painter. Hahn, herself from Korea, studied art there as well as at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

In Venice, there is Christina Schlesinger’s joyous vision, “Marc Chagall Comes to Venice Beach” (1991) on the Israel Levin Senior Center at 801 Ocean Front Walk.

Down the path at 201 Ocean Front Walk is Emily Winters’ emotion-filled “Endangered Species” (1990), which casts a tearful eye on the effects of development on the Venice community. In 1975, Winters worked with Jaya, a women artists’ collective, to complete “The People of Venice vs. the Developers” at 316 S. Venice Blvd. for the Citywide Mural Project. In it, a bulldozer tears down a house with someone still in it.

“Boy, that piece caused us so much difficulty, because the developers went berserk,” Baca said.

The exquisite image of Dolores del Rio surrounded by sensual flowers and a list of her movies, located at Hudson Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard, was painted by Alfredo de Batuc in 1990.

“She was a very big star in her day, but she’s kind of been eliminated from the history books,” Dunitz said. “This is an important mural because it has brought her back to attention. I think it’s beautiful.”

Dunitz is a board member of the Mural Conservancy, which was formed in 1987 to preserve local murals and increase public awareness of them. She started research for her book more than two years ago, after seeking out murals for a bus tour for teachers.

“I just had a real love for the murals that I found, and I wanted to share that,” Dunitz said. But she had no idea that more than 1,000 murals existed in the Los Angeles area. At the time, she knew of less than 100.

“I was a total ignoramus,” she said. “And also, for growing up in L. A., I didn’t know L. A. at all.

“I was a travel writer. When I first started working on this project, I hadn’t been anywhere in L. A. I had instead been traipsing around South America, going on exotic vacations. I’d be home for a few months after a trip and then I’d get wanderlust again and be ready to go on another trip.

“Working on this project for two years, I never felt the desire to go anywhere else because I felt like I was on a trip. I was traveling all the time.”

The project gave Dunitz a new appreciation for the diversity of Los Angeles. “Murals have the ability to really introduce people to a deeper level of getting to know Los Angeles. It’s a level much closer to the people than going to just your predictable art venues.”

Dunitz encourages others to reach beyond the fears that insulate them from the larger community. “People go all over the world and go on city tours, explore all these foreign cities. Very often on mural tours, there are people who say this is the first time they have been to East L. A. or South-Central, and yet they’ve been all over the world.”

One mural in particular that Dunitz wants people to go out of their way to see is Noni Olabisi’s “Freedom Won’t Wait” at 54th Street and Western Avenue, which is a stop on SPARC’s tour. Olabisi, a barber, works across the street. Painted after last year’s riots, it shows people’s faces filled with anguish.

“The emotional impact of this mural is very direct, and you can’t help but be struck by the power, the expressions on the faces in this mural,” Dunitz said. “I would hope that it would become a world landmark in Los Angeles.”

Robin Dunitz’s slide presentation, “Murals by and About Women,” is at 6 p.m. today at Sisterhood Bookstore, 1351 Westwood Blvd., Westwood. Call (310) 477-7300.

SPARC’s March 28 tour, “Focus on Women”, begins at 9 a.m. at SPARC. Cost is $25. Advance payment may be sent to SPARC, Mural Tours, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice 90291. Paid reservations are advised. Call (310) 822-9560.