THE PAINTING ON THE WALL : Building Bridges Instead of Barriers, a Mural Helps the Healing Begin

It’s a workday afternoon and except for an occasional docent or security guard, I have the entire Detroit Institute of Arts to myself. I’m alone in the garden court, absorbed by the frescoes of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude of Rivera’s angular Amazons. Beyond the elemental symbolism of industry, desire, fertility and creation, what strikes me most is that they look like me and I look like them , the first images of the feminine with which I can identify . . .

I’m in the seat next to Bobbi as she jumps from the car and dashes across the busy Sydney street. As she hurries into the bank, a fiercely white, squat stucco building, my eyes are drawn along stark, staid corporate walls and captured by a single handprint the color of blood dried to blackening. Four inches below its ruddy base, the insolent palm drizzles to nothing. I suddenly feel it to my bones . As my pulse roars in my ears, I’m flooded by a strange sense of recognition, awed by something aboriginal, metaphorical and insurrectionary. . . .

We’re driving east along Sunset Boulevard. “Look,” my husband points to the wall of an Echo Park building. “They covered it up! Whattta shame.” His favorite stylin’-and-bombin’ wall, tagged with the rebellious urban scrawl of graffiti artists, has been painted over with a pedestrian business advertisement. That particular wall always excited his aesthetics, aroused sightings of his bohemian past as if he’d suddenly discovered that a bit of dear ol’ Manhattan had broken off and slid west to the cultural wastelands. . . .

On a diamond-blue spring afternoon, I find myself among the pleased and the preening at the unveiling. In the wake of the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, and the violence that followed, the staff of the California Employment Development Department was inspired to do something to help heal the community. And so the Art Team Mural Project was born. After nearly two years, the 27-foot-long wall inside the department’s South-Central office, at Avalon and El Segundo, has been completed by six high school students under the guidance of artists Sally Howell Comaire and George Evans. Bouquets and certificates of merit are presented to Patricia Ayala from Jordan High; Iesha Perkins from Locke High; De’Shaun Brown, also from Locke, but now studying civil engineering at Cal State Long Beach; Reyna Mendez and Horacio Serrano, from Jordan, both awarded Restyle L.A. scholarships to art school; and Milo Pipkins from Inglewood High.

“It made me feel more positive about myself. Not all young people are bad.”--Iesha * “I expected to work with people, but I didn’t expect to make friends.”--Horacio * “If I had been in my own country, I would already have babies, and all I would have ahead of me would be many more babies. . . . Before working on this mural, I would never have dared to dream.”--Reyna * “Ours was a master-apprentice relationship. . . . We gave the students our skills, but it’s their concept. . . . It gave me a chance to put something back into my community.”--George Evans. * “The qualities you see in the mural are the qualities they expressed with one another: hope, dignity, value, promise, self-discipline, integrity. . . . They would not put their names on something they were not proud of.”--Sally Howell Comaire.

Their utopian vision pulls me into an Eden of brightly colored tropical birds and a lush harmony of vines. A child lifts herself heavenward in a swing. A young man creates a rolling river of hope from his labor, which feeds L.A., making it paradise renewed. Above, white clouds dot a listening sky. . . .

“Girls used to bother me about being in gangs. They don’t bother me anymore. . . . All those girls are either pregnant or dead.”--Reyna * “I had never worked with other races outside my own. It helped show me that we can and that we should work together . . . from the heart.”--De’Shaun