A Wall of Painstaking Effort

Getty Conservation Institute Director Miguel Angel Corzo predicted, in a recent interview, that by the end of the year funding will finally be in place for a long-delayed venture: The $3.5-million conservation of “America Tropical,” the controversial Olvera Street mural that was created in 1932 by celebrated Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Whitewashed almost immediately after it was painted because of its politically charged imagery, it nevertheless continues to be an influential icon of L.A. art history, and seminal to the city’s subsequent mural movement.

Officials on the project--the globe-trotting conservation institute’s first treatment program at home in California--say that, by February 1999, construction should begin on a protective covering and a public viewing space for the 80-by-16-foot rooftop mural.

Also part of the plan is a Siqueiros Exhibition Center, an educational space to occupy 2,500 square feet of an adjacent historic building. Both are scheduled to be completed and open to the public in spring 2000.

Visitors may be able to watch as Getty conservationists put final touches on their work after the facility opens. Over the years, various civic-minded artists have proposed repainting the mural, but, in keeping with the Getty philosophy, what’s left of the mural will be conserved, rather than restored to its original vivid colors.

Sounds good--and looks good in the glossy new brochure featuring floor plans for the educational exhibition center, connected by walkway to the rooftop and divided into four futuristic-sounding exhibits: Paradise, Reality/Legacy, Utopia and the Renewal Exhibit Computer Stations.

Yet Corzo would be the first to admit that since 1987--the year the Getty Conservation Institute became involved with the mural--this is hardly the first time a pending grand opening of “America Tropical” has been predicted.

It’s somewhat like peeling back the layers of whitewash, dirt and tar that Getty conservationists are painstakingly stripping from the mural to go back through newspaper clippings hailing the planned reopening. They turn up like slow clockwork every few years.

* June 3, 1996: “Delayed by earthquake safety precautions and bureaucratic entanglements involving historic monuments, the project is expected to be complete in two to three years.”

* Feb. 20, 1994: “If all goes as planned, the site could at last be opened to the public as early as next year.”

* Sept. 13, 1990: “Funding for the remaining work must still be secured, but the leaders hope the mural will be open for public viewing as early as September 1991.”

* Oct. 27, 1989: “If the campaign goes as well as expected . . the mural might be on display as early as next year.”

“I am an optimist, and every time something would come up I would say, ‘We will solve this, we will be ready in a couple of years,’ ” Corzo said.

“And then something else would come up.”

*

No more than the ghost of a mural now, “America Tropical” was painted atop the former Italian Hall, on an outdoor wall adjacent to a rooftop that once served as a beer garden. The now-deserted building was once a popular gathering place for leftist groups of all sorts.

For most of its history, the mural was abandoned to the ravages of sun, rain, smog and earthquakes because of its explosive politics. An avowed communist, Siqueiros painted a tropical scene in a hybrid style that had echoes of various forms of Indian and pre-Columbian art.

When the mural was almost finished, Siqueiros dismissed his assistants and privately added its final element--a bold image of a crucified Mexican Indian, with an American eagle perched above his head and two revolutionary soldiers aiming rifles at the eagle. When the mural was unveiled, it shocked the city, and the portion of the mural visible from Olvera Street was painted over with white Duco paint soon after the opening, and the rest was whitewashed by 1933.

A renewal of Siqueiros’ visa was refused, and he was forced to flee the country. Ironically, the white paint served to better preserve the images local politicos most wanted to destroy.

In more recent years, however, this piece of Los Angeles’ cultural legacy has been less a victim of “red scare” than red tape.

The mural’s last decade has been dogged by politics of a different sort--a morass of city government approvals required by half a dozen departments; architectural designs and redesigns; new seismic codes; safety regulations and handicap accessibility requirements; concerns of local merchants; and, always, money.

Giora Solar, group director for conservation at the Getty Conservation Institute, jokingly calls the mural’s recent history the “via dolorosa,” or trail of tears. And its twists and turns serve to indicate that when it comes to a highly visible public project overseen by multiple interests, red tape isn’t easy to cut, even when the golden name of Getty is attached.

The Getty Conservation Institute is a branch of the J. Paul Getty Trust, and its policy is to work in financial partnership with a local entity--in this case, the city of Los Angeles (which owns the buildings of Olvera Street), in part to ensure that some entity exists to maintain the project once the institute’s work is completed.

“When we are doing a project out there in the world, one of our biggest difficulties is that, when we are coming in as the Getty, everybody sees money,” acknowledges Solar. “We are an experts institute.”

The institute is underwriting $1.3 million ($666,500 has already been spent); $1.1 million has been committed by Los Angeles, and the National Endowment for the Arts has offered a $60,000 grant. Approximately $930,000 remains to be raised.

The sum of $1.3 million represents one of the conservation institute’s largest grants. Solar observed that, since the project is local, more Getty money can be spent on actual conservation. “When we go to China, or Africa, it goes for logistical things, just traveling there, or putting up a camp in Tanzania or wherever,” Solar said.

On the other hand, Solar added: “It’s more complicated in Western culture, where you have a democratic system. You don’t have some dictator who says: ‘That’s what I want.’ ”

*

The Getty Conservation Institute entered the picture in 1987 after Jean Bruce Poole, now historic museum director for El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a city department that oversees Olvera Street, met Corzo, then director of special projects at the Getty.

Poole’s interest in the mural dates back to 1977, when she joined El Pueblo as senior curator. “I immediately saw this fading piece of art on the wall of the Italian Hall; you could see it very clearly from our parking lot,” she said.

Poole joined forces with two Angelenos who had already suffered their own frustrations trying to save the mural: filmmaker Jesus Salvador Trevin~o, who filmed a 1971 documentary on the mural for KCET-TV, and art historian Shifra Goldman, who teaches Latin American art at UCLA.

KCET covered the travel expenses of two restoration experts from Mexico City: Jaime Mejia and Josefina Quezada, who volunteered their time and did some preliminary mural examination.

Siqueiros also volunteered his services during these early efforts. Though he did not want to restore the existing mural, the artist began painting a replica of its central portion on wooden panels at his studio in Cuernavaca, intended as a gift to the city of Los Angeles. The artist died in 1974, before the panels were completed, and they have now disappeared--Goldman said they were painted over.

In 1977, Poole coaxed El Pueblo higher-ups to bring the two restorers back from Mexico City. Back then, the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument was called El Pueblo Park and was overseen by the Los Angeles City Parks and Recreation Department. It became a separate city department and acquired its new name in 1995. In 1978, a protective grid of plywood and burlap was constructed around the mural but was destroyed in just one year by wind, sun and rain. Another was built in 1979 but once again fell victim to the elements. In 1980, El Pueblo ordered the erection of a wooden shed to cover the mural, leaving a 10-foot space inside for air circulation.

In 1979, Poole applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, of “not more than a few thousand dollars,” she recalled. It was approved, but restorer Mejia wanted more time to study the mural, so the grant was never funded.

Mejia and associates made a final mural visit in 1980 but were unable to begin conservation work because of what a project overview document called “the apparent difficulty of developing a formula to inject into the wall to stabilize the paint and remove any dampness resulting from a leaking roof.” At the same time, Poole consulted with experts at Caltech about the continuing effects of climate on the mural.

The following year, Mejia met with a local conservator whom Poole declined to name--because, Poole said, that conservator eventually stormed off the project because she resented the “interference” of Mejia and Caltech. A concrete proposal was never completed.

Shortly after, following an appeal for help to the Mexican consul general, Tomas Zurian, chief conservator of Mexico City’s Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, was brought to Los Angeles to study the mural. Zurian believed the mural could be conserved at a cost of $200,000. Neither the Save the Mural Committee nor El Pueblo had the money.

In 1982, the Save the Mural Committee approached the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the museum had held its own discussions about the mural as far back as the late 1960s), but meetings resulted in no conclusive action.

*

“Ever since I’ve been here, people have come here and attacked me because we weren’t doing anything about the mural,” Poole said with a sigh during a recent conversation at El Pueblo’s Olvera Street headquarters. “I open my file drawer and say, ‘You are welcome to read all of that, and see what we have tried to do.’ ”

The mural lay ignored until 1987; then, after Corzo’s meetings with Poole, two members of the Getty institute’s scientific program did a new chemical analysis of paint samples to decide how best to stem the damage. In 1988, the institute entered into an official partnership with El Pueblo Park to conserve the mural.

Later in 1988, Corzo left the Getty to become president of Friends of the Arts of Mexico, where he organized the blockbuster exhibition “Mexico: Splendor of Thirty Centuries,” exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. There remained an informal agreement for Corzo to remain involved with the mural, with some help from the Getty.

With funds provided by Friends of the Arts of Mexico, Corzo hired Scott Haskins, president of Santa Barbara’s Fine Art Conservation Laboratories, to undertake conservation work on a 6-by-10-foot test area--including some “in-painting” with removable watercolors to show what the mural could look like after conservation.

The study was brought to Friends of the Arts of Mexico, to help persuade the organization to provide funds for the full conservation. But, Corzo acknowledged, activity stalled until 1990, when he returned to the Getty Conservation Institute, this time as director. “I was going to do something, but at that time I was up to my eyebrows in work on the exhibition,” he said. In March through May of 1990, Friends of the Arts of Mexico brought in Augustin and Cecilia Espinosa, conservation experts from Mexico, aided by two students from the Courtauld Institute in London. Their examination turned up a number of problems: The wall on which the mural was painted was not seismically reinforced. Roofing tar had splashed on the bottom of the mural. Both paint and plaster were frail and peeling.

In May 1991, the institute installed an environmental monitoring station adjacent to the mural, and for the next year and a half collected data on wind speed and direction, rainfall, temperature, humidity and sunlight--a standard preliminary step in preserving a mural, Corzo said.

That information was turned over to the architecture firm of Altoon & Porter, commissioned to design a rooftop structure for public viewing. The city approved the plan in 1994, but it was eventually rejected by Getty institute officials who thought that the proposed large-scale, expensive tent of fabric panels did not effectively block out the sun’s damaging rays; nor did it “merge with existing architecture” of historic Olvera Street. (Altoon & Porter declined comment.)

Also in 1994, as the result of Proposition G, funds finally became available for seismic stabilization of the unreinforced masonry buildings of Olvera Street, including the Italian Hall. Though seismic work had nothing to do with the mural, conservation once again halted until the fall of 1996. A $40,000 grant from the city’s Cultural Affairs Department--included in the $1.1 million in promised city funding--was spent to construct columns that will support the viewing platform.

Meanwhile, in mid-1995, the institute commissioned a second viewing space design from Santa Monica’s IQ Magic. Mural exhibition designer Tom Hartman and a media specialist were dispatched to Mexico to study Siqueiros’ other murals. By November, they had come up with a new architectural plan.

The new viewing structure includes “garage doors” that can be opened to expose the mural in sections; the doors will also be equipped with UV-protected glass through which the mural can be viewed.

A walkway in front of the mural will be covered with a motorized retractable scrim, which will house an interior lighting system for the walkway. The scrim material also can serve as a projection screen if the rooftop is used for performances or events related to the mural or Olvera Street history. The new design was approved by the city in December 1996.

To meet fire safety requirements, the restoration project must include an emergency exit off the rooftop viewing platform. This required coming to an agreement with Vivien Bonzo, owner of the adjacent La Golondrina restaurant, because that exit will open into a space currently occupied by the historic restaurant, opened by Bonzo’s grandmother in 1930.

“Olvera Street and the mural have a lot in common--only recently have people in the city cared enough to want to concern themselves with restoration and upkeep,” Bonzo observed. “We’re happy that they [the Getty] have an interest in it, and we share their concerns that city government sometimes works at a deliberate pace, in which you find yourself 10 years later still talking about the project.”

In December 1996, the city of Los Angeles agreed to become a major funder of the mural project, although the monetary amount had not yet been determined. And, in February 1997, Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre pushed through a motion that transferred $442,000 in general fund money from the city’s department of general services to the city’s capital expenditures department, designated for the mural project, in the 1997-98 budget. The rest of the city’s $1-million commitment will come from the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation.

The money is in place, said El Pueblo’s acting general manager, Frank Catania. “What is pending is the approval of an interdepartmental agreement between El Pueblo and Rec and Parks that determines who does the accounting. It’s a simple, internal kind of process.”

*

Simple--except that any capital project in the city routinely involves several departments, Catania added. Along with El Pueblo and Parks and Recreation, the city’s fire and building and safety departments must approve all plans, as well as Cultural Affairs, which oversees historic buildings. The city’s bureau of engineering will provide architects and project managers to oversee construction.

And the mural conservation will occur alongside another attempt to preserve history: The Italian Hall Foundation is raising funds to restore the top floor of the hall to what it looked like in its heyday in the early 1900s. That timetable has not yet been set.

The last piece in the Siqueiros puzzle is to raise the remaining $930,000. Project consultant Lucy McCoy said the fund-raising campaign will target corporate donors. And, despite their confidence that a predicted opening in 2000 will be the last such forecast, project leaders add that they would rather miss a self-imposed deadline than begin the process before all the money is in place.

“It’s a question of what’s ‘being on schedule’ in this type of project,” mused the Getty’s Giora. “When you start, no one knows how long it will take.”