Make Art Not War

Disraely Ramirez was angry and sad when he heard a news story that a young boy had been killed by a stray bullet.

The 17-year-old junior at Belmont High School in Los Angeles took matters into his own hands by creating an anti-gun-violence message for a billboard on Canoga Avenue near Roscoe Boulevard.

Disraely’s design is one of six billboards created by teens in the Visualizing Violence LA project, which provides young artists with a platform to explore gun violence.

Under the supervision of professionals, the aspiring artists transformed their thoughts on the issue into Madison Avenue-style messages.

“I felt sad about what happened to the kid,” Disraely said on Wednesday. “That was on my mind when I thought about doing the billboard.”

Teamed with May Sun, a multimedia artist from the Mid-Wilshire District, Disraely came up with the idea of a hand gripping a pistol with a yellow-orange flame exploding out of the barrel.

“We were trying to think of how to handle this in a simple context,” Sun said. “The bullet is so fast and dangerous that you can’t see it until it hits you. I also liked what he was telling me about what he heard on the news. . . . I wanted to incorporate that as if someone was telling a story.”

The text reads: “Can you see the bullet? . . . A couple of months ago, I heard on the news that a young boy died because of a stray bullet. This young boy didn’t know what life was about or who he was going to be in life. If you or someone in your family own a gun, please think of what that gun can do to an innocent life.”

Once Disraely and Sun completed the final design, they gave it to project founder Janeil Engelstad of Silver Lake, who sent the message to World Studio, a New York-based graphic design firm that completed the pre-production work.

When the work returned to Los Angeles, Disraely’s message was rolled out onto a billboard owned by Eller Media, a national advertising firm that donated $5,500 in unused billboard space across the city.

Disraely saw his billboard for the first time Monday. “I was glad about seeing it and I was very happy.”

All six messages--on billboards in downtown Los Angeles, Pico-Union and South-Central as well as Canoga Park--will remain in place until Feb. 29.

The students’ works are unique variations on the same anti-gun violence theme.

One, for instance, is a stark picture of a firearm against a white background and over giant red words: “Life. Gun. Death.”

“Hopefully this one step will lead to some discussion,” said Engelstad, adding she wanted to get people talking about solutions to gun violence.

Engelstad recruited four of the student artists, including Disraely, through Heart of Los Angeles youth center. The Rampart-Koreatown area center provides after-school arts, athletics and tutoring programs to about 900 students per year. Engelstad also included two student artists from a summer enrichment course she taught at UCLA.

The six students, chosen for their talent and dedication, were easily sold on having 10- by 25-foot renderings of their work posted in such prominent spots as the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Hill Street.

“I thought it would look good on my college application,” said Samantha Page, 17, who designed the “Life. Gun. Death.” billboard. “But once I started doing it and getting into it, I was really proud to think that my image was going up on something . . . that would hopefully make a difference for somebody.”

Another artist, George Gonzalez, 15, said he found the inspiration for his billboard in magazine articles about the Columbine High School shootings. He read that one in three American homes contain guns.

He painted three identical homes, one with bullet holes in the walls, with the message: “Who gets the next bullet?”

“I’m very proud of myself, and I want to keep working,” said Miguel Garcia, 19, a high school junior who has been taking classes at the youth center for a year.

He said painting helped pull him out of a severe depression after he left Mexico five years ago to join his parents in Los Angeles.

Garcia said he based his billboard idea on memories of playing with toy guns as a child. His billboard shows a young boy in cowboy outfit with two thought bubbles on either side of his head. One shows a gun-toting teenager, the other a bookworm.

The message below asks in both English and Spanish, “What will your little cowboy be when he grows up?”

“You’re a child and you’re just playing,” Garcia said. “But then when you grow up, the guns, the violence, they’re in your mind. You think [guns] are cool.”

Engelstad plans to repeat her “Visualizing Violence” project with teens in Chicago later this year. Images of the billboards and their street locations are posted on the Internet at https://www.worldstudio.org.