Young Artists Take Highly Visible Stand Deploring Violence, Guns

Chances are your daily routine includes getting stuck in traffic or idling at a red light, all somewhere within sight of a billboard. And that’s exactly what Silver Lake artist Janeil Engelstad is banking on.

Through her project, “Visualizing Violence,” she’s hoping motorists in six locations throughout Los Angeles will look up and focus on billboard art that decries how easy it is for young people to acquire guns.

The six new billboards, unveiled last week, were created by student artists and feature anti-violence images and slogans on commuting routes in downtown and West Los Angeles, Woodland Hills, Pico-Union and South Central.

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 that she wanted to get people talking about solutions to gun violence. She also said the billboard program is intended to give a voice to teenagers unfiltered by the media or political rhetoric.

Engelstad recruited four of the student artists through Heart of Los Angeles Youth, or HOLA, a center in the Rampart-Koreatown area that provides after-school arts, athletics and tutoring to about 900 students a 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 for the month of February in prominent spots such 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 of the artists, 15-year-old George Gonzalez, said he found the inspiration for his billboard in magazine articles about the Columbine High School shooting, in which 15 people were killed last spring. He read that one in three American homes contains guns.

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

To prepare for their billboard assignments, each student was paired with a professional artist brought to the project through Engelstad.

‘You Can’t Miss Billboards’

They then learned about billboard communication during tours of Eller Media, a national advertising firm that donated $5,500 worth of unused billboard space around town. Neiman Marcus and L.A. Eyeworks assisted with other costs.

“Billboard ads have become increasingly popular,” said Dash Stolarz, a representative of Eller Media. “You can’t escape traffic, so you can’t miss billboards.”

For the HOLA art students, who generally come from poor, immigrant families, having their work blown up to billboard scale caused a heady rush.

“I’m very proud of myself, and I want to keep working,” said Miguel Garcia, 19, a junior at Leway High School who has been taking classes at HOLA for a year.

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

A converted toolshed behind his family’s South Central home on 102nd Street serves as Garcia’s bedroom, where he fills his sketchbook, reads philosophy and is painting a mural on his slanted, sheet metal ceiling.

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 regalia with two thought bubbles near 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 teenagers in Chicago later this year. Images of the billboards and their locations can be found at https://www.worldstudio.org.