State to Facilitate Cleaning of Murals

The state Department of Transportation, responding to criticism for painting over several freeway murals that were marred by graffiti, announced plans Wednesday to make it safer and cheaper for artists to clean their own murals.

Under the plan, Caltrans officials said they will notify artists by certified mail when a mural has been vandalized. The agency will no longer impose a strict 45-day deadline for artists to clean the graffiti before maintenance crews cover the murals with a coat of drab gray paint.

Instead, the deadline will be established on a “case-by-case basis,” said Maria Contreras-Sweet, secretary of the state’s Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, which oversees Caltrans.

“I’m just saying we need to rewrite the manual,” she said.

Caltrans also will provide artists with free safety barriers to protect them as they work to preserve murals along the freeways. Artists now spend as much as $800 a day to rent traffic cones and concrete barriers from private companies.

Caltrans’ new policy, however, does not include the funding that artists say is desperately needed to pay for the material and labor required to restore murals and remove graffiti.

“I don’t think it’s fair to expect the artist to have the money to clean up the murals all the time,” said Robin Dunitz, vice president of the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles, a nonprofit group whose mission is to preserve the approximately 2,500 murals painted on public and private property throughout the county.

Still, Dunitz and other artists called Caltrans’ new policy a step in the right direction.

“This is progress and that is the best thing,” said Debra Padilla, executive director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, another group dedicated to funding and maintaining public art.

In recent months, Caltrans has drawn heat because its freeway maintenance crews partly or completely covered four freeway murals near downtown Los Angeles with gray paint as a response to graffiti.

Artists decried the loss of the murals as a blow to Los Angeles County’s reputation as the mural capital of the world.

Caltrans defended its actions, saying that the agency is simply responding to an increase in graffiti. Caltrans officials noted that taggers, who in the past refrained from vandalizing murals, now realize that graffiti stays in place longer on a mural than it does on blank walls.

Contreras-Sweet said she hopes that the new policy will make peace with the artists who worked long hours to beautify what otherwise would be dreary freeway walls.

But artists and preservationists say they are still offended that Caltrans has yet to meet with them about the problem.