A View of History Larger Than Life

In a cityscape splashed through with 1,500 paintings and mosaics that unfold on expanses of concrete along the sides of freeways, on school and store walls, the predominantly black neighborhoods of Compton and Watts are home to some of the more compelling pieces.

A new mural art show, a series of slide lectures and two upcoming tours of mural sites in the South Los Angeles, downtown and Mid-City districts beginning this month highlight these works.

This rich tapestry of street art is most often associated with Latino culture, said Robin Dunitz, a mural historian who curated the “Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride: African American Murals” exhibition at the Cal State Dominguez Hills art gallery.

Through photographs and original works, the show traces the historical journey of black mural art from the walls of Southern black colleges in the ‘20s to the streets of contemporary urban America. “You don’t think about African American culture in connection with murals, but it’s a tradition that stretches back to the Harlem Renaissance,” said Dunitz.

As she began sleuthing about town for murals ultimately featured in her 1992 guidebook to L.A. street art, Dunitz kept stumbling across what she called “very important and very beautiful” wall paintings in the black community. She wanted to share that experience and began busing art students, teachers and German tourists to South L.A. for daylong tours of the works.

The mural tours are a big draw, especially for wary visitors from the Westside, “world travelers who are not afraid to walk around Bogota or Calcutta but won’t go to Compton by themselves,” said Dunitz.

This Saturday she will co-lead the first of two tours, focusing on mural sites clustered around Watts and Compton. The planned itinerary zigzags from the Cal State Dominguez Hills exhibition to an Alameda Street clinic, then skips over the railroad tracks for a stop at the Alma Reaves Woods branch of the Los Angeles Public Library in Watts and a visit to nearby Watts Towers.

The tour will end below a roaring stretch of the 105 Freeway, where Willie Middlebrook’s “Portrait of My People # 619” (1995) anchors a collage of unsung community figures into the street-level foot of the Avalon/I-105 Green Line Station. Middlebrook’s tile mural, like Stanley Wilson’s ceramic medallions on the floor depicting African motifs of serpents and turtles, were commissioned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Many Historical Works a Few Politically Charged

Contemporary murals are usually commissioned by various government and local agencies or sponsored by art collectives. These are walls that talk more of the proud history of African ancestors than of brandished guns and police sirens; they praise the wisdom of books and libraries over the strength of street knowledge and seek to plant respect for community heroes.

Notable exceptions include politically charged works like Noni Olabisi’s “Freedom Won’t Wait” (1992), an emotional statement that went up at the corner of 54th Street and Western Avenue in the wake of the 1992 riots after the acquittal of police officers in the Rodney King beating trial. “That kind of angry social commentary isn’t as popular now as it was in the 1970s,” said Dunitz.

A second mural tour scheduled later in the month will include “Freedom” and Olabisi’s “To Protect and Serve” (1996), a richly detailed history of the Black Panther Party.

The murals also reflect the will of black artists to write their own version of history on the walls--one that has at its center the figures of local leaders, poets and musicians. “In the early days, murals promoted ethnic pride at a time when African American artists couldn’t show their work in art galleries,” said Dunitz. “The neighborhood walls became their gallery.”

To narrate the story behind the stories on the walls, Dunitz enlisted the help of Cecil Fergerson, a retired curator and a legend of sorts in the black arts community. Fergerson began his career as a janitor at the now-defunct Museum of Science History and Art, and rose to become a curatorial assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An early advocate of black artists, he spent the 1970s devising ways to exhibit works shunned by museums, turning to churches, schools and even tennis courts.

Fostering Awareness of Community Heroes

A young Fergerson protege named Richard Wyatt paid tribute to him in a 1989 mural painted on the south side of the Watts Towers Art Center. In it, the benevolent gaze of a larger-than-life Fergerson surveys a sun-bleached strip of sidewalk framed by a lone palm tree.

“You have people that have done things for the community, and you want to make that known,” said veteran muralist Elliott Pinkney, responsible himself for more than 40 murals around the city. “You put up their images so people start asking, ‘Who’s that person?’ and you get a community dialogue.”

Pinkney, who has been known to put a brush in the hands of passing teenagers and ask them to help with the painting, will have his own “Ceremony for Smokers” (1991) included in the tour. Sponsored by a statewide Tobacco Education Campaign, “Ceremony” is intended to convey the ills of smoking to black youths; it portrays men and women crawling out of a bluish smoke abyss under the glacial stare of a bony socket.

The proof that Watts and Compton residents have found vital connections with the mural art in their neighborhoods is that most paintings, even the decades-old ones, remain graffiti-free. The current exhibition and tours will give nonresidents a chance to forge personal connections with an often invisible part of the city.

Added Fergerson, “It’s necessary that people who come to L.A. go west of La Brea Avenue and learn about the history of Los Angeles in reference to black people.”

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“Walls of Heritage, Walls of Pride” exhibition at the University Gallery at Cal State Dominguez Hills, 1000 East Victoria St., Carson. Ends March 6. First tour of Watts and Compton mural and historic sites, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., $5. Second tour of South Los Angeles, Mid-City and downtown, Feb. 17, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., $5. For details and reservations contact Robin Dunitz, (818) 487-0416.