Hidden Portrait of a City
Unlike its Chinese counterpart, the Great Wall of Los Angeles is not exactly a big-time tourist attraction.
See it from the moon? It’s tough enough to see from across the street.
The wall extends nearly half a mile through North Hollywood, on the face of the Tujunga Wash flood control channel. It is obscured by trees and chain-link fencing and is old only by Los Angeles standards--completed in 1983. Yet the broad reach of history is clearly apparent on what is billed as the world’s longest mural.
Bold, flowing images in the style of the great Mexican mural masters illustrate how ethnic groups shaped the growth of America--and California in particular.
Rosa Parks and Albert Einstein are on the wall. So are Adolf Hitler and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. The wall is a memorial to pain and anger and war and ideas. It celebrates inventors, poets, film stars and thousands whose names will never be recorded: deported Mexican nationals, abused Native Americans, laid-off workers of the Great Depression, coolie laborers and people of Japanese heritage imprisoned in internment camps.
It is a wall of tears and subtle humor. A scene devoted to the boom of the suburbs shows a sprawl of blue-roofed homes and a phalanx of trucks. “White’s Moving,” says the script on one truck--a bit of social commentary that really was the name of a 1950s van company, according to the wall’s creator.
“That’s a pun I couldn’t resist,” says Judith F. Baca, founder of SPARC, the Venice-based Social and Public Art Resource Center.
The effort to paint the wall has an interesting history itself. The nonprofit group organized more than 400 people--most of them disadvantaged youths--to design and paint the landmark, a project that took years and changed the lives of some of the teenagers involved.
The mural is 13 1/2 feet high and stretches 2,470 feet down one side of the flood channel, along Coldwater Canyon Avenue. It extends from Burbank Boulevard to Oxnard Street.
No one has added to the wall, or even done touch-up work, for 19 years. Rain, high water and debris have dulled the paint and peeled it in places. Worse, the mural’s visual story--which begins with saber-toothed cats and mastodons--stops abruptly with Olympic track stars Wilma Rudolph and Billy Mills of the early 1960s.
Omitted events include the Vietnam War, the Watts riots, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Apollo moon landings and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Baca has been working on many fronts to salvage the mural and add new expanses of art to make it current. The Los Angeles City Council has committed $100,000 toward restoration. Meanwhile, designers are sifting through thousands of ideas and images to come up with a montage for each missing decade. Four 350-foot sections would extend the wall more than a quarter-mile to the north.
The brainstorming involves many people from many backgrounds and fields of expertise. The designs are being roughed out by Baca’s mural students at UCLA. The students are contributing some of the ideas; others are being cultivated in planning meetings with professional artists, art scholars, historians and residents of neighborhoods scattered around the city. The sparcmurals.org Web site also invites suggestions for the wall.
Responses have been informative and often surprising, Baca says.
“Someone sent us an image of Michael Jackson as a white guy with a monkey in his lap,” Baca says, referring to a depiction of the pop singer made famous by sculptor Jeff Koons. That image, if it is used, would offer a nod to the singer and commercial artist as symbols of the crass materialism of the 1990s, Baca says.
“It’s smart stuff, by people who know the art world,” she says. “My favorite one for the 1990s is a guy dressed up as an Aztec warrior--the face of an Aztec warrior in full costume--and on his back is a leaf blower.”
Highly stylized, the warrior is shown in luminous profile, a rendering submitted to the Web site by a man named Serg Hernandez. He also supplied a caption: “A once-proud Aztec people now works as gardeners blowing leaf and grass.”
Creating the right weave of metaphors is crucial and time-consuming. Although the design work began in the fall of 2000, funded by $208,000 in grants from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, only small sections of the future wall have been pieced together. Some of the images are posted on SPARC’s Web site; others exist only on the computer screens of the designers.
Looking at them is a fascinating glimpse at history as it was and art as it will be. The rendering of the 1960s, for example, shows blacks at a whites-only lunch counter. Fire hoses spray racial demonstrators in Birmingham, Ala. The water flows into a stream that irrigates a field. The stream then morphs into a line of people following farm labor leader Cesar Chavez.
The 1970s design is largely incomplete. The section dealing with the 1980s shows the AIDS quilt and President Ronald Reagan half-hidden behind a mask of himself--a commentary on Reagan’s adroitness with the media.
Missiles overhead suggest the heightened military armament of the Reagan years. A deeper part of the sky is lighted with the exploding space shuttle Challenger.
The 1990s art is even more striking: a Los Angeles cityscape vibrant with global themes. Fires mark the burning oil fields of the Persian Gulf War as well as the 1992 riots.
“I think the World Trade Center should be the final image,” Baca says, but designers are not that far along.