Their Brush With Greatness

A prominent Mexican artist has taken under his wing a dozen graffiti artists who butted heads with Santa Ana city officials last month when they painted a mural on a downtown building without a permit.

Vladimir Cora, a painter who divides his time between Santa Ana’s Artists Village and his native Nayarit, asked the teens to paint the foundations for a sculpture, made of painted boards, titled “The Twelve Apostles,” which appears this weekend at a Los Angeles art gallery.

The show might eventually appear in the Artists Village, a cluster of buildings in downtown Santa Ana where artists work and live.

In addition, city officials are working on Cora’s request that they find space for the teens to paint other large works for him for small stipends.

“I’m not in favor of anyone breaking the law or putting their lives on the line. This is my way to help, to rescue them,” said Cora, whose work has appeared in galleries in California and Latin America. “They are making art. It’s popular. But it’s art. They aren’t gangsters. They need direction.”

Cora’s effort is one of the few linking the Artists Village to the working-class Latino neighborhood around it. Since the mid-1990s, Santa Ana has invested more than $11 million in several arts-related investments downtown.

Like other projects that seek to draw investment to working-class communities, the Artists Village created space too expensive for most local residents to rent--roughly $600 to $900 a month. Rosters of the artists in the buildings show few Latinos.

“People feel intimidated by the Artists Village,” said Carlos Romero, an artist who had a studio in the village’s Santora Building on Broadway until the rent increased. “They see a lot of white people come around. They see the high prices [of the art] and they don’t see how they fit in.”

Although a list of artists in the Santora building includes few Latino surnames, city arts administrator Jim Gilliam said the community is involved in the studios. The notion of a split is mistaken, he said.

For example, he said, the community attends the open gallery nights.

Connecting the city-ordered whitewashing of the mural to neighborhood participation in the Artists Village is unfair, Gilliam said. The mural was nothing more than a sign that had no permit, he said.

In March, a group of graffiti artists painted a jarring tableau of block letters, a big red car and a cartoon figure on the side of a Sycamore Street business that gave them permission.

Residents contacted city officials, who, because the mural included the name of the business, Rollin Auto Service, said it constituted a sign.

Because it lacked a permit, the mural was whitewashed. If the mural weren’t a sign, no city permission would be needed because the wall is private property, officials said.

Rollin owner Ricardo Alatorre said he hadn’t asked for the name of the business to be included in the painting.

“If it’s against the rules, they have to take it down,” he said. “I felt bad for the kids, though. It really discouraged them.”

Cora’s invitation to the teens made them nervous because they were now in a relatively highbrow realm. Jessie Hernandes, a 16-year-old who recently got his high school equivalency diploma and has been arrested twice for graffiti vandalism, initiated the project.

“It’s cool because we’ve been hooked up” to the Artists Village, Hernandes said. “But everyone here is all educated. They talk about Picasso and Van Gogh and we just talk graffiti.”

Despite the incident’s positive outcome, some artists remain embittered and are working to get the mural back up.

“They threw the baby out with the bathwater,” said artist Gilbert Vasquez, who does not rent space in the Artists Village.

“We should have just addressed the part that was considered signage,” Vasquez said. “It’s an open secret that [some city officials] are opposed to murals and this just solidified the resentment the community has about the Artists Village.”

On his Web site, www.gilbertvasquez.com, he wrote an essay and put up a photo of the work before it was whitewashed.

“None of the community blood circulates in these buildings. It’s dead,” he said. “There could be drawing classes, things to serve the community. It’s a mausoleum.”

Rigo Maldonado, who makes altars but can’t afford village space, agrees: “It’s not a place for people from this neighborhood.” Maldonado has opened his downtown home to artists and put up works on his lawn.

Michael McGee, project facilitator at the Grand Central Arts Center, a village building owned by Santa Ana and used by Cal State Fullerton, says those complaining are merely “a fringe. Many people are excited about what is happening. Downtown is more vibrant.”

The open-gallery night, the first Saturday of every month, attracts 2,000 to downtown Santa Ana, he said.

The CSUF facility, however, is used mostly by artists who are students of the university. And of 27 living there, six are Latino and none are Mexican American, he said. A few have held workshops drawing local high school students to Grand Central.