News Blog
Murals
Perhaps it was the abundance of concrete, or the year-round painting season, or the city full of Mexican workers that made Los Angeles the place where murals began to be a predominant art form. Or perhaps it was because an entire population – the majority of the city – had been “disappeared” in textbooks, in the media, in cultural markers of place, and needed to find a way to reclaim a city of Mexican and indigenous roots. Read More
Fine Decorative Paintings
Mr. Greben understood the power and importance of what he witnessed that day in the cooperate spirit of the young painters. He began a course of action that led to the first City of Los Angeles citywide mural program, making me director of a burgeoning murals program in the predominantly Mexican Eastside of Los Angeles. Freed from my more conventional teaching by the General Manager, I began to work full-time with the youth of East Los Angeles, called by neighborhood youth to work at various sites. Three years later, I initiated a proposal to the Los Angeles City Council that became the first citywide mural program. More than 400 mural productions were supported through the Citywide Murals Program under the Department of Recreation and Parks before the program was disbanded. Scaffolding, paints, youth apprentices and stipends were distributed by the small staff of Eastside youth from previous mural crews whom I hired to run the program, supporting hundreds of mural sites in every community of the city. Read More
Fine Decorative Art
Through the World Wall project, artists were asked to articulate a particular moment, an apex of change for their countries that best described the time in which they live and which could benefit people of other countries and realities. The concept of “from the neighborhood to the global” motivated the development of the World Wall, a traveling installation mural equal in length to one 350-foot segment of the Great Wall, which could be assembled indoors or outside in a 100-foot diameter circle as an arena for ritual and dialogue. The World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear premiered in the summer of 1990 in Joensuu, Finland, where our Finnish collaborators (Sirka Lisa Lonka and Aero Matinlauri Juha Saaski) added a work called “Alternative Dialogues.” That same summer, Alexi Begov of Moscow produced a work during the fall of the Communist Party in the then-Soviet Union called “Waiting for the End of the 20th Century.” In 1999, an Israeli/Palestinian collaboration was added: “Inheritance Compromise” by Adi Yukutieli,(Israel Jewish) Akmed Bweerat (Israel Arab) and Suliman Mansour (Palestinian). Each work has represented years of intense dialogue between the artist-collaborators and work with the children of their home villages. Read More
