<![CDATA[Art & Soul Productions

<![CDATA[Art & Soul Productions - Blog]]>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:31:10 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Part IV: Judy Baca and Crew at LACMA]]>Mon, 04 May 2026 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/part-iv-judy-baca-and-crew-at-lacma

Judy Baca and crew with Jim Kelly at LACMA, 2024

This is the eMail i received that got this series started. It’s from my good buddy Jim Kelly. He sent it to me back in June, 2024:

“Judy Baca and crew at LACMA today.
They have a working setup creating new mural panels for the LA river project. While I was there, they revealed the new templates that cover Queer history. They must have known I was coming, jejeje.“ -From James Kelley

Judy Baca and members of SPARC working on The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1981. Courtesy: Judith F. Baca and © SPARC archives; photograph: Gia Roland

Witness History Being Made:
Judy Baca at LACMA

By ARMANDO PULIDO
Armando Pulido is a writer and curatorial assistant at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, USA.
Featured in:
FRIEZE LOS ANGELES, Frieze Week Los Angeles 2024

Judy Baca’s mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles has been nearly 50 years in the making.
Now, she’s working on it live in public at LACMA,
in a historic gesture of creative transparency
and cultural community

Judy Baca has transformed the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into her studio.
In the museum’s Resnick Pavilion, behind a railed platform,
a mural is taking shape, accompanied by archival photographs, site plans and a model of the Tujunga Wash in Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley.
The mural stretches along the wall on a giant scroll to allow it to be transported to its final site in the future.
This addendum to The Great Wall of Los Angeles, which Baca began in 1975, reprises the mandate for the original work, depicting the histories of marginalized communities in LA and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
And Baca does not shy away from telling the city some hard truths. In the exhibition
“Painting in the River of Angels:
Judy Baca and The Great Wall,”
the Chicana artist begins the blueprint for a new section of The Great Wall, tentatively titled:
'Farmworkers’ Movement, East LA Student Walkouts, Watts Rebellion, Watts Renaissance, Black Panther Party,
El Altar (2023–24).'

Judy Baca painting The Great Wall of Los Angeles, summer of 1983, photo courtesy of the SPARC Archives (SPARCinLA.org)

       Nearby, one panel of the new extension is already fully rendered in color. The Great Wall of Los Angeles: Generation on Fire (2023) depicts the 1961 Freedom Riders, a group of activists who challenged segregation on US public transport. Protestors are forcefully hosed down to quell flames surrounding their bodies, alluding to an attack by an armed mob of Ku Klux Klan members that fire-bombed the protestors’ buses. The scene distills a moment in American history while, at the same time, pulling back to suggest a wider relevance—political activism against segregation, racism and war remains all too essential today—creating a remarkable throughline between past and present.

       Paired with these panels are original site plans, tracing the history of the mural’s genesis in 1974, when the US Army Corps of Engineers contacted Baca about creating the work in the flood control channel of the Tujunga Wash, as part of a beautification process.
Originally assisted by artists, historians, at-risk youths and community members, Baca completed the initial phases covering prehistoric LA through to the 1950s with her piercing, corrective histories.
In 2022, the Mellon Foundation awarded Baca and the nonprofit organization she co-founded for the creation and preservation of activist and socially engaged art,
the Social and Public Art Resource Center,
$5 million to extend the work and bring its story up to the present day. Such funding marks a significant paradigm shift for Chicano muralism in Southern California, as these pieces have historically been erased, white-washed or destroyed,
as in the case of Baca’s own Hitting the Wall (1984) mural under the 110 freeway.

https://www.judybaca.com/art/hittingthewall/

   Today, the (The Great Wall of Los Angeles) mural’s creation involves a different collaborative process.
Baca and her team have moved from working in the Tujunga Wash to studio spaces, or, in this case, the county museum.
It has shifted from being a primarily youth-driven collective
to a smaller team of historians, artists and activists, but it nonetheless still poses larger questions about who gets to witness history—especially marginalized history.
What does it mean for museum goers to be present at the creation of one of the world’s most vivid depictions of the Chicano Movement, a story that is often only told within Chicano communities?
What does it mean for a Chicana artist to occupy a municipal museum’s central space and command the attention of everyone who walks through its doors?

       The political dimension of Baca’s work cannot be ignored, especially as it calls out fascism, which we see on the rise today throughout the world.
The artist reminds us that, though these histories may seem removed from us, they still need a narrator, especially one who has stood unapologetically by her beliefs throughout her decades-long career.
Baca’s practice also reminds us to remain steadfast in a collective stance against injustice and to continue to use our voices.

Judy Baca on scissor lift at The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1983. Courtesy: © SPARC Archives; photograph: Linda Eber

The artist collective Asco demonstrated this belief with their notorious Spray Paint LACMA intervention in 1972,
in response to a claim that Chicanos made graffiti, not art.
It wasn’t until 1974—the same year that The Great Wall of Los Angeles was conceived—that the Chicano artist group known as “Los Four,” made up of Carlos Almaraz,
Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Roberto Isaac “Beto” de la Rocha and Frank Romero, was the subject of the first exhibition of Chicano art at LACMA.
For a city with a predominant Latino presence,
it was long overdue. Nearly 50 years later, Baca has reclaimed that space, involving the public in the expansion and ongoing story of one of the world’s longest murals,
which arguably tells a more accurate and compelling history than that found in American textbooks.

Further Information:
To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze,
sign up to the newsletter at frieze.com, and follow @friezeofficial on Instagram, Twitter and
Frieze Official on Facebook.

From:
https://www.judybaca.com/art/great-wall-of-los-angeles-1974-present/Restoration

“The restoration of the Great Wall of Los Angeles is a massive undertaking. Every segment of the 2,750ft is cleaned, examined and treated to bring it back to its original state of brilliant color. Within the three-month dry season in the Los Angeles River the work must be completed racing against a clock that is determined by the difficult conditions of heat, water flow, rain and other factors of the unique site in the Los Angeles flood control channel. The site channels the main water flow through the San Fernando Valley to the ocean and becomes extremely perilous in a rain storm so weather watches and evacuation methods are a constant worry for the 30 members of the restoration team composed of professional muralist, interns from universities around the country, local volunteers and past participants of the Great Wall productions.”

From:
https://www.judybaca.com/art/great-wall-of-los-angeles-1974-present/

A Personal Message from UCLA Professor Judy Baca, Creator of the Great Wall of Los Angeles and SPARC’s Founder/Artistic Director:

       “In 1975 when the Great Wall was still a dream, I never imagined it would lead me, the more than 400 young “Mural Makers” and the 35 other artists on my team through such a moving set of experiences. Nor could I have imagined that 27years from the date the first paint was applied to the wall that it would still be a work in progress.
       When I first saw the wall, I envisioned a long narrative of another history of California; one which included ethnic peoples, women and minorities who were so invisible in conventional text book accounts. The discovery of the history of California’s multi‑cultured peoples was a revelation to me as well as to the members of my teams.
       We learned each new decade of history in summer installments; the 20′s in 1978, the 30′s in 1980, the 40′s in 1981, and the 50′s in 1983. Each year our visions expanded as the images traveled down the wall. While our sense of our individual families’ places in history took form, we became family to one another. Working toward the achievement of a difficult common goal shifted our understandings of each other and most importantly of ourselves.
       I designed this project as an artist concerned not only with the physical aesthetic considerations of a space, but the social, environmental and cultural issues affecting the site as well. I am not a social worker, though people mistakenly call me one and I am not a teacher although I have teaching skills. I draw on skills not normally used by artists. I’ve learned as much as I’ve taught from the youth I’ve had the good fortune to know by working alongside of them. They’ve taught me among other things how to laugh at myself, how to put play into hard work, and how not to be afraid to believe in something.
       I am extremely grateful.
       Perhaps most overwhelming to me about the Great Wall experience has been learning of the courage of individuals in history who endured, spoke out, and overcame seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It was true both of the people we painted about and of ourselves the Mural Makers.”
       – Judith F. Baca

From: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/painting-river-angels-judy-baca-and-great-wall-0

Painting in the River of Angels:
Judy Baca and The Great Wall
       Oct 26, 2023–Jul 21, 2024

       For the first time in her practice, Judy Baca transforms a museum into a studio. She and artists from the Social and Public Art Resource Center expand The Great Wall of Los Angeles into the 21st century, painting three sections of the mural at LACMA. LACMA’s exhibition presents murals from the 1960s and 1970s depicting the Chicano Movement, Watts Renaissance, the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement, and archival materials that have never been exhibited, revealing Baca’s process and innovations to muralism. Baca conceived The Great Wall (1975) as a monument to the people of California, featuring moments from prehistoric times to the 1950s. She collaborated with 400 youth and community members to design and paint the mural on the walls of the L.A. River to tell history from the perspective of those erased from it.
After the artists complete the paintings at LACMA, they will add them to The Great Wall, creating a mile of visual history.

This exhibition was organized by the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036
© MUSEUM ASSOCIATES 2024

Major support provided by
The Claire Falkenstein Foundation,
Berta and Frank Gehry,
and Mellon Foundation.
Generous support provided by
Fabian Newton Family,
Carmela and Miguel Koenig,
Cheryl Gora,
and an anonymous donor.
Premier sponsorship provided by Snapchat
       All exhibitions at LACMA are underwritten by the LACMA Exhibition Fund.
Major annual support is provided by
The David & Meredith Kaplan Foundation,
with generous annual funding from
Louise and Brad Edgerton,
Edgerton Foundation,
Mary and Daniel James,
Justin Lubliner,
Alfred E. Mann Charities,
Kelsey Lee Offield,
Koni and Geoff Rich,
Lenore and Richard Wayne,
and Marietta Wu
and Thomas Yamamoto.

]]><![CDATA[Bob Lucas Memorial Library's Community Mural in Altadena]]>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/bob-lucas-memorial-librarys-community-mural-in-altadenaWe interrupt this series of blog-posts to give you a short update on what’s happening in Atadena, after the devastating fires of last year…

The Altadena Bob Lucas Memorial Library is updating its historic 1999 community mural with a new, renewed version led by artist Edgar Arceneaux and local poets in early 2026.
The project, featuring themes of resilience and community, includes a new section painted with community input to reflect Altadena's spirit.
Key Details About the Mural Project:

   •   Location: The mural is located at the Bob Lucas Memorial Library and Literacy Center.
   •   Purpose: The project represents a "renewed, uplifting version" of the original 1999 mural, emphasizing community resilience, growth, and literacy.
   •   Process: The design was developed through community workshops in late 2025 where poetry and ideas were translated into visual imagery.
   •   Artists & Collaboration: Local artist Edgar Arceneaux and poets Sakae Manning/Carla Sameth facilitated the process, with painting sessions held in January 2026.
   •   Community Involvement: Residents of all ages were invited to help paint, making it a collaborative, historic, and, community-focused effort.
   •   Completion: The murals were nearing completion as of late January 2026, including work in the reading court and, facing the parking lot.

The project is considered a 25-year continuation of the original, serving as a lasting piece of art for the, Altadena community.

Edgar Arceneaux
"Our murals at the Bob Lucas Library are almost finished. Local artists & designers will help us letter the text in the coming weeks and they should be complete by the end of February. We can’t wait to share the final work, a true community project.
And thank you to everyone (especially @edgar_three) who helped imagine and create the mural facing our parking lot and the new one inside our reading court… that was inspired by the previous mural at Bob Lucas Library."

poets Sakae Manning/Carla Sameth facilitated the process.

]]><![CDATA[Spark and Neighborhood Pride: Part C]]>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/spark-and-neighborhood-pride-part-c

Neighborhood Pride

The Great Walls Unlimited:
Neighborhood Pride Mural Program
was conceived as a citywide extension of
the Great Wall of Los Angeles.
Begun in 1988, the program has since produced 105 murals in almost every
ethnic community of Los Angeles.
Over its fourteen-year history
Great Walls Unlimited:
Neighborhood Pride
employed over 95 different established and emerging muralists from Los Angeles and around the country, trained hundreds of
youth apprentices, collaborated with countless community based organizations,
worked closely with the fifteen different Council Districts that make-up the city of Los Angeles,
worked with minority owned businesses, scholars, and The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA),
all to produce images that speak to the multi-ethnic communities that make up the city.
As the first program of its kind in the nation,
Great Walls Unlimited:
Neighborhood Pride
has become one of the country’s most respected model mural programs setting a standard which has inspired other cities
across the United States.
Sadly, due to budget cuts and other issues outside of SPARC’s control, 2002 marked
the final year of the
Great Walls Unlimited:
Neighborhood Pride program.
In the final year fifteen new murals were completed,
painting a colorful ending to the mural program that helped make Los Angeles the mural capital of the world. Today the
Great Wall and Neighborhood Pride murals continue to be visited by members of the local communities and visitors from around the world. The murals have proven over time to be a valuable lens through which to see Los Angeles by residents, artists
and social scientists alike.
For scholars, these murals hold the visual keys that give the voice to those often not included in the traditional historical recordings.

Venice Reconstituted (1989) by RIP Cronk

Location:
25 Windward Ave. and Ocean Front Walk,
Venice Boardwalk
Map

Artist:

Rip Cronk established himself as a world class muralist before relocating to Los Angeles in 1979. After securing a postion as a muralist-in-residence at S.P.A.R.C., he completed his first California mural, “Venice on the Half Shell.” Cronk’s work has since become visually synonymous with Venice Beach.
Subject: The piece is one of Cronk’s most recognizable, dealing with the juxtaposition of art history, contemporary society and the importance of questioning the nature of mythology. The mural is a tongue-in-cheek pop-surrealistic portrait of the Venice Boradwalk in 1989. It is a parody not only if the Botticelli masterpiece “The Birth of Venus,” but also a renaming of the earlier Venice Pavilion mural that contains the same figure.
Status: Mural has suffered delamination and heavy graffiti.

Cecil (1989) by Richard Wyatt

Location:
Watts Tower Arts Center,
1727 East 107th Street,
Watts, Los Angeles.
Map

Artist:

Born in Compton, Richard Wyatt was first commissioned to paint a mural at the age of 14 by UCLA. He graduated from the university a few years later and has since exhibited widely and taught in various schools across the nation. His murals can be found scattered throughout the Los Angeles area, including pieces at Union Station, LAX, and Long Beach City Hall.

Subject:

Cecil Fergusen is a legendary figure in the field of African American Art; he is known as the “community curator” and celebrated for his incredible rise through the ranks of the contemporary art world. Starting as a janitor for LACMA, he worked his way up to the position of curator. The first African American to hold the position, he encouraged ethnically based art and co-founded the Black Arts Council. His reputation for tireless support and advocacy for his cause has given him a wealth of loyalty and respect among his peers, the artists he has helped, and the entire African American community of Los Angeles.

Status: The mural has suffered severe UV(sun) damage.

Mujer Del Este De Los Angeles (1989) by George Yepes

Location:
418 South Pecan Street,
Boyle Heights, CA
Map

Artist:

Born in Tijuana, raised in East L.A., and formed by a hard life–of poverty, gang violence and womanizing–Yepes gained an early reputation when he painted with notable artists (Carlos Almaraz, Frank Romero and Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, among others). He then became an instrumental partner in the mural group “East Los Streetscapers” until he left, due to creative reasons. Yepes had painted over 800,000 square feet of social, historical and sacred images onto the façades of buildings ranging from hospitals to churches.His 28 murals are landmarks in Los Angeles, as are the 21 murals that his students of the Academia de Arte Yepes have painted. The Academia is a free program that has taught nearly 1500 low-income students in the art of mural painting for over the last decade.
Subject: The mural depicts a veiled Latina holding the flags of more than 100 countries. The title, “Lady of the Eastside” is an allusion to the city’s original name, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles. According to Yepes, the model for the mural was Guadalupe Ontiveros’, 32, a student at East Los Angeles College–originally from México. The piece represents a community that has greatly matured, and has become multiethnic.
Status: Slightly fading; the mural is protected from direct street access, and can be directly viewed from a nearby freeway. (Painted out?)

The Pride of Mar Vista (1989) by East Los Streetscapers

Location:
Inglewood and Alan;
Mar Vista
Map

Artist:

East Los Streetscapers (ELS) was founded in 1975 by Wayne Healy and David Botello, both veteran of the East LA Mural Movement. Healy was born in Santa Barbara and worked as an aerospace engineer before dedicating himself fulltime time to ELS. Botello was born and studied in East Los Angeles. He is an experienced artist and muralist who has received two National Endowment for the Visual Arts Fellowships. ELS projects are executed in a wide variety of materials and include the Metro Rail Slauson Station and Parque Pobladores in San Jose.
Subject: Reflecting the African-American and Mexican-American composition of the Mar Vista neighborhood, the mural draws upon ancient African and Mexican Traditions as well as imagery of contemporary family life.
Status: The mural has suffered heavy graffiti and delamination damage, sections have been whitewashed.

Plus!
6 more pages of community murals!
Check them ALL OUT!:
https://sparcinla.org/programs/neighborhood-pride/

“People often decry Los Angeles’ lack of an official center, a heart that feeds the arteries that run throughout its neighborhoods,
but it is this lack of center that creates the opportunity for democratic process that is multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, multi-lingual,
multi-faith, multi-historical, in essence
multi-centered.
It is not that the City of Los Angeles
lacks heart but that it has many hearts,
beating simultaneously and inexhaustibly.”
-Pete Galindo,
former Neighborhood Pride Director

]]><![CDATA[Judy Baca, Spark,“The Great Wall”, and City Wide Murals: Part 2]]>Mon, 02 Feb 2026 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/judy-baca-sparkthe-great-wall-and-city-wide-murals-part-2Birth of a Movement
By UCLA Professor Judy Baca,
Creator of the Great Wall of Los Angeles and SPARC’s Founder/Artistic Director

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.

In 1932 a mural was painted on Olvera Street, the birthplace of Los Angeles, by the great maestro David Alfaro Siqueiros,
the Mexican muralist/painter. Siqueiros was the last of Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Muralists), who after the 1910 revolution in Mexico began a cultural revolution that taught the precepts of the revolution and the history of Mexico through murals. Siqueiros, the most revolutionary of the three in materials usage, social intent and content, worked for a period of time in Los Angeles. His 80-foot-long mural America Tropical spoke to the exploitation of the Mexican worker.
Commissioned by the city fathers for a Bavarian beer garden (owned by a Nazi), the mural was intended to depict a kitschy Mexican village scene for the benefit of tourists. Instead, Siqueiros made the central image of the mural a crucified figure.

'America Tropical' by David Alfaro Siqueiros

With increasing demand for low-wage immigrant labor and massive migrations of Mexican and Central American workers to Los Angeles over the last 10 or 15 years, this image is even more relevant today than in the ’30s. The mural was partially whitewashed shortly after its completion and then fully painted over within its first year on public view beginning a legacy of censorship that still haunts Los Angeles.
In the 1970’s, forty years after it was painted over, the image began to reemerge from the whitewash. We saw this as a symbol, an aparicion (religious apparition), coinciding with the growth of Los Angeles’s Mexican population and strength of the Chicano movement.

LA Murals Origin
Murals in Los Angeles were the first artistic medium to support and then shape a movement toward identity and justice that reached a mass population.
This artistic occupation of public space forged a strong visual presence of a people who at that time (late ’60’s, early ’70s) lacked representation in public life, with neither voice in elections, nor elected representatives. No person of Latino descent served on the City Council or on the School Board, despite the fact that in actual numbers we were fast becoming the majority of the population.

Parallel to and perhaps growing from this new visual strength, many citizens of emerging Latino communities organized, with very little money and freely given labor, toward the mutual goal of improving the conditions of their communities.

SPARC was born of the spirit of this movement, taking its name from the notion that it takes only a spark to start a prairie fire. The organization has been intent on nurturing this healthy fire within the city as a whole for nearly 40 years.
As the fire of muralism progressed, distinctions began to emerge. Apart from its initial purpose of creating a capacity for the imagery of the people to occupy public space, Los Angeles murals spoke to the cultural demands of previously under-represented peoples. Some works became cultural-affirmation images, asserting only that we exist as distinct cultures; others addressed the hard task of articulating and advocating for resolution of issues affecting the places where our people lived and worked.

This new social power was not limited to immigrant labor nor indigenous people but spread to the multiplicity of Los Angeles populations. African American, Thai, Chinese, Jewish and women’s murals began to appear on the streets of Los Angeles.
Before long, community murals began to attract media attention and documentation. Murals began to tackle larger issues of police brutality, border crossings, drug addiction, gang warfare, and other difficulties of a life of poverty and exclusion.

Early in the movement space was freely available and uncontested. If you had the paint and the time, the wall and the message were yours. In this environment the movement flourished. In the early seventies a visitor could drive from site to site and could have seen Carlos Almaraz, David Botello, Willie Herron, and I (Judy Baca) all painting simultaneously on the streets of Los Angeles.

In 1970, I began working for the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks, teaching art in Boyle Heights, a neighborhood with the highest number of gangs in the United States. Similar to the neighborhood I grew up in (Pacoima), Boyle Heights had cultural markers — graffiti —with roll calls written on the walls that told you who lived there, what the neighborhood was called and who was from there.
But this stylized iconography often triggered destructive conflict, part of the contesting of public space by rival gang members. I began working with gang members from different neighborhoods to establish networks between them to promote peaceful solutions to such conflicts. Redirecting gang members’ inclinations toward public expression via my own artistic training as a painter, we began painting murals as a way to create constructive cultural markers.

Mi Abuelita (1970) 20 ft. x 35 ft. Acrylic on cement.

Originally located in Hollenbeck Park Band Shell
This mural was developed with a twenty youth team
“Las Vistas Nueva” from four neighborhoods in conflict
in East Los Angeles.
It was sponsored by the local community and summer programs for disadvantaged youth,
City of Los Angeles

One day as we were painting I came face-to-face with the General Manager of the Department of Recreation and Parks, Sy Greben. He had recently taken that job after having served as the Director of the Peace Corps for President John F. Kennedy’s administration.
He asked, “Are you being paid to do this work?” Since Mr. Greben was the highest-ranking person in the department,
I was afraid to answer for fear that not having official status as city employees, our painting of park walls would be halted. “No,” I said politely, “I am an art teacher in your parks working on my own time.”

Citywide Murals Program

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 city-wide 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 at various sites.

Three years later, I initiated a proposal to the Los Angeles City Council that became the first city-wide 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.

Within the first year of the Citywide Murals Program,
censorship problems arose as communities began to identify issues affecting their lives. Because the program was under the auspices of a City department, local officials tried to exert influence on works that were created within their districts, threatening to withhold funds for the entire citywide program under their purview.

One council member, realizing the popularity of the murals, asked to have his own portrait painted on a highly visible public street to help ensure his re-election.

Controversies continued to arise, of course, and interestingly the themes that provoked outrage from officials and conservative elements of our city remain controversial today.

It was for this reason that the “Friends of the Citywide Mural Program,” a group of supporters including attorneys, called to defend the often-besieged program, decided to form a nonprofit corporation called the Social and Public Art Resource Center.

In collaboration with members of the City Council who felt that freedom of speech was essential for the expanding mural movement, they encouraged the founding of SPARC as an arts organization that could carry out mural programs in such a way as to animate public discourse and free expression of the diverse communities of the city without direct official intervention.
The first project of the new nonprofit organization the Social and Public Art Resource Center was the Great Wall of Los Angeles mural...

...and the rest is SPARC history!

]]><![CDATA[Judy Baca, Spark and “The Great Wall” (Part A)]]>Mon, 05 Jan 2026 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/judy-baca-spark-and-the-great-wall-part-a“So… Back in the day, late 70’s as I recall, when I first started teaching myself to draw and paint, I was living on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, painting and working with pastels, having a grand time, trying to figure out how to pay the rent and stay out of trouble at the same time. I was taking night art classes at Santa Monica City College and assisting various muralists and decorative painters on their projects, and doing the odd sign gig and menu-board as I could get, and the occasional faux-finish painting project for local interior decorators, when one day I passed by this old art-deco municipal building with a sign out front that read S.P.A.R.C."

“I pulled into the parking lot and went in side.
It was an old police station!
The lobby was set up like an art gallery and the jail-cells were converted into offices and paint-stations!
I looked at some of their literature and saw that !they were all about mural painting!
Just what I was interested in!
I attended a few workshops and tried to get in on their projects... but it was all volunteer work!
And besides, they weren’t interested in my portfolio of signs and graphics and decorative work, and since I needed to “follow-the-money”, I did.”

As Bob Marley says:
“When I Wurk, Man, I must be Pay’ed!”

"But I liked what they were doing over at S.P.A.R.C.,
and I saw that there was a way to make murals in the community, and that Public Art could have a real positive impact, and that’s why I was slinging my brush…to have a positive and uplifting effect on peoples’ environments!"

“I eventually hooked up with a local Graphics Painting Department for an interior design firm out of Century City, and a Restaurant Developer in Santa Monica converting washed-up steak-houses into hip and whacky Beer-Bars and Burger-Joints in collage towns, traveling all around the mid-west.

Those two connections eventually led me on a wild and crazy mural painting career all across the western United States, and introduced me to several amazing artists and mentors who eventually became my good friends." -Roberto Quintana

" …so, I guess I owe it all to Pamela Brown,
(and S.P.A.R.K.!)” -RQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cweBs-tdaA

SOCIAL AND PUBLIC ART RESOURCE CENTER
Creating Sites of Public Memory Since 1976
Art | Community | Education | Social Justice

https://www.judybaca.com/about/
Dr. Judith F. Baca, one of America’s leading visual artists, has been creating public art for four decades.
Powerful in size and subject matter, Baca’s murals bring art to where people live and work.
In 1974, Baca founded the City of Los Angeles’ first mural program, which produced over 400 murals and employed thousands of local participants, and evolved into an arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). She continues to serve as SPARC’S artistic director and focuses her creative energy in the UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab, employing digital technology to promote social justice and participatory public arts projects. She is an emeritus Professor of the University of California Los Angeles, where she was a senior professor in Chicana/o Studies and World Art and Cultures Departments from 1980 until 2018.
Beginning with the awareness that the land has memory, she creates art that is shaped by an interactive relationship of history, people and place. Baca’s public artworks focus on revealing and reconciling diverse peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirm the connections of each community to place. She gives form to monuments that rise up out of neighborhoods. Together with the people who live there, they co-create monumental public art places that become “sites of public memory.”
Baca has stood for art in service of equity for all people. Her public arts initiatives reflect the lives and concerns of populations that have been historically disenfranchised, including women, the working poor, youth, the elderly and immigrant communities, throughout Los Angeles and increasingly in national and international venues.
Her most well-known work is The Great Wall of Los Angeles. It is located in San Fernando Valley,
the mural spans half a mile and still is a work in progress engaging another generation of youth.
The mural-making process exemplified community involvement, employing more than 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds, artists, oral historians and scholars.
In 2017 the Great Wall of Los Angeles received national recognition on the National Registry of Historic Places by the US Department of the Interior.
In 2012, the Los Angeles Unified School District named a school after her called the Judith F. Baca Arts Academy, located in Watts, her birthplace.
She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the United States Artist Rockefeller Fellowship and over 50 awards from various community groups.

Judy's Artist Statement
Biography and CV

Here’s a link to Judy’s website
with a great 'moving banner' of the full-length
of the “Great Wall” mural!
...and a few more videos,
…and a lot more about Judy and her many murals!.
(in the link, Scroll down to the banner, It’s really cool!)

https://judybaca.com/art/great-wall-of-los-angeles-1974-present/

YouTube Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dimAaP30E4&t=75s
Muralist Judy Baca & Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC),
NEIGHBORS episode:

The Great Wall of Los Angeles
is located in
the Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel (LA River)
in the San Fernando Valley – Studio City / Valley Glen.
Near LA Valley College and Grant High School.
North of the Ventura Freeway (101),
between the 405 and 170.
From the 101, Exit on Coldwater Canyon Ave.
and head North.
The Great Wall is on
Coldwater Canyon Avenue between Burbank Blvd.
and Oxnard St.
Park along the street and walk the 1/2 mile mural
and enjoy!

]]><![CDATA[LA Dodger Shohei Ohtani Mural by Robert Vargas]]>Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/la-dodger-shohei-ohtani-mural-by-robert-vargasSo, right after the ‘Big Win’! I started seeing stories of this mural by homeboy Robert Vargas, and I thought “Man! That guy is FAST! So I checked it out and well, he’s fast, but not THAT Fast!
He did the Ohtani mural last year when Ohtani was new to the team, just really good timing!
Here's a couple articles I found on the mural and also a mural Vargas did on Valenzuela.
Check out the videos too! -RQ

Shohei Ohtani Comes Out Swinging — Literally — in Giant Little Tokyo Mural!

by LINA LECARO / APRIL 2, 2024 (UPDATED: AUGUST 21, 2025)

Little Toyko is a top destination for everything from shopping to sushi, but as of last week, there’s a very big new reason to visit the area. Local artist Robert Vargas, whose mural portraits around the city have become known for their ability to capture the soulful essence of the people living here, has created a huge likeness of L.A.’s most famous new resident: Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani.
Just in time for the season opener last week, Vargas’ majestic painting of Ohtani brought lots of excitement to the area as it was unveiled. He’s been living on scaffolding, painting the 13-story, 150-foot-tall likeness of Ohtani for 7-10 hours everyday for the past few months on the side of the Miyako Hotel. And now that it’s complete, it’s spreading “Dodger Blue” pride beyond Echo Park and Elysian Park. But it’s not just about our city’s beloved baseball team for the artist.

Vargas, who grew up in Boyle Heights and says his mom used to work at the original Clifton’s Cafeteria, has always sought to bring L.A. cultures together, both with his art and with unique events (his Red Zebra parties topped my “Best of L.A. Nightlife” lists many times throughout the years).

And if you ever went to the Downtown Art Walk in its heyday, you might remember him and the large crowds who would surround him on the sidewalks as he painted subjects with black oil bars and large white paper placed on the ground. There is a certain level of performance to his art process and it’s always fun to watch.
Vargas once said that the street was “his studio” and now that he’s moved on to bigger projects like this mural, that is more true than ever. He paints freehand style sans grids or projections, but does do a lot planning and design prep. His latest takes his interactive proclivities in a new direction. Co-created with The AR Firm, the mural has a corresponding QR code that allows viewers to see Ohtani swinging and pitching in animated movements towards Dodgers Stadium.

Despite a recent scandal involving Ohtani’s interpreter and illegal gambling, good will for the Japanese player remains high, and the mural is a testament to both his likability and stature. It’s also another example of L.A.’s artistic community expressing its eternal love for the city that inspires us all.

“I’m really looking forward to the people who are from all different parts of the city that will come here to look at this mural,” Vargas says.” I hope when they do, they feel a sense of city pride.”

New mural of LA Dodger Shohei Ohtani reminds Little Tokyo why they bleed blue

by Panahon Mika, an undergraduate student majoring in Psychology, with minors in Advertising and Cinematic Arts. She enjoys being a perpetual tourist in Los Angeles, where she was born and raised. She is eager to share her journey through the heart of pop culture and the soul of LA, writing for Annenberg Media. March 30, 2024

A 150-foot-tall mural featuring baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani was officially unveiled in Little Tokyo Wednesday morning, a day before the Dodgers’ home opener game. Ohtani signed with the LA Dodgers just a few months ago with a whopping $700 million contract, the largest sports contract in history.Native Angeleno Robert Vargas designed and painted the mural which showcased Ohtani’s two-way talents as a batter and pitcher.

As an artist honored by the city of Los Angeles, Vargas is known for painting murals of LA icons, such as Kobe Bryant, that can be found throughout Downtown LA. On the days leading up to the event, the Boyle Heights artist encouraged fans to watch him complete the mural, painting every day from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

The mural scales the side of the Miyako Hotel, beside the Japanese Village Plaza. Ohtani shares a connection with the Japanese American district, as he hails from Japan. Though Ohtani’s LA debut would come the next day, the large turnout for the unveiling was proof that fans were ready to support Ohtani in his new journey as a Dodger.

This homage also comes days after Ohtani fired his interpreter who was involved in a theft and sports gambling scandal. Nevertheless, both the Japanese community and Dodger fans alike joined in the festivities on Wednesday. This was a union that was particularly special to Vargas.

“We’re team LA and looking at everybody here, I see the whole country of Japan rooting for Shohei,” Vargas said. “We’re all Angelenos rooting for Shohei. That nation and Dodger Nation are all on the same team. ”Performers played taiko drums for the crowd as they waited for the mural, which had been covered with a blue tarp for most of the morning. Lowriders, a staple of LA Chicano culture, were displayed for attendees to admire. The cars were featured along East 1st Street, which closed for the event.

The mural also featured an augmented reality component, allowing fans to scan QR codes posted around the street to view the mural as a moving piece through mobile devices.

After remarks from Robert Vargas and other community leaders, attendees excitedly counted down as the blue tarp dropped to reveal the fresh tribute. Confetti rained down on the sea of blue jerseys as cheers broke out.Local businesses welcomed customers coming from the event for the rest of the day and the Japanese Village Plaza bustled with renewed optimism.

See the mural (Video), titled “LA Rising,” now up on 328 E 1st St.

Check out this video,
“Ohtani Mural Little Tokyo"
Mural of L.A. Dodgers' Shohei Ohtani a hit in Little Tokyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3gOGwZXDKA

The Fernando Valenzuela mural is officially unveiled in Boyle Heights.

By Jason Rodriguez/ Laist
Originally published Nov. 3, 2024

Muralist and Boyle Heights native son Robert Vargas has been working around the clock to get the mural finished.
It was unveiled on Sunday. (Originally published Nov. 3, 2024)

Fans gathered around site all morning, about a block west of Mariachi Plaza, to celebrate the moment. To so many in the community, Valenzuela was more than a lethal southpaw and baseball player who wore No. 34.

“I remember bonding with my father over listening to Fernando on the radio,” said Josefina Lopez, a playwright. “And so for a lot of us Fernando represents our fathers, our brothers, our uncles, and he represents a good man, a hero.”

LAist producer Kevin Tidmarsh contributed to this story.

More at:

]]><![CDATA[Calle De La Eternidad Mural by Johanna Poethig]]>Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/calle-de-la-eternidad-mural-by-johanna-poethig

1993 Location: BBF Broadway Building
351 South Broadway (at 4th St.)

CURRENT CONDITION
The building that the mural was on was demolished for extensive renovations.
However, the SPARC Mural Rescue Program preserved a digital rendering of the mural.
The digital file is currently in the SPARC archives, awaiting a suitable wall to re-inhabit.
©SPARC https://sparcinla.org/

ABOUT THE MURAL
“The architecture of the building really affected me (Johanna Poethig) because it’s so high off the ground and so much of the background is all those buildings reaching to the sky.
Also, the whole context of being in Broadway, in a very Latino neighborhood, is so important to me. I started to look for symbols and artifacts from pre-Columbian America.
The arms that are reaching to sky based on Peruvian gold work. The Aztec Calendar contains text by Octavio Paz about time and place.
It’s trying to bring poetry to the idea of being at home and in exile at the same time. In the middle of a commercial LA landscape you have something that is talking about connecting us culturally and historically to our past and present.” -Johanna Poethig

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Johanna Poethig was raised in the Philippines through high school and has lived in Chicago, san Francisco and Oakland since coming to the United States. she received her BFA at the UC Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College (in Oakland, CA). Poethig’s public art works intervene in the urban landscape, in neighborhoods, on freeways, in parks, hospitals, schools, homeless shelters, cultural centers, advertising venues and public buildings.

Johanna Poethig
https://johannapoethig.com/

https://johannapoethig.com/public-art-projects/

https://synchchaos.com/public-murals-by-johanna-poethig/

Contact: johanna@johannapoethig.com

]]><![CDATA[Miles Toland and Joseph Toney / A Collaboration]]>Mon, 06 Oct 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/miles-toland-and-joseph-toney-a-collaborationHere is a FANTASTIC artist and muralist that I’ve been keeping an eye on, Miles Toland, and his latest project:
a collaboration with Joseph Toney. -Roberto Quintana

From Toland’s Fall Equinox Newsletter:

"This May, I (Miles Toland) completed my largest mural to date with the help of my friend and collaborator,
Joseph Toney.

I’m really honored that we had an opportunity to paint on Utah’s tallest building, Astra Tower.
We were lucky enough to have the process documented
by our buddy Ryan Finder of View Finder Media. "

You can watch the 8 minute documentary on YouTube:

SHORT FILM ‘ECHOES OF ETERNITY’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loLyW3gwt5Q

“Painting in the studio is what grounds me and painting in the street is what gets me high.
Street art is so interwoven with the surrounding people and place that I always feel a deep sense of connection to wherever I paint.” -Miles Toland

Article from:
The Blocks is the brand identity of Salt Lake’s Cultural Core, an initiative created by the City and County of Salt Lake to promote and develop arts and culture in the downtown area and to provide a reliable revenue source for 20 years.
201 South Main Street #2300, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111
info@downtownslc.org (801) 364-3631

“The first day we got our lift, we started working at full extension or over 80 feet off the ground,” says Miles Toland. “We’ve been pretty comfortable on [the lift] the whole time, but it did take us a few days to get our ‘lift legs,’” he explained. “There’s a bounce in the basket that we kept feeling even after we quit for the day and were on solid ground.”

To call their street art collaboration huge doesn’t fully capture this stunning piece. For perspective, its 14,000-square-foot area is the same size as three NBA basketball courts placed side-by-side. “We spent just over two days alone laying out the grid,” Toland says. “The scale is so massive, that it took quite a bit of forethought to get it right.” Toney adds, “We’re finding we’re using a combination of old systems and inventing new ones to get something this big done.”

At first glance, Toland’s and Toney’s artistic styles are very different. Toland’s work is detailed and intricate and often centers on the human form. “My surrealist paintings capture the mysterious places we visit between sleeping and waking,” reads his website artist statement. Much of his work also includes mandalas and geometric patterns that he says represent balance and order and are a nod to the cycles and rhythm of nature.

The mountains are at the heart of Toney’s aesthetic approach, interpreted with graceful and almost abstract striations to signify ridgelines, slopes and canyons. He describes his landscapes as “ultra-contemporary” and created to “reflect a deep connection to environmental issues, drawing inspiration from the vastness of the American West.”

Toland and Toney also have plenty in common, too.
Both are based here in Utah. Each’s repertoire includes studio work as well as murals, and both love the physicality offered by mural painting as well as the immersive experience of painting outside.
“I love watching those moments when a mural I’m working on connects to the spaces surrounding it,” Toland says, “when, because of how the light hits it, it becomes a living part of the environment.”

The two met and became friends when both were selected as presenting artists for the 2021 South Salt Lake Mural Fest. And then in early 2024, when Kensington Investment Company issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a mural to adorn the western wall of the then-to-be-completed Astra Tower, they decided to team up to throw their collective hat in the ring for consideration.

For Toney, the mural explores “the human connection to nature, the water cycle in the Wasatch and how we’re all connected to nature wherever we are, even in the heart of the city.” Toland pointed out how the piece’s focal point—two hands anchored in the landscape, one cradling the other–is intended to “speak to the intrinsic connection between nature and humans.” He also explained how the hands’ differing colors acknowledge diversity coming together in collaboration and unity.

How Astra Tower unintentionally
became Utah’s tallest building with the state’s largest mural
By: Carter Williams

Article from:
Deseret News Publishing Company.
All Rights Reserved https://www.deseret.com/
Copyright © 2025

SALT LAKE CITY — Ed Lewis never intended to construct Utah’s tallest building when his company began planning
Astra Tower some seven years ago.

However, designers needed to add height to account for the smaller lot size. Then, after compiling a market study, he found that they needed to add more parking to account for future renters who like to drive to locations all across the region. Adding a service elevator on the north side of the building required more height to account for 35 lost units.

Add it all up, and Kensington’s building suddenly became 41 stories and 451 feet high, pushing it past the 422-foot Wells Fargo Center to become the tallest building in downtown
Salt Lake City and the state.

All the building’s changes unintentionally led to a massive, eight-story wall that felt very blank as residents started
moving in. Kensington explored the idea of turning its western wall into a giant projector screen, but it ultimately settled on a partnership with the Salt Lake City Arts Council on a plan to fill about 13,000 square feet of space with paint.
They reached out to artists seeking to take on what would ultimately become the state’s largest mural,
which generated at least a few dozen submissions.
That’s where they came across
Miles Toland and Joseph Toney,
a pair of muralists whose work has popped up all over the world.

Toney, who lives in Utah, and Toland befriended each other during South Salt Lake’s Mural Fest a few years ago.
They kept in touch and, when they saw the artist request come in, they started talking about collaborating on a design.

“We did know how large it was gonna be, and that was
part of the excitement behind the project,”
Toney told KSL.com, recalling the origin.

All of the artists were given the freedom to design whatever they wanted. Toney and Toland bounced around pencil sketches nearly a dozen times before they pieced together four designs. One concept ultimately featured human hands forming out of clouds and mountains, locking hands up over a lake. A few migratory birds are flying above, next to an immense orange moon, all of which is meant to symbolize the cooperation and collaboration across different groups needed to address the stewardship of Utah’s natural beauty.

Toland and Toney started working on the mural last month, using about 70 gallons of paint and another 20 gallons of varnish. They estimate they also went through about 100 spray paint cans over four weeks to slowly turn the giant blank wall into a massive art piece.

“It’s an honor to know that our work is at this scale,”
Toland said.

“The largest wall might be a temporary title
but an exciting title nonetheless for the time being.”

“I’m stoked on how our styles came together
on this 14,000 sq/ft wall.”

Miles Tolland
https://www.milestoland.com/about
My surrealist paintings capture the mysterious places we visit between sleeping and waking. I invite the viewer into this liminal space by blending familiar elements of our objective world with ethereal textures and geometric patterns of the unseen world. The mandalas and the organic fluidity of wood grain suggest the subjects’ energy extending beyond their physical bodies and into the subtle realm of spirit. I approach my art as a practice of bringing resistance into resonance by honoring the beauty in dissipation and decay, and finding wisdom in nature’s forms.

Joseph Toney
https://toney.co/about
Joseph Toney honed his artistic practice growing up in Western North Carolina and earned a BFA from Appalachian State University. After exploring various locations in the West, he settled in Salt Lake City, Utah. Toney creates ultra-contemporary landscapes that reflect a deep connection to environmental issues, drawing inspiration from the vastness of the American West. His illustrative painting style reimagines these landscapes with meticulous attention to detail, resulting in abstracted memoryscapes. His work is showcased worldwide, appearing in private collections, large-scale murals, and commercial products in the outdoor industry.

And here’s a link to my Blog on Toland from back on
5/16/2022
http://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/miles-toland-surrealist-muralist

Especially check out Toland’s murals
at the ‘Beatles Ashram”
https://www.milestoland.com/beatlesashram

]]><![CDATA[Thomas Hart Benton’s ‘America Today’ mural]]>Mon, 01 Sep 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/thomas-hart-bentons-america-today-mural

“Thomas Hart Benton has long been one of my favorite muralists!
Since I am an autodidact, I never learned what a bad and out of touch artist he was, and what an inconsequential and backward
‘Hick’ all of the critics and art-philosophers considered him to be.
I only saw his fantastic designs and figurative work, his beautiful handling of color, and his innovative use of the picture plane, light, and space!

I consider him right up there with the other great North American Muralists: Orosco, Siqueiros, and Rivera!
Shows you what I know!

Here’s a great article from the Met and a few videos on the mural, and his life.” -RQ

America Today
Thomas Hart Benton
Article from the MET Collection
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/499559

Offering a panorama of American life throughout the 1920s, America Today is a room-sized mural comprising ten canvas panels. Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton painted America Today to adorn a boardroom on the third floor of the New School for Social Research, a center of progressive thought and education in Greenwich Village, New York. The mural was commissioned in 1930 by the New School's director Alvin Johnson.
Benton finished it very early in 1931, when the school opened a new building designed by architect Joseph Urban.
Although the artist received no fee for his work on commission, he was "paid" with free eggs, the yolks from which he created the egg tempera paint.

Eight of the America Today panels depict life in different regions of the United States: the South, the Midwest,
the West, and New York.
In the 1920s, Benton traveled throughout these areas of the country, creating a body of studies from life, mostly in pencil, on which he based many of the details in America Today.

Instruments of Power

The largest America Today panel, Instruments of Power, is filled with enormous machines that embody modern industrial might. Benton created America Today in a dynamic, restlessly figurative style that reflects his study of sixteenth-century European painting, especially the style known as Mannerism (see MMA 1972.171).
But the exaggerated, pantomimed gestures and expressions of the figures he painted also recall early twentieth-century film, among other popular sources.
Also stage-like in character is Benton's depiction of architecture, particularly the dam in Instruments of Power,
a facade that suggests his response to Italian painter
Giorgio de Chirico (MMA 1996.403.10).

Among the mural's most distinctive features are
the aluminum-leaf wood moldings,
which not only frame the entire work but also create inventive spatial breaks within each large composition.
When America Today was installed in the New School, these moldings echoed Art Deco details in Urban's building design.

‘Changing West’

'Steel'

Jackson Pollock, Benton's student at the Art Students League at the time, modeled for other workers, including the large figure in the panel Steel. In the 1940s,
Pollock became a leader of the
Abstract Expressionist movement.

‘City Building’

The bawdiness of Benton's scenes of urban life connects them to the work of his friend Reginald Marsh (MMA 32.81.2), who recalled modeling for the figure of the African American construction worker in the City Building panel
of America Today.

‘Midwest’

‘Deep South’

‘Cotton Pickers, Georgia’

Benton painted
Cotton Pickers, Georgia (MMA 33.144.2)
from the studies that he made during a trip through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the summer and fall of 1926. The artist returned to this same group of studies in conceiving and executing Deep South, the first panel in America Today's geographical and chronological sweep.

‘Coal’

‘City Activities with Dance Hall’

In contrast to these dramatic scenes of labor and struggle, Benton depicted in City Activities with Dance Hall
and City Activities with Subway popular leisure-time activities during Prohibition (1920–33), particularly
dancing (to jazz music) and drinking (illegal at the time).

‘City Activities with Subway’

‘Outreaching Hands’ (over-door)

The last and smallest panel, Outreaching Hands, shows only hands reaching for bread and other hands holding money, allusions to the economic despair and inequity caused by the Great Depression, which began in 1929.

Despite references to the Depression, Benton's mural powerfully promotes the idea of "progress," as he perceived it, predicated on modern technology. Benton's mural reveals the artist's belief that the foundational technological and mechanical strength on which progress relied was, in turn, dependent on manual and industrial labor.
Consequently, bodies of large, heroic workers fill many of the mural's panels. Workers and labor fascinated many artists and photographers throughout the 1920s,
including Lewis Hine (MMA 1987.1100.119)
and James Lesesne Wells (MMA 1999.529.173).

After appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1934, Benton left New York and settled in Kansas City, Missouri the following year. Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s,
he became closely associated with a movement known as Regionalism, which included John Steuart Curry (MMA 42.154) and Grant Wood (MMA 50.117), artists who exalted rural America and tended to regard
contemporary abstract art as un-American.

During this period, Benton painted July Hay (MMA 43.159.1), a work that reflects his admiration for the sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel (MMA 19.164).

‘July Hay’

After residing for more than fifty years in the boardroom of the New School, America Today proved difficult for the school to maintain in perpetuity. In 1982, the school announced the sale of the mural, with the condition that it would not be resold outside the United States or as individual panels.
But the work was a great challenge to sell as a whole, increasing the likelihood that the panels would be dispersed.

America Today was acquired by AXA (then Equitable Life) in 1984, in support of efforts on the part of then-mayor Edward I. Koch and others to keep it intact and in New York City. Two years later, after extensive cleaning and restoration,
America Today was unveiled to critical acclaim in AXA's new headquarters at 787 Seventh Avenue.
When the company moved its corporate headquarters again in 1996, to 1290 Avenue of the Americas,
America Today was put on display in the lobby.
There it remained until January 2012, when the company was asked to remove it to make way for a renovation.
The removal triggered AXA's decision to place the historic work in a museum collection, and in December 2012, AXA donated the mural to The Met.

Resources for Research
The Met's Libraries and Research Centers provide unparalleled resources for research and welcome an international community of students and scholars.
The Met Collection API is where all makers, creators, researchers, and dreamers can connect to the most up-to-date data and public domain images for The Met collection.
Open Access data and public domain images are available for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use without permission or fee.

Video about the mural and it’s installation at the MET:

Video about Benton’s life and career:

Thomas Hart Benton 1970

Self Portrait

]]><![CDATA[Cholo graffiti in East Los Angeles with Cheech Marin / Part IV: Estevan Oriol]]>Mon, 04 Aug 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/cholo-graffiti-in-east-los-angeles-with-cheech-marin-part-iv-estevan-oriolLet’s conclude Cheech’s interview and exploration
of the roots of East L.A. graffiti and his conversation with another photographer… a Los Angeles native who came of age in the 1980s when New York graffiti entered the LA scene.

ORIOL: “I was born in LA, I come from a Mexican family, so I grew up around Cholo graffiti. Then the new kind of graffiti came from New York—they started doing it out here in the 1980s.
I only started photographing in the early 1990s, but I was more into the old school, and I’m still that way.”

ORIOL: “Cholo graffiti has other fonts in addition to Old English—there’s the western-looking, saloon-like letters; square letters; outlined block letters.
To me, they were more interesting than all the colors and the bubbles and the arrows and the stars and all that, which were common in East Coast graffiti. It was simpler, but I thought it was cooler, and it was bolder.”

MARIN: “Is that a good thing? Are we supposed to think globally or should we cling to the specificity of our four blocks?”
ORIOL: “I think you keep the integrity of the four blocks and you hold on to that originality, that authenticity.”

Art in the Streets

Estevan Oriol pulls inspiration from the city and reflects its sensibilities in his work.
Southern California juxtaposes the glitzy and the gritty, and those extremes are visible both in Oriol’s choice of subject and execution. Whether he is photographing street life, fashion models, tattoos or lowrider culture, there is a voice in his work that is distinctly LA-bred.

A native of Los Angeles’s Westside,
Estevan Oriol (b.1967, Los Angeles)
worked as a bouncer at several local hip-hop clubs in the late 1980s. After befriending rising local music stars Cypress Hill and House of Pain, he began traveling with the bands as tour manager in 1992 and documenting his experience in photographs.
About the same time, he met a fellow lowrider car aficionado who went by the name Mister Cartoon,
and by 1995 the two were business partners in the apparel line Joker Brand Clothing.

In 1995. Estevan Oriol (then known as DJ Scandalous)
and B-Real from Cypress Hill,
sat down with Mr. Cartoon to discuss a new venture,
Joker Brand Clothing.
As the line grew more successful. Oriol began to direct videos for musicians such as Cypress Hill, Xzibit, Eminem,
and Blink-182, working across a broad range of disciplines, including feature films, commercials, music,
fine art, and fashion.

Although Oriol has photographed many international subjects, such as Tokyo Bosozoku motorcycle gangs
and favela life in Brazil, he and his work are decidedly Angeleno, and his portraits of Los Angeles’s women, musicians, lowrider cars, Cholos, gang members, graffiti writers, and other characters provide a unique record of the city’s street culture over the past twenty years.

As a photographer, Oriol largely works with film and classic cameras, such as the Pentax 67, to create high-contrast black-and-white and color-saturated images.

Here’s a Tour de Force
of
“East Coast vs. West Coast Graffiti Yards”
by
'The Graffiti Wanderer'
“I like to share what I see in these places. I do not condone or encourage any illegal activity.
All content is for documentary purposes.” -TGW

Exploring and Walking Tour Videos.

Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection
The Cheech Marin collection is notable for classic examples of Chicano art produced from the inception of the Chicano movement to the present, with a concentration in painting from the 1980s and 90s. This exhibition includes a number of widely exhibited works by such first-generation Chicano artists as Carlos Almaraz, Margaret Garcia, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Frank Romero, John Valadez, and Patssi Valdez, whose artistic careers began during the Chicano civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, as well as works by such younger artists as Vincent Valdez and David Flury. Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A. is a Los Angeles-focused selection of Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, an exhibition of the Marin collection that toured nationally between 2001 and 2007.

"Thanx, Cheech, for sharing your fantastic collection!
-and-
Congratulations on the success of your Art Museum,
'The Cheech'.
All my best to you, Homeboy!" -Roberto Quintana

]]><![CDATA[The ‘Holy Trinity’ fresco by ‘Big-Ugly-Tom’ aka Masaccio]]>Mon, 07 Jul 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/the-holy-trinity-fresco-by-big-ugly-tom-aka-masaccio

"I have recently been studying the complicated history of Medieval Europe and the incredible works of the Renaissance Masters, and I was pleasantly reminded of Masaccio’s ‘Holy Trinity’ mural, one of my personal favorites from the Quattrocento period of the early Renaissance, in what is now Italy.

It is one of my favorites not only for it’s masterful and innovative use of the new perspective to create the illusion of depth with it’s lower portion (the ‘Sarcopha-Guy’ ;) coming out into the church-space, and the 3-dimensional decorative architecture with it’s base, columns, pilasters and arch, but also for Masaccio's use of quadrature illusionism to create a virtual barrel-vaulted chapel to enclose the main subject(s)." -RQ

"Masaccio not only uses the newly invented (discovered?) rules of perspective to fool the eye, but he also creates an almost ‘surreal’ trick of the mind, by subtly breaking the rules of perspective he has just convinced us, the viewers, to accept as real… by having his allegorical ‘God-the-Father’ standing at the rear of the chapel/vault area while simultaneously supporting the arms of the crucified Christ, which is clearly mounted in the front of the chapel/vault, under the arch!” -RQ

Art Encyclopedia
Visual Arts of Painting | Sculpture |Architecture
Photography | Ceramics and other crafts

Interpretation of the Holy Trinity by Masaccio

One of the iconic works of Renaissance art, The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saint John and donors (1428) can be seen in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, in Florence. Like many religious paintings produced during the Renaissance in Florence, it also has a secular side.

First, it depicts the Trinity of God the Father, Christ the Son and the Holy Ghost (symbolized by a white dove); second, it also functions as a commercial portrait of the patron or customer.
The work was commissioned by Domenico Lenzi and his wife, as a mural painting for the family remembrance chapel at Santa Maria Novella.

However, the feature that made it one of the 15th century's most influential Renaissance paintings, is its use of single-point linear perspective to organize its composition.
Its 27-year old creator Tommaso di Giovanni Masaccio (1401-28) was to Early Renaissance painting what Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was to architecture, and Donatello (1386-1466) to sculpture.

Superb Demonstration of Linear Perspective

The geometric principles of linear perspective - the technique whereby an artist may depict three-dimensional depth on the flat painting surface - appears to have been discovered by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) in his treatise Della Pittura (On Painting) published in 1435.

As a science, perspective was associated with optics and the study of vision, but as a pictorial technique it was only properly explored during the Early Renaissance in Florence.
In his Holy Trinity, Masaccio was the first individual of the Florentine Renaissance to properly explore the illusionistic potential of this new technique.

The painting depicts a chapel, whose cavernous interior seems to open up before the viewer. Inside, framed by Ionic columns, Corinthian pilasters and a barrel-vault ceiling, a crucified Christ is overlooked by God and the Holy Spirit, flanked by John the Evangelist and the Virgin Mary. The modelling of these figures is so realistic that they could be statues. Each of them - except for God, the immeasurable entity - occupies their own three-dimensional space.

To cap it all, in front of the pillars which form the entrance to the make-believe chapel, Masaccio portrayed the two donors Domenico Lenzi and his wife. He painted them life-size and in equally realistic detail. The whole trompe l'oeil effect of the chapel and its occupants is a stunning example of how realistic depth can be incorporated into a flat painting.

At the front of the picture, below the level of the chapel floor, there is a sarcophagus on which Adam's skeleton is laid out as a memento mori for the viewer with its inscription "I was once as you are and what I am you also shall be."

Influential
Masaccio's Holy Trinity became a hugely influential painting for generations of Florentine artists. Writing over a century later, the Mannerist artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) was so overwhelmed by Masaccio's perspectival foreshortening that he was convinced there was a hole in the wall containing the make-believe chapel!

In 1570, a stone altar was built in the church of Santa Maria Novella, which led to Masaccio's mural being covered up. As a result, the fresco remained invisible for almost three centuries from 1570 to 1861, until the altar was removed and the painting once again became visible. However, it wasn't until 1952 - when the lower (skeleton) part of the painting was also uncovered - that the entire fresco was put on view.

Masaccio
Within months of completing the work, Masaccio was dead.
His sudden demise put an end to his meteoric 7-year career, during which he had already produced three other masterpieces:

Madonna with St. Anne (c.1423, Uffizi, Florence),
the Pisa Altarpiece Polyptych (c.1426, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), and
the Brancacci Chapel frescoes (c.1425) in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

He remains one of the greatest Early Renaissance artists.

]]><![CDATA[Cholo graffiti in East Los Angeles with Cheech Marin / Part Tres: Gusmano Cesaretti]]>Mon, 02 Jun 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/cholo-graffiti-in-east-los-angeles-with-cheech-marin-part-tres-gusmano-cesarettiLast March I started a 4 part series of interviews
with Cheech Marin,
from MOCA’s website/exhibition:
‘Art in the Streets’ by Jeffrey Deitch...

Let’s continue with Cheech’s exploration of the roots of East L.A. graffiti and his conversation with the photographer…

Born in Fratina di Porcari, in Lucca, Italy. Gusmano Cesaretti studied at Collegio Cavanis. His father gave him a beautiful photo camera for his 14th birthday. It became his instrument.
Gusmano has expressed himself through a wide range of mediums from photo journalism, editorial, fashion and commercial work to feature films, documentaries and conceptual art. All bear his own special personal vision and style.

“I’m interested in people, and I want to capture society in my photographs in a way that looks beyond the obvious”
–– Gusmano Cesaretti

CHEECH MARIN: "Although the origins of American graffiti are typically traced back to New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and 1970s, an earlier history began in the barrios of Los Angeles decades before.
Here a subculture developed among Mexican-American youths who were both detached from the culture of their parents and, because of widespread discrimination, prevented from identifying as entirely American. ‘The Pachucos’, as they called themselves, dressed in extravagant, dandyish zoot suits, and they didn’t stray far from the small neighborhoods where they lived.
Gangs emerged as a means of asserting cultural pride and maintaining control over their communities, and street writing was a way of defining territory. Gang life further evolved after the Los Angeles riots of 1943, known as the Zoot Suit Riots, in which racial tension erupted into a series of brutal confrontations between white military servicemen and the young Pachucos.
In the postwar period, Pachuco culture developed into the Cholo gangs of the 1960s.”

CESARETTI: “When I came to LA in 1969, I drove around, exploring the city. I was going into East LA and the Mexican neighborhoods, and I started seeing writing on walls, and I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but it was beautiful and exotic.”

CESARETTI: “When I first started photographing graffiti, I didn’t know it was written by gang members. But people would come up to me to ask why I was taking pictures, and then they would explain, this means this, that means that. And so I started to understand the language and the symbols. I met Chaz (BOJÓRQUEZ) in 1972-73, and he took me around, exploring the neighborhoods, and he explained everything about the graffiti to me.”

CESARETTI: "In Italy, graffiti is everywhere, and it’s been around for centuries. Pompeii was a huge red-light district— there were houses of prostitution (The Lupanar) , there were smoking rooms where they used to smoke opium, and people would write notes on the walls or names or leave messages to each other, like, “So-and-so, she’s fantastic, you should try her next time.” So merchant marines in ancient times would come to Pompeii and say, “Hey, let’s look for Marina or so-and-so.

"In Italian, "sgraffiare" (Sgraffito) means 'to scratch the surface'—you just need a nail or a knife or a rock, or a spray can, and you can leave a message on the walls."

House covered with sgraffito in the village of Pyrgi, Mastichochoria of Chios / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgraffito#/media/File:Pyrgi_house1.JPG

CESARETTI: Graffiti around the world has merged into a similar style; it all looks the same. But Cholo graffiti remains very strong and pure. The gangs have gotten tougher—they deal in drugs, they have guns—but Cholo style hasn’t changed. And they’re still writing like they did forty years ago.

Street Writers:
A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti.

On moving to Los Angeles in 1970, Gusmano Cesaretti was struck by the vibrant visual culture of that city’s Eastside and set about documenting it.
He captured the cars, the fashions, and the tattoos of East LA as well as its Cholo graffiti, a style that was wholly free from New York influence. Cesaretti’s entrée into the local graffiti culture came when he met the young Chaz Bojórquez, a resident of Cypress Park and perhaps the city’s most artistically inclined graffiti writer at the time.

Although the book has long been out of print, its images have circulated for years among graffiti aficionados in multiple generations of Xeroxed copies.
Considered to be the first book published on street art subculture, this photo essay developed when Cesaretti became fascinated with the unique style of Chicano graffiti that was evolving in East Los Angeles.
He teamed up with graffiti legend Chaz Bojorquez, who explained the evolving language among the local street artists as they toured the neighborhood.
Cesaretti recorded Bojorquez as he shot photos, transcribing his words and forming them into the accompanying text.

This book was out of print for decades and reprinted in 2021 by Arte Povera Foto Books.
Rare in the trade, an essential addition to any street art or Chicano studies library.

Gusmano Cesaretti

Curator and Publisher
Cesaretti has curated many exhibitions, starting with his gallery Cityscape Foto Gallery, which he founded in Pasadena, California in 1977. He was instrumental in arranging the exhibition of several major works by Los Angeles street artists in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's blockbuster 2011 Art in the Streets show, including the Chosen Few MC motorcycle club. In 2014 he started publishing Los Angeles FOTOFOLIO, an underground journal of black and white photography by well-known and emerging photographers that is distributed free of charge in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, and Mexico City.

Books and exhibitions
Cesaretti's photographs have appeared in many books and magazines as well as several artist monographs, including Street Writers (published by Acrobat Books, 1975), 5 x 5 = 24 (published by xx, 1979), Fragments of Los Angeles (published by Damian/Alleged Press, 2013), and Dentro le Mura (published by Arte Povera, 2014). His work has been exhibited at the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Cesaretti has since worked on nearly a dozen feature films as a producer and has continued to work in documentary photography in Latin America, Haiti, and Southeast Asia.

]]><![CDATA[Cholo graffiti in East Los Angeles with Cheech Marin / Part B: Chaz Bojorquez]]>Mon, 05 May 2025 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/cholo-graffiti-in-east-los-angeles-with-cheech-marin-part-b-chaz-bojorquezLet’s continue Cheech’s exploration
of the roots of East L.A. graffiti
and his conversation with…

CHAZ BOJÓRQUEZ: "Some people date the first graffiti in LA back to the 1930s, when shoeshine boys would mark their spot on the street by writing their names on the wall. There are tags by the Los Angeles River that date back to the ’40s, painted with sticks and tar. Before spray cans were invented, most of the graffiti was made with paint and brush."

"Chicano gangs were originally formed for protection, in response to racism. When people think of LA gangs, they usually think of drug dealing and violence, but the Chicano gangs were originally more about taking pride in a neighborhood.

By 1943, when the riots happened against the Latino zoot suiters, it created the foundations for the Cholo culture. Graffiti was a way to define your identity and say, “This is Latino territory.” This is our roll call, our names written on the wall—that’s what’s called a "placa". Placas are usually placed at the edge of a neighborhood, marking the territory for an individual gang. It says, “This is ours.” When I see a tag, I see a complaint; I see a whole bunch of tags, I see a petition."

"I lived in the neighborhood of the Avenues gang. I was not a gangster, I was a hippie, my cousins were gangsters in prison, and my friends were surfers—but we were all the same, there wasn’t a distinction that you had to be a gangster to tag. We were always at the same liquor store tagging. You could tell the little guys by the bad handwriting, and they would write low, at eye level. And the older guys, they would write bigger and taller. But was it about being the highest and all that? No, that was not the case. Your tag was allegiance to your community. You never went out of your neighborhood to tag.

"The gangs used Old English type because it was seen as the most prestigious. It was on your birth certificate, the newspaper—the LA Times."

MARIN: "It’s a co-opting of legitimacy and a form of code-switching. Switching from one language to another, one culture to another—the formality and the prestige of that and adapting it to your own style—you say two things at the same time."

BOJÓRQUEZ: "And then there’s that other style, ‘Teen Angel’. It’s a script, for tattoos and drawings. We used to write beautiful script letters on the side and back windows of lowrider cars, you know, words like “Pillow Talk” or “Sad Boy,” all that stuff."

MARIN: “I’m so tired of being alone.”

BOJÓRQUEZ: “They use ‘Teen Angel’ for tattoos across the neck. But it would never go up on the walls; nobody does that in the streets.”

MARIN: "You were studying art while you were tagging, right?"

BOJÓRQUEZ: "I started taking art classes when I was about fourteen years old, before I was tagging. I was very aware of the art scene of the time—Andy Warhol, the Ferus Gallery guys—but I did not see a Latino face. Then I was going to the Chouinard School of Art in ’67, and again I was very disappointed because I did not see a Latino face anywhere. That’s why I started tagging—for myself."

MARIN: “In 1972, the Chicano art collective Asco tagged the outside of LACMA, because the museum didn’t show Chicano artists. Two years later, the museum gave another Chicano group, Los Four, a show. But for the museum, it was barbarians at the gate. It was, “Okay, we’ve shown it once, you’ve had your day.”

BOJÓRQUEZ: "Exactly. In art school, I became disillusioned.
I wasn’t getting support from my art teachers or anything like that, I was getting kicked out of school because they didn’t see any value in my fine-art work. So, I said, fuck school, I’m just gonna go back to graffiti at night.

That’s when I came up with the image of Señor Suerte. It mixes a lot of different styles from the ’60s. The skull, of course, is Mexican, from Día de los Muertos. But also at that time, there was the black civil rights movement—I copied that look you saw in movies in the 1970s, like Shaft and Super Fly, with the pimp daddy hat, the fur collar. I liked that look."

MARIN: "Who doesn’t like that look?"

BOJÓRQUEZ: "I was smoking a lot of dope, so the first drawing had a joint, but then I thought, I’m not gonna put drugs in the street, that’s disrespectful. You know, it was the Latino morality. So I crossed his fingers and took the joint out."

"The first time I tagged my skull symbol I did it freehand with a spray can, and it came out badly. So I turned to the latest technology of the ’60s—plastics—to cut out a stencil with more detail and total control. My first tag was on the 110 Freeway from downtown LA to Pasadena, when you’re coming out of the freeway tunnels; I tagged the spiral staircase. That was ’69, and it stayed there ’til the Olympics in ’84. Then, about fifteen years after that first tag, I started seeing it tattooed on gangsters from the Avenues gang. It’s become a symbol of protection: If you get shot and have the skull tattooed on you, it will protect you from death. So since then, I put it away, I don’t make T-shirts, I don’t make nothing—it belongs to them, because they live and die for it. It’d be stupid to commercialize that image."

MARIN: "Is danger part of graffiti? The more dangerous and hard to do, the better—to put it in the spot where you know the guy is fucking rappelling off something to get there?"

BOJÓRQUEZ: "That’s the style from New York. It’s been taken up by new guys, but that’s not West Coast Cholo. I only tagged in Highland Park, I never went out of Highland Park. One time I did Hollywood because I worked at this job, but otherwise when I see young kids hitting all over the place, that’s New York mentality—me, me, me. It wasn’t our tradition. One writer would write for the group, and our tags were about us."

MARIN: "Real little micro-neighborhoods, man. And essentially that particular gang that was in that neighborhood lived and died for their four-square blocks."

BOJÓRQUEZ: "It’s clannish, it’s really clannish."

MARIN: "So at the moment that mass transit comes in, that separates it from marking territory?"

BOJÓRQUEZ: "I don’t see gangsters on trains. I’ve never hit a train. I never see trains."

MARIN: "Well, buses."

BOJÓRQUEZ: "Tagging buses, that’s a younger man’s game, from the 1990s. We never hit buses. We didn’t hit churches or buses. When New York–style graffiti started coming in here about the mid-1980s, all the young kids went all New York gaga. The documentary Style Wars came out in ’84, and it changed overnight. There was the excitement of the world movement out of New York.
But I want to say that New York was the first to take graffiti to heart because they took their pieces and put a frame around it and made a gallery, the FUN Gallery and all of that.
And they changed it into a product—like Haring with his Pop Shop. But it didn’t last. New York is all about “Been there, done it, next thing.” Then there were the anti-graffiti laws, and that closed off the subways. What happened over here was, it just stayed gangster."

MARIN: “Is that a good thing? Are we supposed to think globally or should we cling to the specificity of our four blocks?”

BOJÓRQUEZ: “What’s unique about LA is that we bring our culture into our graffiti. Cholo culture is Mexican-American culture, and our style carries our culture. To the world graffiti movement—99.9 percent New York–influenced—Cholo is a subculture on the West Coast, but we choose to write with cultural pride in our letters and that’s our strength.”

MARIN:”But I think it’s gonna be impossible with every generation, ’cause every generation of kids will interpret it in their own style. Who gets to define what Chicano is? Every generation of Chicanos defines what it means to be Chicano for them, and they have just as much right to say it as a Chicano that grew up in the ’40s does.
The biggest controversy I had when I exhibited my art collection under the title Chicano Vision was using the word "Chicano". “Can we call it Mexican-American art, or Hispanic art, anything but Chicano art?” By definition, it was not art if a Chicano did it; it was agitprop. At the same time, the radical political activist Chicanos, they didn’t want anybody else using that name but them. I was just a fuckin’ dope-smoking comedian. Those Chicanos thought they made up the term in 1968. But I thought, hey, that’s finally a term that defines who I am. I’m not a Mexican, I hated Mexican-American, Hispanic, fuck that. I’m a Chicano.”

Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.:
Selections from the Cheech Marin Collection

The Cheech Marin collection is notable for classic examples of Chicano art produced from the inception of the Chicano movement to the present, with a concentration in painting from the 1980s and 90s. This exhibition includes a number of widely exhibited works by such first-generation Chicano artists as Carlos Almaraz, Margaret Garcia, Gilbert “Magu” Luján, Frank Romero, John Valadez, and Patssi Valdez, whose artistic careers began during the Chicano civil rights movement in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, as well as works by such younger artists as Vincent Valdez and David Flury. Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A. is a Los Angeles-focused selection of Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge, an exhibition of the Marin collection that toured nationally between 2001 and 2007.

BOJÓRQUEZ: “I fought for that word "Chicano". And I believe that Cholo graffiti is Chicano art. Chicanos were the hard ones to convince. They said it was anti-Chicano because Chicano was family, religion, farmworkers, border and migration issues, not this bad-boy stuff— “it undermines what we’re doing, it’s not art.” I started out as just a tagger, but then I came to define myself as a graffiti artist—and I really had to defend that word "artist". Now I don’t just work in the arts, I do graphic design—I work in culture.
But the only way to stay where I’m at is to stay pure. I’m always going back to the original letters of Old English to build my foundation, but I include my own style of control of Asian calligraphy. I like the traditions of Cholo and the expressive spirit from Asian philosophy. I came back to my community feeling more like I better get up in my four blocks. I constantly ask myself, how can I paint more pride or strength—how do I add balls to my letters?”

Chaz Bojórquez (b. 1949, Los Angeles)
grew up in Highland Park, where he created a graffiti icon that was adopted by the local gang.
Bojórquez first encountered graffiti as a young boy while exploring the concrete riverbeds of the Los Angeles River.
The markings he found there introduced him to the Cholo graffiti that Chicano Angelenos had been developing since the 1930s. While a student at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts) in the 1960s, he developed his signature character, a stenciled, fedora-wearing skull named Señor Suerte.

Bojórquez’s position as one of the city’s premier Cholo graffiti artists was cemented in 1975 with the publication of photographer Gusmano Cesaretti’s book:
Street Writers: A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti.

Working on canvas since 1979, Bojórquez mixes powerful variations on Cholo fonts, informed by his study of Asian calligraphy, with the iconography of the Day of the Dead and other traditional Mexican folk imagery.
An elder statesman of the Los Angeles street scene, he has exhibited widely and has worked on numerous graphic design projects. The monograph
The Art and Life of Chaz Bojórquez
was published in 2010.

CHAZ BOJÓRQUEZ
Draws his inspiration from Los Angeles where he was born, grew up and still lives. He received formal art training at Guadalajara University of Art in Mexico, California State University Los Angeles and the Chouinard Art Institute now known as Cal Arts.
Under Chinese Calligraphy Master Yun Chung Chiang, Chaz developed a deep understanding for written language. He worked as a commercial artist in advertising and film before concentrating on painting.
Chaz is the “Godfather of Los Angeles Graffiti Art”.

“I put 50 years in of writing. I am an Original. We started this stuff. We not only had the best book... but, it was the very first book” –– Chaz Bojórquez

https://streetwriters.com/pages/the-artist
ARTE POVERA FOTO BOOKS
Independent publishing company dedicated to releasing limited edition photography books rooted in culture.

https://streetwriters.com/pages/contact-media-inquiries
CONTACT
Arte Povera Foto Books, Inc.
PO Box 421203
Los Angeles, CA 90042
Email: curator@streetwriters.com

]]><![CDATA[Laurence Linkus: Posthumous Art Exhibition!!]]>Mon, 24 Mar 2025 22:34:33 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/laurence-linkus-posthumous-art-exhibition(Cheech Marin’s interviews with Cholo Graffiti Artists will have to wait!)

This exciting
Art Show
announcement
just came across my desk!

!Come one!
!Come ALL!
Come and enjoy Link’s Art!
Haggle! Barter! Bid! Brawl!
-!! Make an Offer !!-

Original Paintings! Drawings! Sketches!
Prints! Illustrations! Photography!

This is a FANTASTIC opportunity
to see what may be the last exhibition
(in the U.S.)
of this World Famous Artist’s
Fine-Art Corpus!!

Link and Bonnie’s daughter, Daena,
doesn’t want to have to ship
all of Link's AMAZING art-work
back to Germany!!
She would much rather have it all go to friends, colleagues and patrons
who will enjoy and cherish it!

RSVP to Daena’s eMail: DAENA@POSTEO.DE

(or just CRASH the party!
That’s what Link would do!)

"Do I need to remind you all of what happens to the $-VALUE-$ of the works of
Dead-Genius-Artists!?!"

600 Maulhardt Ave.
Oxnard, CA 93030

And
since this is still a "Mural Blog"...
here's a link...
to some of Link's mural work!

]]><![CDATA[Cholo Graffiti in East Los Angeles with Cheech Marin / Part 1]]>Mon, 03 Mar 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/cholo-graffiti-in-east-los-angeles-with-cheech-marin-part-1“Here’s an interesting series of 4 posts
that I have put together from the MOCA’s
‘Art in the Street’ website.
The exhibition took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles,
from April 17 to August 8, 2011.
(See more about the show here)"

Free Graffiti Font Downloads

"The MOCA site features a great interview with Cheech Marin in conversation with three East L.A. artists, each with close knowledge of cholo-graffiti. "

Cholo-Graffiti style

"They all came up around the early 70’s, (when I was in High School), just before the New York Graffiti style came to the west coast. This was all way before I picked up a brush and started teaching myself how to paint… and discovered how interesting the soon-to-be dying art of sign-painting was!
Back then there were guys still making a living as sign-painters and writers, and I could always make a few bucks fumbling my way through the odd sign-job or menu-board, and I liked learning all about lettering styles."

New York Graffiti style

But I never did any graffiti or tagging!
Well, almost never. Mainly because I couldn’t see any money in it! I did manage to paint quite a few large bill-boards and record-covers and movie posters for the studios and record stores in Hollywood, before the vinyl industry and large format printers took it all over.
(But that’s a tale for another blog.)
This one is about graffiti and street-painting.
Anyway… I have always been fascinated with lettering styles and the history of fonts and such, so now that I am semi-retired, and in my (early!) seventies, I’m taking the time to explore and understand the graffiti culture better.”
-Roberto Quintana WFA aka ‘sQuint’

Here’s the start of Cheech’s interview…
Cheech Marin:
“Although the origins of American graffiti are typically traced back to New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s and 1970s, an earlier history began in the barrios of Los Angeles decades before. Here a subculture developed among Mexican-American youths who were both detached from the culture of their parents and, because of widespread discrimination, prevented from identifying as entirely American. The ‘Pachucos’, as they called themselves, dressed in extravagant, dandyish zoot suits, and they didn’t stray far from the small neighborhoods where they lived. Gangs emerged as a means of asserting cultural pride and maintaining control over their communities, and street writing was a way of defining territory. Gang life further evolved after the Los Angeles riots of 1943, known as the Zoot Suit Riots, in which racial tension erupted into a series of brutal confrontations between white military servicemen and the young Pachucos.*

Military Servicemen (with Clubs) and young Pachucos (with Zoots)

"In the postwar period, Pachuco culture developed into the ‘Cholo’ gangs of the 1960s. Derived from the Aztec word 'xolotl', meaning “dog,” the word Cholo had been used in the United States as a derogatory term for a person of Mexican heritage, but in the ’60s, Mexican-American activists reclaimed the term—along with 'Chicano'—for themselves, transforming an ethnic slur into a badge of pride. Cholo gang members, like the Pachucos, emphasized the creation of a uniquely Chicano youth culture based around the streets.”

This photograph of three men sporting variations on the zoot suit was taken by Oliver F. Atkins.

And Here’s a video-interview of Cheech about his own story…

Cheech Marin Tells His Life Story
(Full Interview/ VLADTV)

There have been some great comedic duos that have brought us countless laughs over the years... There’s been Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, and Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. But none of them represented the era of counterculture and hippie free love as much as Cheech and Chong.

Back in the '70s and '80s, this comedic duo achieved commercial and cultural success with their stand-up routines, studio recordings, and feature films. Their story and career are one of the most unique in comedy history.

The Legendary comedian and actor appears here on VladTV, where he spoke about his career, childhood, and family life. Cheech explains how he formed his comedy duo with Tommy Chong and how they transitioned that success into a string of classic films. Cheech also talks about his solo success in film. Later in the interview, Cheech offers his thoughts on the shift in attitudes towards marijuana and much more.

-AND-
Check out Cheech’s FANTASTIC! Art Collection
at his very own Art Museum!

The Cheech Marin Center
for Chicano Art
and Culture
opened in June 2022
as a public-private partnership between RAM (Riverside Art Museum), the City of Riverside, and comedian Cheech Marin
—one of the world’s foremost collectors of Chicano art!

A significant portion of Cheech’s collection will always be exhibited and can continue to be toured at venues across the nation and throughout the world!

]]><![CDATA[The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves]]>Tue, 04 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/the-shamans-of-prehistory-trance-and-magic-in-the-painted-cavesThis post was scheduled for the first Monday of February…
However Monday, February 3, 2025 was:

A Day Without Latinos:
The Peoples Fight for Justice
https://brownrock.org/2025/02/02/brown-people-matter-the-peoples-fight-protest-for-justice-in-downtown-los-angeles/
(Thanx Elaine!)
I hope you missed me! -RQ

"Here's another one of my favorite
books from my library!"

“The Shamans of Prehistory”
Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves
by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams

• Harry N. Abrams, 1998
• ISBN 0810941821 (ISBN13: 9780810941823)
• Hardcover, 120 pages
From:
https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/books/shamans_of_prehistory.php

This startling book reveals a new way of understanding the remarkable images painted or etched on rock walls by the people of prehistory.

Noting the similarity of prehistoric rock art with that created by some contemporary traditional societies, archaeologists Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams suggest that the ancient images were created by shamans, powerful individuals who were able to contact the spirit world through trance and ritual. In many societies throughout history, shamans have been consulted to try to change the weather, foretell the future, control the movements of animals, and converse with the dead.

With an abundance of full-color illustrations, Clottes and Lewis-Williams draw on neuropsychology and ethnography to follow prehistoric shamans into their trance states. The authors shed light on what these artists were thinking and how they may have worked.

On these pages, Paleolithic art and life are seen in a new and astonishing way.

Since the first report of cave art (at Altamira in 1879), attempts have been made to explain the purpose of the mysterious drawings. Art for art's sake; totemism; hunting, destructive, or fertility magic; and modern structuralist theories have all been proposed. Clottes (The Cave Beneath the Sea: Paleolithic Images at Cosquer, LJ 4/1/96) and Lewis-Williams (cognitive archaeology, Univ. of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg) propose a new theory emphasizing the shamanic aspects of Paleolithic cave paintings.

After an unavoidably technical chapter providing the basics of shamanism, the authors examine Paleolithic paintings from across France and Spain, noting the use of animal figures, composite figures combining both human and animal characteristics, and geometric designs that are all common elements of shamanism.

The bulk of the book is both fascinating and thought-provoking, and while it is not likely to be the last word on the subject, it is an important contribution to the field. Recommended for academic and large public libraries.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Theory of prehistoric shamanism

Some of Clottes's most publicized contributions to the study of prehistory have come not in the form of field research, but in his efforts to propose a plausible theory of the psychological and social context in which prehistoric cave art was created.[3][5] In 1994 he joined with South African anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to study prehistoric art in light of known neuropsychological phenomena associated with shamanic trances.[3][5][6] Together they concluded that there is a strong argument for believing that much of prehistoric art was in fact produced in the context of shamanic practices.
In 1996 they published their findings in the book Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire: Transe et Magie dans les Grottes Ornées (published in English in 1998 as
The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves).[5]

The book received heavy criticism from some other researchers, with some objections stemming from a reluctance to use modern ethnographic or psychological observations as a basis for speculating on the meaning of prehistoric art, following clumsy early-20th-century attempts to do so.

Other experts found the ideas compelling, and suggested that academic infighting or jealousy may have played a role in the criticism.[3]

In response to their critics, Clottes and Lewis-Williams published an expanded version of their book in 2001 (Les Chamanes de la Préhistoire: Texte Intégral, Polémique et Réponses).
David Lewis-Williams later went on to develop aspects of their thesis more fully in his own book The Mind in the Cave[6] and its sequel, Inside the Neolithic Mind (co-authored by David Pearce).[7]

Jean Clottes is a prominent French prehistorian.
He was born in the French Pyrénées in 1933 and began to study archaeology in 1959, while teaching high school.
He initially focused on Neolithic dolmens, which were the topic of his 1975 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Toulouse.
After being appointed director of prehistoric antiquities for the Midi-Pyrénées in 1971, he began to study prehistoric cave art in order to fulfill the responsibilities of that position.
In the following years he led a series of excavations of prehistoric sites in the region.
In 1992, he was named General Inspector for Archaeology at the French Ministry of Culture;
in 1993 he was appointed Scientific Advisor for prehistoric rock art at the French Ministry of Culture.
He formally retired in 1999, but remains an active contributor to the field.

James David Lewis-Williams is professor emeritus of cognitive archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
David Lewis-Williams, as he is known to his friends and colleagues, is regarded as an eminent specialist in the San or Bushmen culture, specifically their art and beliefs.
His book, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (Thames & Hudson) won the American Historical Association's 2003 James Henry Breasted Award.
His most recent books are:
Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods (Thames & Hudson) co-authored with David Pearce and published in 2005,

Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, published in 2010, and

Deciphering Ancient Minds: The Mystery of San Bushman Rock Art, co-authored with Sam Challis and published in 2011.

Review from Booklist:
With an abundance of full-color illustrations, Clottes and Lewis-Williams draw on neuropsychology and ethnography to follow prehistoric shamans into their trance states. The authors shed light on what these rock artists were thinking and how they may have worked. On these pages, Paleolithic art and life are seen in a new and astonishing way.

“The most obvious question about cave art is why is it there, and Clottes, a prehistoric rock art expert associated with the French ministry of culture, and Lewis-Williams, a South African professor of cognitive archaeology, propose an elegant answer in this beautifully illustrated volume.

They begin by documenting the universality of certain cave art images, then suggest that these paintings are shamanic in nature.

They make their case in a fresh and lucid discussion of the methods shamans use to achieve altered states of consciousness in order to get in touch with the spiritual realm, then, shifting to a neuropsychological perspective, characterize the types of hallucinations experienced at the three main stages of trance: geometric shapes, objects of religious or emotional significance, and visions of animals, monsters, and people.

The three sets of visions are depicted gracefully on cave walls deep beneath the surface of the earth, the perfect setting for a journey to another world.

This is a handsome and quietly thrilling solution to an old and essential mystery.” —Donna Seaman

Reviewed by Barnaby Thieme, 8/22/2012:

The good folks at Erowid have posted my (Barnaby Thieme) review of The Shamans of Prehistory by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams, two prominent authorities on paleolithic cave painting.

I (Barnaby Thieme) am sympathetic to the book’s central argument that many painted caves served a ritual function related to archaic forms of shamanism, but I found their specific cognitive-archaeological model to be under-developed.

Clottes and Lewis-Williams ground their theoretical framework in an altered states model of shamanism and speculate that early shamans may have utilized visionary plants to induce trance states. The Erowid site which hosts a massive online archive of information relating to psychoactive plants and chemicals and their use.

You can read the full review here.

Beginning some 35,000 years ago, hundreds of cave sanctuaries throughout southern France and Spain were lavishly adorned with beautiful and evocative paintings and engravings. Prehistoric artists carried out their work with remarkable stylistic continuity for over 20,000 years.

Since this world of buried art was rediscovered and explored in the last hundred years, these paintings have been admired for their rich, expressive depictions of animals and geometrical patterns.

But what do these paintings mean, and why were they created? How were these caves used?
At various times, scholars have interpreted cave paintings as art for art’s sake, hunting instructions, sympathetic magic, totemistic representations of clan identities, or symbolic vocabularies with complex systems of meaning.

In The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves, two prominent researchers argue that many European caves are linked to shamanic ritual practice and initiation. Renowned expert Jean Clottes, who served as principal researcher of the magnificent Chauvet cave of southern France, co-authored this book with South African cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, a specialist on the San culture of the Kalahari, which practices rock painting to this day.

At 120 pages, this book is essentially a long essay laying the basis for the authors’ shamanic hypothesis and attempting to ground it in biological terms.

While I (Barnaby Thieme) found their central thesis to be underdeveloped, the authors do an admirable job of surveying the available evidence, providing a valuable analysis of the known art.

The book is lavishly illustrated, though the pictures are rarely captioned with date information.

In the book’s introduction, the authors present a brief account of shamanism as a religious paradigm. They focus on the role of shamans as expert practitioners who carry out supernatural feats by entering trance states through various means, including the use of visionary plants, isolation, fasting, chanting, and dancing. In these altered states, they travel into the heavens above, or into a world beneath the earth, where they encounter spirits and animal powers who assist them in their work.

The authors argue that the visionary states experienced by the shaman conform to a three-stage model that characterizes trance or altered consciousness, including those evoked by ritual practice and those caused by psychoactive substances such as LSD.

The authors interpret the generality of their three-stage model as evidence for a shared biological process at work, one that is triggered in different ways but produces a similar experience.

Stage one of their model consists of the appearance of vivid, luminous, geometric patterns.

In stage two, the fuzzy and ambiguous geometric images begin to take on meaningful shapes and symbols, as the subject “recognizes” them as outlines of known shapes (e.g. horses, lions, etc.). The transition between stages two and three is often marked by an experience of passage, such as moving through a tunnel or flying. Stage three involves frank hallucinations of otherworldly symbols and beings.

This model is used throughout the book as a framework to explain the universality of characteristic shamanic visions, such as the magical flight, which may be interpreted as the transition between stages two and three. Many cave paintings can be interpreted as reflecting one or more of the stages. This may indicate the caves were ritual or initiatory centers that either depict or help elicit shamanic visions brought about through various means.

In my (Barnaby Thieme’s) opinion, the model is inadequate as an explanatory mechanism, and unable to do the heavy lifting Lewis-Williams and Clottes require of it. Its key terms are extremely vague—especially the central concept of “altered states”.

This term can refer to a vast array of states of awareness, including alertness, stupor, delirium, hallucination or bliss. Even if we restrict ourselves to visionary situations that involve both visual distortions and frank hallucinations, we still find a diverse set of experiences that is poorly characterized by this model.

The authors suggest at several points that the fitness of their altered-states model to the evidence may indicate that hallucinogenic plants were ritually used. To evaluate that hypothesis, we need to examine which hallucinogens fit their three-stage model, and ask if they were available in Europe in prehistoric times.

I submit that the classical tryptamine and phenethylamine hallucinogens, such as psilocybin or DMT and mescaline, are the best fit for their altered-states model.
Unfortunately, these are overwhelmingly found in the New World, and were probably unknown within Europe until sometime long after the caves had been painted.

What potentially hallucinogenic substances were most likely to be available in the late Stone Age in Europe?

I suggest the following candidates: carbon dioxide, cannabis, opium, Amanita muscaria, Syrian rue, and solenaceous plants, including datura and belladonna.

At the right dose levels, carbon dioxide intoxication does fit well with the three-stage theory, as we learn from the extensive research of Dr. Ladislas Meduna. The authors do not mention carbon dioxide intoxication in this book, but Clottes speaks of it in his Cave Art (Phaidon, 2010), where he speculates that some cave chapels may have caused carbon dioxide intoxication due to poor ventilation and this could have played a role in the paintings.

The problem with this theory is that high levels of carbon dioxide rapidly cause unconsciousness and death; indeed, the gas is frequently used to euthanize animals. Hallucinations generally occur at the threshold of unconsciousness, and it’s hard to imagine how any shaman could fall insensibly into a visionary stupor in the depths of a cavern thick with carbon dioxide, and then live to tell the tale.

Psilocybin-containing mushrooms may have been known in Europe in prehistoric times, but the evidence for this is extremely tenuous. Surprisingly, the authors don’t consider the famous rock art bee-masked being that may be covered with mushrooms, found on the Tassili plateau of southern Algeria. But the link between that image and psychoactive mushrooms is speculative, and Algeria is a long way from Dordogne.

Cave paintings usually depict easily recognizable animals in crisp, elegant outlines, either isolated or in small groups.
Modern visionary art inspired by hallucinations, on the other hand, frequently emphasizes figure-ground ambiguity with crowded visual fields saturated with suggestive images.

It would also be remarkable to find a long-lived visionary bestiary so limited in its repertoire. We frequently find horses, aurochs, and mammoths, but almost never snakes, insects, or birds. What kind of visionary artist doesn’t paint snakes?

I don’t believe the theory works much better with endogenous altered states. Trance states evoked by meditation, chant, isolation, prayer, or dance are no less diverse than those evoked by psychoactive substances. I don’t see the three-stages model as a good description for my (Barnaby Thieme’s) experience of any of them.

It’s entirely possible, or even likely, that psychoactive plants were part of the spiritual tool kit for Homo sapiens in the Paleolithic, but I don’t see clear evidence linking them to cave art.

I (Barnaby Thieme) am also a firm proponent of the shamanism model for understanding Paleolithic cave art, but on comparative grounds, such as those advanced by Mircea Eliade.

The structure of many cave sanctuaries strongly suggests an initiatory domain, easily recognizable from sacred spaces used by cultures today. The placement of key artwork in remote, difficult-to-access chambers implies a journey. The animal images are of an archaic character that fit extremely well with what we observe in contemporary shamanic cultures, such as among the Intuit, Tlingit, or Haida. And some of the composite “sorcerer” paintings are richly evocative of trance states or initiatory visions of a well-known type.

Purchase Book
The Bradshaw Foundation Book Review

]]><![CDATA[Eaton Fire Update!]]>Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/eaton-fire-updateThis is to inform my Throng-o-Followers, my Posse,
and my many Friends and Family…

All is well at the Art and Soul Productions’
Studio, Estate and Compound!
"I sustained some minor wind damage and some ash and smoke infiltration, an inconvenient evacuation, loss of power, and some really pissed-off felines!" -RQ

The Night of the Fire! View from my Studio.

But!...
The Devastation to Altadena
was complete!
"My Heart goes out to all of my Dear Friends
(at least 10+!)
who have lost their homes,
and to the entire Altadena community!"

"We are all 'Altadena-Strong'!
but the suffering and destruction will take a long time to heal and recover from.
Below are a few links to follow if you wish to help and/or stay informed:"

Altadena Fire Recovery Information & Resources
https://recovery.lacounty.gov/altadena/

Disaster Recovery Centers
https://recovery.lacounty.gov/recovery-centers/

Recovery Altadena
https://www.recoveryaltadena.com/

EATON FIRE RELIEF & RECOVERY FUND
https://pasadenacf.org/funds/eaton-canyon-fire-relief-recovery-fund/

2025 Eaton Fire Emergency Resources
https://www.altadenalibrary.org/news/emergency-resources

How You Can Help Today
https://www.redcross.org/local/california/los-angeles/ways-to-donate.html

Altadena Town Council grapples with Eaton fire recovery, rebuilding, in early forum on next steps
https://www.pasadenastarnews.com/2025/01/22/altadena-town-council-grapples-with-eaton-fire-recovery-rebuilding-in-early-forum-on-next-steps/

]]><![CDATA[Virgin Goddess, VHestia, Appears at Random Drive-By!]]>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/virgin-goddess-vhestia-appears-at-random-drive-by

'Vhestia, Goddess of the Hearth', 36" x 36" (0.914M x 0.914M), Mixed Media on Panel, by Roberto Quintana 2024

We interrupt this Mural Blog to report a Goddess sighting
at the Random ‘Slow Down’ drive-by gallery
in Highland Park, California.

The Apparition of the Goddess was first seen to manifest
at 200 N, Avenue 64, on January 1st, 2025.
The Miraculous Vision is expected to last throughout
the blessed month of January,
at which time a limited edition of
25 framed giclee’-prints on canvas,
of VHestal-Icons will be made available
to Devotees of the Hearth-Goddess,
for a small sacrifice.

The Original Fine-Art-Manifestation,
3' x 3’ (0.914M x 0.914M) / Mixed Media /
on Laminate Panel of the
Apparition of the Virgin of the Hearth
will be offered up to the
‘Most-Blessed Follower’
for a more substantial sacrifice.

Only Fungible-Tokens-of-the-Realm
will be blessed as legal tender for
the sacrifice and indulgences.

Random Custom Framing and the Slow Down Gallery
http://www.randomframing.com/index.html
Creating frames that protect, enhance, and increase the value of your art.

Random Custom Framing
is a small design oriented shop with over twenty years of experience in producing great frames.
They will listen to your needs and together they will make the right choices for your art.
At Random Custom Framing, They pay attention to detail and employ the latest framing techniques, suited to the media.
They use the finest, museum-quality materials to not only enhance the design but to protect and preserve your artwork.
They value the trust you place in them with your artwork and take great care in storing and handling the pieces in our shop.
They understand that display context is important.
They offer in home design and consultation to make sure that your newly framed artwork fits into the intended environment.

Bringing Random to You.
http://www.randomframing.com/consultation.html

We Offer In Home Design and Consultation.
With over 25 years of experience working with artists and collectors we can assist you with most all of your art needs. Our services include;
• Assessing the framing you currently have, updating the look and quality
• Working with conservators on pieces that have been damaged
• Design and advise framing solutions for unframed work
• Work with you to acquire new artwork
• Arrange, Hang and Install your artwork
Call or email for more information

Employing Our Skills as Craftsmen to Enhance Your Art
http://www.randomframing.com/woodshop.html

At Random Custom Framing, we appreciate the aesthetics of natural wood. We make our own frames, using maple, walnut, cherry, mahogany and basswood, as well as carrying vender-supplied molding in a variety of materials.
We’re good at problem solving, and we have the expertise and the equipment to customize molding profiles to suit your particular needs.
Our finishes provide your frame with its own personality.
We apply:
• Paints to match colors
• Stains to enrich the tone and bring out the wood grain
• Chemicals to age or change the color and enhance the clarity of the wood
• Aniline and plant dyes to color the wood evenly and deeply
• Waxes and rubs to add color and complexity to the final finish

http://www.randomframing.com/location.html

About Kate and Douglas
http://www.randomframing.com/about.html

Douglas Johnston and Kate Burroughs are the husband and wife team behind Random Custom Framing.
Kate spent some time with Aaron Brothers and Art Center College of Design.
Douglas spent his time in his workshop and the kitchen.
Together their skills and style, interests and inclinations make Random Framing the most awesome shop on the Eastside.

The Birthplace of VHestia

]]><![CDATA[Maxfield Parrish’s ‘Old King Cole’ murals]]>Mon, 02 Dec 2024 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/maxfield-parrishs-old-king-cole-mural“Here are some fun murals
by one of my favorite artists and muralists,
Maxfield Parrish!
I have received so much joy from studying Parrish’s work,
and I have learned a great deal from his paintings and illustrations, and his compositions!
I especially enjoy his light-heartedness
and the uplifting beauty of his color” -RQ

from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxfield_Parrish
Maxfield Parrish (July 25, 1870 – March 30, 1966)
was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak (1922) to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.[1]

Maxfield Parrish was approached in 1906 by hotelier John Jacob Astor
(who was later struck down in the sinking of the Titanic) to create a mural to go above the bar at his hotel, The Knickerbocker, on 42nd Street. Though Parrish was a non-drinking Quaker. He relented when Astor offered him $5,000 (the equivalent of $130,000 today) for the work, a small fortune at the time.
Parrish crafted a painting centered on the children’s rhyme about Old King Cole, with Astor painted atop the throne.
Legend has it that Parrish cheekily painted Astor’s King Cole while passing some royal gas, flanked by knowingly smirking attendants.
Though the mural’s time at The Knickerbocker was short lived, Parrish’s Old King Cole mural has been lovingly restored
and remains atop the bar at what is now New York City’s
St. Regis Hotel.

The text below is by
Norman Vanamee
from an article:
Walls of Fame.
from the St. Regis Magazine..

ISSUE 3 – 2014

New York’s murals, scattered in bars and restaurants, mansions and civic buildings, have become partof the city’s fabric. But Maxfield Parrish’s Old King Cole, which sits above the bar of The St. Regis New York, is one of its most beloved
and contains an extraordinary link to the man who commissioned it, John Jacob Astor IV.

– The Back Story –
On a chilly November night last year (2013), about 120 people squeezed into the King Cole Bar and Salon at
The St. Regis New York.
The star of the night was a brilliantly-colored painting, just back from a $100,000 restoration and rehung in its place of honor above the bar where it has presided over similarly
chic events for almost eight decades.
One hundred and ten years ago, John Jacob Astor IV asked a young artist named Maxfield Parrish if he would like to paint a mural to hang in the bar-room of The Knickerbocker Hotel, Astor’s glamorous new flagship on 42nd Street and Broadway in New York City. The fee was $5,000, extremely generous for the time, but it came with caveats.

First, the subject of the painting had to be Old King Cole, and second, while Parrish would have complete artistic freedom in how he depicted the nursery-rhyme character, he had to use Astor as the model for King Cole’s face.

“At first, Parrish wasn’t sure he wanted the job,” explains Laurence Cutler, chairman of the National Museum of American Illustration and an expert on the artist.
“He didn’t like being told he had to do anything.”
Parrish had other concerns as well:
he came from a conservative Quaker family that frowned on alcohol and wasn’t thrilled that his work would hang in a bar. Plus, he had already painted a version of King Cole for the Mask and Wig Club, a private theater club in Philadelphia.

King Cole mural for the Mask and Wig Club by Maxfield Parrish

But Parrish’s father, Stephen Parrish
(1846 – 1938)
an established artist with connections in Philadelphia and
New York society, encouraged him to reconsider.
“Basically, he explained how unadvisable it would be for somebody just starting their career to say no
to somebody like Astor.”

Parrish had recently moved from Philadelphia to Plainfield, New Hampshire, where he and his wife, Lydia, were expanding a small estate they had built
called The Oaks, which they would live in for the rest of their lives. He realized that the fee, the equivalent of $130,000 today, would set them up well and accepted the commission. He began work on Old King Cole in a studio that was
too small to hold the whole mural, so he painted
the three 8 feet x 10 feet panels one at a time.
He placed the king in the center,
flanked by jesters and guards.

It was a more dramatic, less cartoon-like depiction than his first version of Cole for the Mask and Wig Club and,
when it was installed at the hotel in 1906,
it instantly became part of the fabric of a city
and a culture hurtling toward the excitement
and excesses of the Roaring Twenties.
“The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial, colorful Old King Cole was well crowded”
wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise.

Parrish picked a good time to accept a mural commission.
At the turn of the century, wealthy industrialists like Astor
were building mansions as quickly as they could
and hiring artists to adorn the walls.
“It was the golden age of American mural painting,” says Glenn Palmer-Smith, a painter
and author of Murals of New York City.

Established artists were able to command huge fees,
but the appeal was more than just financial.
The country had recently glimpsed the nuance and complexity of mural painting at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago,
which featured frescos and murals by some of the US and Europe’s most prominent painters.
American architects and artists were eager to embrace the medium.

Not long after the fair,
ten of the country’s best-known illustrators and painters, including Henry Siddons Mowbray and Robert Lewis Reid, collaborated on a mural depicting the history of law for the lobby of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division building on Madison Avenue, which opened in 1900. “Can you imagine ten top artists collaborating on anything today?” says Palmer-Smith.

Parrish went on to paint eight additional murals over the course of his long and influential career,
including The Pied Piper in 1909 for the bar at
the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

But Old King Cole is arguably his most famous. It has all the hallmarks of his later illustrations and prints, including bold, luminous colors, classical architectural forms,
and an impish sense of humor.
“It launched his career,” says Laurence Cutler. “Immediately afterwards he received a commission to illustrate a cover for Harper’s Magazine, and from then on he worked non-stop for the next 40 years.”

When the Knickerbocker closed in 1920, Old King Cole went into storage, then briefly hung in a museum in Chicago,
and was finally installed at The St. Regis, an Astor-owned hotel, in 1932. There, at the heart of Millionaires’ Alley,
as 55th Street was called at the time,
it made the transition from artwork to icon.

Longevity alone might explain the King Cole Bar’s popularity – New York City has been torn down and rebuilt so many times that its residents develop emotional attachments to places and things that survive the constant reinvention. But it is Parrish’s painting that patrons love and return to see over and over again.

“Parrish had a bet with his friends that he could paint absolutely anything,” said Palmer-Smith. “Old King Cole proved it.”

“Here’s another one of my favorite books from my library!” -RQ
(This is my second version. The first one fell apart and got paint all over it!)

Maxfield Parrish
Hardcover – Illustrated,
January 6, 1997
by Coy Ludwig

A compendium of the life and work of Maxfield Parrish,
it is an essential part of a Parrish library. For the collector,
the publisher has included a value guide to some of the products that bear Parrish images.
Examples of Parrish's most famous book illustrations are shown, including selections from Mother Goose in Prose and the Arabian Nights. Also included are his famous magazine covers-from Life, Collier's, Harper's Weekly, etc., as well as all the landscapes that he painted for Brown and Bigelow, who reproduced them as calendars every year from 1936 to 1963.
One of the highlights of the book is the chapter on Parrish's technique, examining in depth his materials, favorite methods, and unique way of painting. In addition, there is a lengthy excerpt from an unpublished manuscript
by Maxfield Parrish, Jr., explaining step-by-step his father's glazing technique and use of photography in his work.
This definitive study also contains numerous revealing excerpts from Parrish's unpublished correspondence with family, friends, and clients.

]]><![CDATA[Genoski, Atlas, and Saturno]]>Mon, 04 Nov 2024 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/genoski-atlas-and-saturnoMurals On The Street:
Resurrection!!!
And then... once in a while, the Ghost will get restored or repainted or reincarnated
or re-born and resurrected!!!

Here’s what happened when
Genoski and Atlas
from my previous post:
http://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/murals-on-the-street-ghosts-genoski-and-atlas
collaborated with
Saturno!
to ReCreate a mural
to replace their last one.

Beyond Colors and Shapes.
A Fusion of Past, Present, and Consciousness.
"My latest project has taken my creativity to new heights, painting a mural of enormous dimensions on the main facade of The Regional Library of Blanes, the Catalan town in Spain, where I grew and flourished as an artist." says Saturno

"This project represents a return to my roots, an opportunity to merge my passion for art with the place that saw me grow.
The artwork has sparked a sense of awe and excitement among locals, unaccustomed to witnessing this type of artistic expression. The creation process has been a spectacle that attracted both the curious and art enthusiasts alike."

"This mural has become a gathering point, a place where the community comes together to admire, discuss, and share their appreciation for art. The interaction with the local audience has profoundly enriched my experience as an artist, witnessing people immerse themselves in the visual narrative I've created, establishing an emotional connection with my work.
More than just an expression of my artistic vision, the mural is also a tribute to the community that witnessed my growth. It's an honor to contribute to Blanes' cultural landscape in this way, reminding everyone of my roots and elevating my art to new heights." -Saturno!

]]><![CDATA[2 (Two!) Individual Artist Grants Now Open from DCA!]]>Mon, 07 Oct 2024 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/2-two-individual-artist-grants-now-open-from-dcaWe Interrupt this exciting series of blog-posts on ‘Ghosts’
and ‘Resurrections’ for a timely announcement just in from
the City of the Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs!

Feel Free to share these with your creative friends! -RQ

1). 2024 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Independent
Master Artist Projects (IMAP) Grant Program

The COLA-IMAP Grant Program allows accomplished artists to create a new “mid-career” solo work with the freedom to re-focus on themselves and their core impulses. The COLA-IMAP grant category honors a spectrum of the City’s avant-garde artists who:
   •   Are dedicated to an ongoing body of excellent work.
   •   Represent a relevant progression through their pieces or series over the past 15 years (or 8 years for a dancer/choreographer).
   •   Exemplify a generation of core ideas in their field.
   •   Are respected by their peers and are role models for other artists because of their distinguished record.
Approximately 6-12 COLA-IMAP grant-contracts will be offered for designers/visual artists (including architects, graphic designers, and product designers including fashion designers), literary artists (poets or fiction writers) and performing artists (including choreographers who wish to make and perform individual dance works, musicians who wish to compose and perform individual music works, and multi-disciplinary theater artists who wish to invent and perform solo works).

The Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA) will organize an online and/or printed catalog to promote the entire set of COLA-IMAP grantees as “creative treasures” and document/market the group as one cross-section of the exciting Los Angeles art scene. DCA and community partners will also attempt to showcase a curated selection of each master-artist’s new work in either a gallery exhibition or performing arts showcase

Amount: $10,000

- AND -

2). Neighborhood Engagement Artist Residency and
Creative Optimism-Uplifting Promises Grants

Neighborhood Engagement Artist Residency (NEAR) grants support freelance teaching artists, social-activation artists, and social practice artists in community-based, participatory projects in self-selected non-arts venues within the City of Los Angeles. Competitive NEAR projects will gather, connect, and inspire participants and audiences who have little exposure to the proposed type of cultural opportunity. NEAR projects should be structured as eleven or more free or low-cost sessions culminating in one or more presentations that are open and promoted to the general public (proposing at least eleven workshops is the ideal duration for community engagement; however, applicants are encouraged to propose projects that can be scaled back to five workshops with one public presentation, as DCA staff will notify NEAR applicants next May about whether the City budget is able to provide NEAR grantees with either a $12,000 or a reduced $6,000 service contract)

Creative Optimism–Uplifting Promises (CO-UP) grants support collaborations between a local nonprofit social justice organization and a creative teaching artist (a freelance artist or an artist already working within a non-profit arts organization in the same community as the social justice organization). In some cases, a third partner, acting as a host site for the project may also be named. Eligible collaborative projects should be: 1) new or launched within the past four years, 2) free or low-cost for participants, and 3) culminate in at least one free public presentation that will be accessible to the general community. CO-UP residences should be structured as eleven sessions ending in one public presentation. CO-UP residencies are funded at $15,000 with $12,000 allocated for artist payment and $3,000 allocated for the social justice organization’s administrative expenses (meritorious CO-UP proposals that cannot be fully funded at $15,000, may be converted to a NEAR project consisting of five workshops and one culminating event with a budget of $6,000 — DCA staff will notify CO-UP applicants next May about whether the City budget able to provide grantees with either a $15,000 or a reduced $6,000 service contract)

Depending upon its budget for FY25-26, DCA aims to support approximately 15-22 residences at either $6,000 or $12,000 (ideally one for each of the city’s 15 Council districts) and an additional 10-15 CO-UP residencies at $15,000 each.

Application deadline for both grants is
October 25, 2024, at 11:59 p.m.!

Department of Cultural Affairs
City of Los Angeles
201 North Figueroa Street, Suite 1400
Los Angeles, CA 90012 US

]]><![CDATA[Murals On The Street: Ghosts!! / ‘Genoski’ and ‘Atlas’]]>Mon, 02 Sep 2024 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/murals-on-the-street-ghosts-genoski-and-atlasSometimes I come across some really nice mural out there that I want to share with you…
and many times I will document them...
only to have them Painted Out!
Or Tagged over!! Or Defaced!!!
or Destroyed by negligence,
or by time and the weather,
Or Re-Painted!
They have been Ghosted!!
Here is one now!

This one is right around the corner from my home and studio!
(The mural went away and was replaced by another one.)

As far as I can tell, this is a collaboration
between two artists!
Genoski and Atlasgraffiti

Photo by James aka Urbanmuralhunter. https://www.flickr.com/photos/atelier_tee

‘Woman and Rose’
at 3404 Union Pacific Avenue in the Boyle Heights,
Los Angeles, California.
Mural by:
Gino Genoski Gaspara aka @genoski
Gino is a resident artist at Klockwork Tattoo Club.
He is a very talented Tattoo Artist and is very open to tattooing different styles and isn't afraid of large scale graffiti projects.

- and -

Atlasgraffiti aka @atlasgraffiti
Rick Ordonez,
also known as Atlas and known colloquially as
the "kitty cat tagger," is an
American graphic designer and graffiti artist
from Alhambra, California.[1]

In early 2010, Atlas transitioned from creating large ornate graphics to drawing stylized cats, particularly on or near
Pasadena Freeways.
In an article for LA Weekly, Ordonez was described as
a “cat-lover" who kept cats as pets.

Atlas: Los Angeles Graffiti Documentary (2005)

Later that year, Atlas got his own show entitled "Rick Ordonez: Kitty Litter" at Mid-City Arts in November 2010.
Gallery manager Medvin “Med” Sobio stated "I saw them and thought it was something completely different. Everybody’s out there doing big, bad graffiti things [to show that] 'I’m a big, bad guy,’ and here he is, doing cats." Ordonez remained anonymous for the show.

Here is a good interview with Atlas about his career as a Vet, VFW, Graffiti Artist and his transition into Fine Art.

THE CORNERSTORE
Atlas | Transitioning from graffiti to fine art.

And a documentary about his platoon from:

THE WOUNDED PLATOON

]]><![CDATA[Update to: 21 Murals for Uvalde, Texas]]>Fri, 30 Aug 2024 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/update-to-21-murals-for-uvalde-texas! BRAVO !

"I just received word that a featured artist
from this blog, helped to sponsor
the 'Healing Uvalde' Mural Project!
by selling two (2!) of his paintings!!
and contributing the proceeds
for the painting of the murals project!!"

!BRAVO!
!! Joe Bravo !!

“Roberto, Attached are the two paintings that were purchased by Jaime Casillas of Oxnard.
The proceeds went towards funding the mural project
in Uvalde to paint portraits of all the students who were killed.
Feel free to post on your blog.
Saludos," -Joe Bravo

Joe was featured here
(4-1-2024)
for his “Water is Life” mural,
in Highland Park.
http://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/joe-bravo-water-is-life-mural

“Nice Job, Joe!
Bravo!!” -RQ

]]><![CDATA[21 Murals for Uvalde, Texas]]>Mon, 05 Aug 2024 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/21-murals-for-uvalde-texas“Art Saves Lives!”

“Well, sadly, not in this case…
But these murals not only serve as a remembrance of the many innocent victims of the Robb Elementary School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas,
but they give witness to the people and places impacted by gun violence all across the United States.
I was going to post this in a series of blogs and stretch this important topic out over several months.
After all, 21 murals and nearly 27 artists
is a lot to digest all at once!
However...
the impact of 21 senselessly lost lives is too horrible
to be diluted over several posts.
They were all taken in 77 minutes!
So here they are, all together!

I am dedicating this post to all of our
Legislators and Representatives,
and especially to our
’Supreme’ Court Justices
and their recent cowardly and shameful ruling
on 'bump'-stock gun legislation.”
-Roberto Quintana

In Remembrance of
the Robb Elementary School
Shooting Victims

“I know that art heals, that art can calm,
that art can point us in a positive direction.” -Abel Ortiz

The idea for the 21 portrait murals came from Uvalde resident Abel Ortiz, an artist, art professor at Southwest Texas Junior College, and founder of Art Lab, a local art space.

“I thought it was going to be one mural,”…
“No, you know what? I’m thinking twenty-one murals!
It needs to be monumental!
It needs to be across town,
and not just in one place.
And so, the idea was born.” -Abel Ortiz

At the same time, future collaborators,
psychologist and art collector Dr. George Meza
and Monica Maldonado, founder of MAS Cultura,
were thinking about how art could benefit the community.

Before the portrait murals, Maldonado had worked with artists to complete three “Uvalde Strong” murals.
Soon after, Maldonado and Ortiz were connected and Maldonado joined as Project Manager.
Dr. Meza and Abel were already in contact and the three joined forces on the mural effort.
Dr. Meza spearheaded their fundraising efforts to raise more than $30,000 through his Facebook group "Collectors of Chicano/Latinx Art and Allies."
Together the trio made the idea of 21 portrait murals a reality and actualized the Healing Uvalde Mural project.

“…I kind of knew, you know, we needed to get people on their feet on the ground doing something very concrete and specific and that was going to be the murals, and that’s why I called them the ‘healing murals’ because with trauma there are many pathways to healing.” -Dr. George Meza

Mural Project Remembers Uvalde’s Lost Lives
by Tiffany Hearsey May 23, 2024

UVALDE, Texas — Heavy rains blanketed the small town of Uvalde, Texas, the night of the horrific mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Uvalde resident Abel Ortiz recalled of the downpour, “it’s almost like the heavens opened up and all the tears came down.” On the morning of May 24, 2022, a gunman entered the school, killing 19 children and two teachers and injuring 17 others. Ortiz, an artist, and art professor at Southwest Texas Junior College, wanted to do something to help the families and community. Drawing on his artistic background, he spearheaded the Healing Uvalde Mural Project, a series of portraits of the victims displayed across buildings in downtown Uvalde. The murals, he explained, “were intended to provide comfort for the families,” and offer “a sense of calm, a sense of reflection.” They not only serve as a remembrance of the victims, but bear witness to the people and places impacted by gun violence in Uvalde and across the United States. Ortiz surmised, “the community can respond to the mural, to the image, reflect, contemplate, and think about possible changes. The lives of the children and teachers honored in the Healing Uvalde Mural Project were neither the first casualties of gun violence nor the last. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), gun violence is the leading cause of death among children and teens. Ortiz said, “If there’s any art that I wish didn’t exist, [it] is this art, because that means the kids would be alive.”

Ortiz partnered with Monica Maldonado, founder of Austin-based nonprofit MAS Cultura, who acted as program manager. She brought 50 Texan artists to Uvalde in the months following the shooting to paint the 21 murals, all volunteering their time and services, free of charge. The families of the victims gave their permission for the project, and many participated in the creation of the murals of their loved ones. Each image tells a story about one life — the person’s hobbies, hopes, and dreams, and the family and friends they loved and who loved them — through re-creations of the children’s drawings, ranging from rainbows and cartoon characters to sea creatures and puppies, signifying dreams of becoming a marine biologist or veterinarian, to lyrics of favorite songs, among other tributes.

Tess Marie Mata
age: 10
Mural by Anat Ronen

“In the bracelet, there was a little butterfly charm that didn’t really register as such in the original reference. While I was painting, I asked Veronica if there’s something else that might be more important, more meaningful, that I could replace it with. She said, yes, actually there’s this heart charm her grandmother gifted her and let’s see if you can integrate that...And the next day I put it in...It's the little things that mean a lot at the end.” -Anat Ronen

Xavier James Lopez
age:10
Mural by Amado Castillo III

“When Felicia (Xavier’s mom) sent me pictures, I noticed that he was always wearing a shirt of the bear, so I asked the mom about the bear t-shirts. And she said, “Oh, man, they were his favorite... I would buy them at DD’s Discount fashion store and he would wear those until they were faded." -Monica Maldonado

Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez age: 10
Mural by Joey “WiseOne” Martinez

“Annabell was an honor roll student and she took a lot of pride in that. She took school seriously, it was an important part of her life that defined who she was. She loved animals and would rescue them. Her hopes and dreams were to become a veterinarian.” -Monica Maldonado

“You can feel the hurt in that community,” artist Joey Martinez reflected when he first came to Uvalde to paint Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez’s mural. “I think it was really important to be there for everybody,” he said. With guidance from Annabell’s family, Martinez included a Uvalde Coyotes logo and a sketch of an A+, a nod to her honor roll credentials — aspects of the 10-year-old’s personality in which loved ones and visitors alike can share. The mural also contains a cell phone with the text “I love you,” which she and her best friend, 10-year-old Xavier James Lopez, would send to each other each night before bedtime. Xavier was also killed in the shooting and his mural sits right next to Annabell’s, their close bond solidified in art. Their union was also honored in death, when the two families buried the children next to each other.

Makenna Lee Elrod
age: 10
Mural by Silvia "Silvy" Ochoa and
Courtney Jimenez / Courtney Arte

“Murals,” artist Silvia “Silvy” Ochoa said, “are beautiful tools to communicate.” She added, “They can make you feel, can help you remember.” Ochoa’s painting of 10-year-old Makenna Lee Elrod is an array of positive memories and symbolic imagery that aims to heal the traumatic memories surrounding her death. “Trauma” comes from the Greek word meaning “piercing” or “wounding.” Through art, a mending of the wounds can occur. Ochoa’s mural depicts Makenna in the bucolic farm where she grew up, surrounded by three butterflies that represent her and her parents, and four trees that symbolize her and her siblings. But it’s the rainbow adorning her shirt that stands out. Makenna’s parents gave Ochoa a photo of their daughter holding a rock with a rainbow she had painted on its surface. Ochoa wanted to include the rainbow on the mural and place it on her chest, and invited each member of Makenna’s family to paint the rainbow. After the portrait was completed, the family shared with Ochoa that Makenna had been shot in the chest. “That’s where she lost her life,” Ochoa told me through tears. “Her family gave her life on the mural in the same place.”

Layla Marie Salazar
age: 11
Mural by Alvaro Deko Zermeño

Alvaro Deko Zermeño’s Artist Statement:
There are no words to describe the level of pain that Uvalde has gone through so being able to use art to try and bring even the smallest bit of comfort to the families, to the community was worth every minute in the sun. It was an honor to meet the Salazar family and hear about Layla.
Layla was energetic and quick to entertain her family and friends. She loved track and because of her drive and focus, she was one of the fastest in her class.
The mural took 5 days to complete and there were times that it was difficult to look at her photo, knowing that the mural would barely scratch the surface of who she was.
On Día de los Muertos, we find ourselves at a point where grief and celebration meet. I hope that the families and the city of Uvalde know that we stand beside them and that their children will never be forgotten.

Jose Manuel Flores Jr.
age: 10
Mural by Albert “Tino” Ortega

“Jose had a big heart and lots of love for the game of baseball. I did the stars coming out from his chest so the stars that are on each side of him, they pretty much call us back to where his heart is, just to signify his love for the game.” -Tino Ortega

Eliahna Cruz Torres
age: 10
Mural by Filiberto Mendieta
Assisted by Nikki Diaz

“It was her first year playing softball.
She was a natural athlete and didn’t even know it...Once she started playing, she became obsessed with the sport and practiced every day. The day of the tragedy Eliahna would’ve found out that she made the All-Star team... Also, there is a cat at the bottom...the cat’s name is Dexter and when Eliahna passed away, he didn’t leave her room for two weeks, he waited for her.” -Monica Maldonado

Uziyah Sergio Garcia
age: 10
Mural by Richard Samuel

Richard Samuel’s Artist Statement:
My Brother
I'm not even sure where to start. The emotion and experience that comes with being a part of a project like Healing Uvalde is life-changing. It’s an opportunity I dropped everything for. I was perfectly matched up to paint Uziyah. A beautiful soul whom I had so much in common with. I learned we both love spiderman, and gaming, are very athletic, love sports, and express unwavering loyalty and love to our loved ones. It was almost as if we were one in a parallel universe. Meeting Uziyah's family, hearing their beautiful memories, and also reconnections through dreams provided me with all the inspiration possible to complete the mural. The amount of appreciation the town of Uvalde had for this project is mind-blowing. Literally, every 5 minutes painting, another car passed by thanking us, asking if we needed water or food. Some cried, some smiled, and some shared beautiful stories. By the time I was ready to leave Uvalde, I realized that this is the best thing I've ever done in my life. I hope my little brothers in heaven welcomed him with open arms because he's one with us. Gone but never forgotten.

Jayce Carmelo Luevanos
age: 10
Mural by Ruben Esquivel

Ruben Esquivel’s Artist Statement:
Jayce Luevanos loved dinosaurs and ninjas. His favorite colors were blue and green and he loved making coffee for his family in the mornings. Jayce would write love letters for his loved ones and sign them with “I love you!”
It was important to me that his family be part of the process and felt included in the mural. I reached out and asked to be connected directly with the family. We had a few phone calls and talked about things that Jayce loved, his family shared some memories and together we began conceptualizing the design. The month leading up to my arrival in Uvalde was nerve-racking. When the time came, I was nervous to finally meet Jayce’s family but they greeted me with open arms and with no hesitation and treated me as one of their own. We were family. His siblings were eager to assist me and helped me paint parts of the mural; After all, this piece is as much theirs as it is mine.
The outpouring support from Jayce’s family and the entire community was humbling and unlike anything I have ever experienced. Jayce’s family would spend every evening and sometimes into the early hours of the morning with me, watching me paint as I poured my heart and soul into his mural. I wanted to create a space where Jayce’s friends, family and even strangers could come to spend time with him, see him, talk to him, and feel his presence. A place for healing. I wanted his family to be able to come see that sweet sparkle in his eye whenever they needed to.

Jacklyn “Jackie” Jaylen Cazares age: 9
Mural by Kimie Flores

“Javier [Jackie’s father] really wanted the Eiffel Tower.
... At that point, we didn’t even have the Eiffel Tower on the mural and originally didn’t understand the importance of it. Then one day I was invited to the family’s home and when Javier opened the door to her bedroom all I could see was the Eiffel Tower everywhere. She had the Eiffel Tower on her bedspread, Eiffel Tower paintings, and an Eiffel Tower jewelry holder. Her dream was to go to Paris to the Eiffel Tower. ... I called Kimie and said we have to add the Eiffel Tower to the mural” -Monica Maldonado

Maranda Gail Mathis
age: 11
Mural By Luis Angulo

Luis Angulo’s Artist Statement:
“Maranda is described as a shy kid who liked being in nature, picking-up river rocks and feathers. I received a picture of Miranda standing in a creek facing the camera. Her arms are outstretched as she shows the camera the river rocks she found. I took this image and added more elements to it, trying to imagine a place that Maranda would have liked to explore. In her hands instead of river rocks, she has an Amethyst crystal, her mom's birthstone. In the water are eleven Koi fish, the same age Maranda was at the time of her passing.”

Alexandria “Lexi” Aniyah Rubio age: 10
Mural by Ruben Esquivel
and Carmen Rangel

Artist Statement:
We wanted to portray the most authentic Lexi, so we reached out to those that know her best, her family. We learned that Lexi loved sunflowers and butterflies, she was a proud Libra and force to be reckoned with. Like her mother, she dreamt of attending St. Mary’s University and of one day becoming a lawyer. She played basketball and softball and had a fondness for math. Lexi and her five siblings were like peas in a pod. All of this is illustrated in Lexis larger than life mural in Uvalde, Texas.

Alithia Haven Ramirez
age: 10
Mural by Juan Velásquez
Assisted by Sarah Ayala

Juan Velázquez’s Artist Statement:
Me and @sarahrayala [Sarah Ayala] got to meet Alithia Ramirez's dad and for me it was the most emotional part of the trip, I didn’t know what to say so I just told him “I’m so sorry” He liked the mural and specially that one of the characters we painted on her shirt was from a Father’s Day card she made for him. He said she wanted to be an artist and now her art (the characters on her shirt) are in a mural.

Eliahna “Ellie” Amyah Garcia age: 9
Mural by Abel Ortiz

"Because she won the basketball championship the Saturday before, so I decided to make it into a sports card design and at the bottom, it says “all-star”...She does have the number 21 on her jersey. That was her actual number, twenty-one, that was her mom’s birthday and that’s why she chose that number when she was in the basketball team." -Abel Ortiz

Rojelio Fernandez Torres
age: 10
Mural by Floyd Mendoza
and Jesse de Leon

Floyd Mendoza’s Artist Statement:
I had only known Jesse de Leon for about a week when we found ourselves in front of a blank wall in Uvalde. Our plan was for Jesse to cover the characters, while I tackled the portrait. To my surprise, Rogelio’s family was so hospitable. My first memory I have of Rogelio’s mother, Evadulia and her sisters was them unloading a cooler of water for us. However, it wasn't until I wrapped up Rogelio’s facial features that I began to see the family open up. In which Evadulia stated “it's like he's standing in front of me.” As we made progress on the wall, it was as though this family was healing before our very eyes. They went from being quiet that morning, to laughing and playing music that same night. I was amazed at how this family was so united and close throughout this project. I’m super honored to have been able to contribute to this project.

Jesse de Leon’s Artist Statement:
To have the privilege to use my gift and passion for this Uvalde project, was humbling. To create this memorial for this angel Rojelio Torres, was life changing. Speaking to his aunt Precious she gave me insight on who he was and what the family envisioned. She spoke of his love for Pokemon cards and playing football with his cousins. He was the life of the party and was always the first on the dance floor! He was a gifted child who was so giving and loved his friends and family.

Maite Yuleana Rodriguez
age: 10
Mural by Ana Hernandez

“We decided to give the mural an oceanic theme since Maite wanted to be a marine biologist. Maite Yuleana Rodriguez was smart, compassionate, loved science, animals, the color green, Attack on Titan and had just taught herself to sew.” -Ana Hernandez

Amerie Jo Garza
age: 10
Mural by Cristina Noriega

"My own daughter Paloma was born only 4 days before Amerie and is also a girl scout, an artist, and a sweet girl who is a friend to everyone. The similarities gutted me in a way that words cannot explain. Painting Amerie and bringing some healing to her family also helped heal my own grief over the unfathomable loss." -Cristina Noriega

Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo
age: 10
Mural by Brittany “Britt” Johnson

Britt Johnson’s Artist Statement:
The mural for Nevaeh Bravo is a collaboration between me (Britt Johnson), Efren “ER” Rebugio, and Nevaeh. One of the first things the family shared with us was Nevaeh's kindred love of painting and drawing. We felt connected to Nevaeh in this way. They provided images of her drawings which included a heart, two birds, a rose, and a handwritten note that reads “I love you.” We knew how important Nevaeh’s drawings were to the family, so we recreated them to be prominent in the background. We also incorporated some of her favorite things like the colors purple and pink, butterflies, softball, and the TikTok symbol. To complement the symbol, there is a comment box that can be used by Nevaeh’s family to write messages to her. In the mural a third bird was added that symbolizes Nevaeh’s two brothers and one sister. The two roses symbolize Mom and Dad. Nevaeh’s portrait is nestled in between both elements to signify the embracement of her family. Curls cascade over her shoulder to show the way she loved to wear her hair. It was an honor to paint for the Bravo family. We are grateful for their kindness and patience throughout the process, and we enjoyed their company while we painted, especially hanging with our dog Charlie. They are always in our thoughts and prayers.

Jalilah Nicole Silguero
age: 10
Mural by Albert “Tino” Ortega

Albert “Tino” Ortega’s Artist Statement:
The subject matter of Jailah Nicole Silguero mural was selected in part for the similarities with my own daughter.
The process of creating the portrait was done in collaboration with Jailah’s family to celebrate her likes and interests.
The halo and glowing light represent a sense of passing and purity. Her family was able to partake in the creation of the mural in hopes to bring a feeling of inclusion in the memorial of their daughter and sister.

Irma Linda and Joe Garcia
Mural by Cease Martinez

Cease Martinez’s Artist Statement:
When researching to do this mural I discovered that Irma LOVED being a teacher and loved her students. I learned that she was a great mother and had been with her high school sweetheart, Joe, coming up on 25 years. Speaking to family and friends, I found out they were practically inseparable. Sadly, this was true even in death. This was the inspiration for painting them in a niche box, often used for devotion or alters. I named it "Amor Eternal" or eternal love. We were blessed to have several of Irma and Joe's friends and family stop by during the process, providing stories of their love.

I wanted to include a quote or scripture on part of the wall space. Their daughter gracefully provided a lyric from one of their favorite songs bringing it all together.

Eva Mireles
Mural by Sandra Gonzalez

Sandra Gonzalez’s Artist Statement:
As a teacher and a muralist, it was important for me to honor the life of a teacher who was passionate about education and died as a hero.

“On the morning of July 23rd, a week after Eva’s mural was painted, I drove up to the mural location and noticed two ladies sitting across from Eva’s mural. I assumed that they were volunteers and approached them. It turned out it was Eva’s best friends, Katie and Lilly. They looked at me and said, “we’re having coffee with Eva”. They shared stories, a particular one about Eva doing Karaoke to Diamonds by Rihanna.” -Monica Maldonado

These murals, as remembrances, also tell the story
of lives violently cut short.
At a memorial to the victims in downtown Uvalde,
a resident expressed her opposition to them.
They’re painful to look at, she explained.
“The families shouldn’t see their kids like that …
they should have seen them grow up.”

The 21 Healing Murals tower over Uvalde’s landscape, greeting all who gaze upon them
with warmth and benevolence.
They aim to provide healing for the families and community through remembrance of the lives taken.
As they honor the victims, they also bear witness to the gun violence that brought about the project,
violence that, two years after the shooting, has continued across the nation.
Ortiz said, “As you walk from one mural to the next,
it’s almost like you’re stitching a wound,”
but, he added,
“Unfortunately, that wound reopens
every time there’s a new shooting.”

One of the country’s deadliest mass shootings,
the Robb Elementary shooting was also one of the greatest law enforcement response failures.
While an 18-year-old former student armed with
an AR-15-style assault rifle stalked the halls and classrooms for 77 minutes, nearly 400 law enforcement officers,
including US Border Patrol agents and state and local police, remained outside the school, even as children called 911 from their classrooms for help.
A Department of Justice report described the response as “cascading failures.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland said,
“lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” if law enforcement agencies had followed generally accepted practices and gone immediately into the school
to apprehend the shooter.
As of May 22, families of the students and teachers killed or injured at the school settled a lawsuit with the city of Uvalde for $2 million and are suing
92 officers with the school district,
individual employees,
and
the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Related:
Through Art, Texans Memorialize Victims of Uvalde Shooting June 7, 2022

Google Doodle Shares Artwork by 10-Year-Old Uvalde Shooting Victim July 18, 2022

Abstractions That Epitomize the US’s Inherent Violence
July 24, 2023

Tiffany Hearsey
Tiffany Hearsey is a freelance journalist.
She covers criminal justice and the occasional horror flick. Visit her website at tiffanyhearsey.com.

More by Tiffany Hearsey https://hyperallergic.com/author/tiffany-hearsey/

The murals and artists can all be found
here.

]]><![CDATA[Joerael / One Down Dog Mural]]>Mon, 01 Jul 2024 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.artandsoulproductions.com/blog/joerael-one-down-dog-mural!Murals On The Street!
Often I come across some really nice mural
or hand painted sign out there
that I want to share with you!
Here’s another One…
( ...Down Dog that is!)

One Down Dog Mural
- By -

J o e r a e l

"Working with Joerael is a magical, creative and collaborative experience. He has consistently exceeded anything I could have ever dreamed up. Each time I've expanded my business Joerael has come to make it more beautiful, and each time I am blown away by his creations. His work is intentional and inspiring and it breathes life into otherwise bland spaces. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Joerael on many occasions and look forward to our next collaboration...hopefully in the near future!"
-Jessica Rosen, Founder One Down Dog

Yoga + Fitness in Eagle Rock
At the heart of Eagle Rock is our second studio, nestled between and convenient to Glendale, Glassell Park, Highland Park and Pasadena, the middle child that we love oh-so-much. Our signature ODD graffiti marks the spot and you’ll find a friendly staff member ready to greet you at the end of a long hallway. If a place could make an expression, our Eagle Rock studio would constantly smile.

MORE
- j o e r a e l -
MURALS
Selected murals throughout the US.

"imprinting dimensional states of being"
WASHINGTON,DC 2018

Joerael's epic mural at The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. This mural spans the length of 2,052 square feet and artistically shares the history of the local Piscataway Tribe.
The Piscataway are 'the people where the rivers bend' and call the DC Bay Area their homeland.

This work was created in collaboration with members of the Piscataway Tribe. The mural is in honor of the Piscataway people whose ancestral land is currently the United States capital. This work touches upon the complexities and histories of indigenous activism in the DC bay area. Joerael took his time and made sure to hold himself accountable to in-depth research and interviews with the tribe Sebi and Gabrielle Tayac of the Piscataway tribe. Joerael developed relations and learned about the tribe's roots in activism. Joerael also included in each design the diversity of the tribe and the resilience of survival.

A deep bow of gratitude for Piscataway Tribal members
Sebi Tayac and Gabrielle Tayac.
Their contributions, time, and stories supported manifesting the mural into reality.

Sky Railway
SANTA FE,NM 2020-2021

Dragon and Wolf murals for Sky Railway in Santa Fe.
photos by Micha Gallegos.

CONTACT
Joerael is available for your next project.

“My work is survival, love, history, and soul and my guiding intentions are to use my art to transform and activate spaces and energy – to be part of the mosaic of transformation – a mosaic of folks standing up for justice and inclusiveness in their way and through their gifts.”
explains Joerael...
“I remember clearly as a boy in San Angelo, Texas, watching on television as the Berlin wall came down, and being captured by the vibrancy and ephemerality of the graffiti, and sensing the transformative effect art can have on a moment in time and the people experiencing it. And that single experience has informed how I approach my role as an artist.”
- JOERAEL NUMINA

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Witness History Being Made: Judy Baca at LACMA

New mural of LA Dodger Shohei Ohtani reminds Little Tokyo why they bleed blue

The Fernando Valenzuela mural is officially unveiled in Boyle Heights.

Art in the Streets

Street Writers:​A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti.

“The Shamans of Prehistory” Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams

One Down Dog Mural- By -​J o e r a e l

Witness History Being Made:
Judy Baca at LACMA

Street Writers:
A Guided Tour of Chicano Graffiti.

“The Shamans of Prehistory”
Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves
by Jean Clottes & David Lewis-Williams

One Down Dog Mural
- By -

J o e r a e l