MURAL TOURS 1996

by Robin Dunitz
MCLA Tour Director


Eliseo Silva, Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy), mural located at 1660 Beverly Boulevard, 1995. Photo © Robin Dunitz.

By now every mural aficionado in Southern California should have received a 1996 Mural Tour Schedule. This year's tours are going to be HOT!

Every MCLA tour this year is a new one. We start the year with one of L.A.'s best, Terry Schoonhoven, on February 24th. Terry has been painting public murals since 1969, when he and Victor Henderson decided to take their fine art talent to the streets by forming the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad. We will see one of their early creations on the tour, as well as several of his more recent, solo efforts. He's been painting murals on his own since 1974. A couple of extra bonuses on this tour will be lunch downtown amid the hoopla for the return of the Angels Flight railway. In addittion, while viewing Terry's ceramic mural at Union Station, we will take a peek at some of the wondrous new public art just being installed next door at the Gateway Transit Center. These include works by Richard Wyatt, East Los Streetscapers, Jim Doolin, Patrick Nagatani and May Sun.
On April 27th I will be leading a tour of Hollywood and Koreatown. The emphasis will be on the exciting new murals along Western Avenue. Thanks primarily to the sponsorship of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), several Asian aritsts are getting involved in muralism locally for the first time. We will also see a vibrant new (1994) work by Ernesto de la Loza, veteran East L.A. muralist and MCLA Board member, in Silverlake, as well as 22-year-old Eliseo Silva's panorama of Philipino history in Echo Park. I will finally get the chance to share my great food find with a mural tour--Si Yeon, a Koreatown all-you-can eat buffet that features Chinese, Japanese and Korean food.

On Saturday, June 22nd veteran art activist Cecil Fergerson will share his irreverant insights on life, culture, politics, racial relations and anything else, while he shows us important and often-overlooked, landmarks of local African-American history and art. Among the sights we will see are Betye Saar's downtown relief tribute to former slave Biddy Mason, First A.M.E. Church, and the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, where many famous African-Americans stayed back when they weren't welcome elsewhere. It's now a museum. A one-time janitor who sued the L.A. County Museum of Art in order to become a curator, Cecil has been organizing art exhibits at community venues for 30 years.

The theme of our Sunday, August 25th (note the slight date change!) tour is Jewish Murals. Eric Gordon, director of the Workmen's Circle, will be our guide. Murals full of history and heritage such as Hugo Ballin's 1920's Biblical mural in the Wilshire Boulevard Temple sanctuary, Art Mortimer's Fairfax Community Mural, and Zinovy Shersher's painting of Boyle Heights past and present will be among the highlights.

On Saturday and Sunday, October 12th and 13th, we will take to the freeway and travel to Ventura and Lompoc to enjoy murals and a week-end getaway at the same time. We will see a beautiful New Deal mural in the Ventura Post Office, then local artists will share some of the vibrant new works around town. Of special note is the Tortilla Flats Project, which through oral histories and lots of community involvement, recreated the history of a fascinating Latino neighborhood that was destroyed in the 1950s when the 101 Freeway was built. We will spend Saturday afternoon in Lompoc, watching about a dozen artists participate in the now-annual "Mural in a Day" event. We will also see other top quality murals, painted in recent years by such artists as Dan Sawatsky of Chemainus, British Columbia, as well as Art Mortimer, Richard Wyatt and Roberto Delgado of Los Angeles. We need 25 participants to do this tour, so call in your reservations soon. The $65 cost includes overnight in Lompoc at the Quality Inn, cocktail hour Saturday evening, and buffet breakfast on Sunday morning.

On our last tour of this year, we won't board the bus. Saturday, November 23rd we will ride the MetroRail. Our guide will be MTA art coordinator Alan Nakagawa, who last year led the Asian Murals Tour. We will view a selection of the most interesting public art found along the Red, Blue, Orange and Green Lines. Among the artist's whose work we will see are Willie Middlebrook, Richard Wyatt, Joyce Kozloff, Eva Cockcroft, Frank Romero, Francisco Letelier, Jonathan Borofsky, Elliott Pinkney and East Los Streetscapers. This tour will cost a mere $15 ($10 for members, students and seniors).

For reservations, call me at (310) 470-8864, or Jim Kenney at (213) 257-4544. You can mail your checks, payable to MCLA, to: Robin Dunitz, PO Box 64668, Los Angeles 90064. Don't delay, as these tours are filling up!

GRACE CLEMENTS' NEWLY UNCOVERED
MURAL, THE STORY OF MUSIC

by Orville O. Clarke, Jr.


Grace Clements, The Spirit of Music, mural at Damien High School, La Verne, California, c. 1939.


You cannot imagine my surprise when the telephone call came announcing that a WPA mural had been found at Damien High School in nearby La Verne. Trust me, there was no mural there! Just two years earlier, I had walked through the campus examining the older buildings for the mural and bas-reliefs that were executed in the 1930's under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Program (WPA/FAP). Since there were no signs of the "lost" work, I had no choice but to consign them to the "lost" bin.

Well, as Father Travers, the Principal of Damien, was happy to point out, the mural was in fine health, thank you. Damien High is renovating their physical plant and the music building was one of the structures that needed some T.L.C. While removing the stucco that covered the building's facade the mural was uncovered. What the workers had found was Grace Clements' The Spirit of Music.

The mural was probably done in 1939. We can make this assumption since there is a dedication on the lower left hand corner of the mural to the "class of '39." Under the various Federal Art Programs that the government sponsored during the Depression, only organizations that were partly or wholly funded by the government (either at the federal, state or local level) were eligible for public art. In the case of schools, the local art's administrators would donate the labor required for the completion of the mural while the school would pay for the materials, which was a small percentage of the total cost. Since a beautiful and inspiring mural to decorate a building would have been a perfect type of class gift, it is safe to assume that this was their graduation gift to the school, then called Bonita Union High School.

This mural utilizes a technique called "petra-chrome," which was invented by Stanton Macdonald-Wright for the Federal Art Programs. It is concrete that is colored to create a permanent and weather resistant art work. It is a cousin of tile and opus sectile, but one that is more affordable and uniquely suited to the bright, sunny Southern California environment. It also solved another problem the programs ran into: There were only a limited number of artists qualified to create the large-scale public murals. Since the creation of the actual mural only required skilled artisans, a "master artist" could design it, while others could execute his/her design. Thus the WPA/FAP, a relief organization dedicated to helping those in need, could maintain their high artistic standards and employ a greater number of relief workers.

Grace Clements was one of the more interesting artists to work under the Federal Art Programs. A skilled modernist painter and critic who, along with Loser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg, was a proponent of a movement called Post-Surrealism or the New Classicism. Her easel and print work bare little resemblance to the rather tame public commissions she did for the government, which include the Long Beach Airport, Venice High School, Bancroft Junior High School, Dorsey High School and Santa Monica High School (the last three also are petra-chromes). The government wanted nothing to do with any of the new "isms" that artists were following--just simple painting that the public could understand and enjoy.

The mural at Damien is a perfect example of this. Although the composition shows elements of Cubism and Surrealism, it remains a straightforward and easily recognizable image. Her mural is dominated by musical instruments. In the center a lute, cello or bass, violin and a guitar are set on top of and contrasted to a piano. This central grouping dominates the composition. Against this swirl are the supporting instruments: A kettle drum to the left, with a French horn above; cymblas, a slide trombone and harp on the bottom, with a choir on top. All of these instruments are tied together by musical notes, which run diagonally across the center. A little touch of modernism to soothe the soul, and we have a mural that anyone walking into a music building would appreciate. This was the kind of success that the government strived for in public commissions: Good art that the public would enjoy, and maybe even learn a little from.

We are lucky that this gift from the past has been rescued in such excellent condition, and that Father Travers and his staff at Damien are so excited about their "new" mural. Now if I can only get them interested in those four missing bas-reliefs on the old gym. . .