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Compiled by Robin Dunitz
All you mural artists out there, if you want your public to know what you've been doing lately, please send the information, along with a picture if possible, to Robin Dunitz, PO Box 64668, Los Angeles 90064. Or you can call 310 470-8864.
Eliseo Art Silva, "Hearts of America," (detail), acrylic on concrete, |
Man One, "A Couple of Immigrantes", spraycan, Figueroa St. between 51st and 52nd Sts., 1997. |
The following new murals were completed through March.
| "A Couple of Immigrantes," ManOne, self-sponsored. N. Figueroa St. (northside alley) between 51st and 52nd Streets in Highland Park. This is a spraycan mural that measures about 12' x 30'. |
"Capturing Our Identity," ManOne, self-sponsored. Avenue 56 near Baltimore St. in Highland Park. Also a spraycan mural measuring about 12' x 20'. This is an image of a young child's face. |
| "Mexico-Tenochtitlan: A Sequence of Time and Culture," Andy Ledesma, John Zender Estrada, Ralph Corona, Jaime Ochoa, Dominic Ochoa, Isabel Martinez, Oscar de Leon, and Jerry Ortega. Conceptualization by Anthony Ortega. Funding for this project came from several local businesses, Art in the Park Advisory Council, Highland Park Heritage Trust Fund, LA Cultural Affairs Dept., 1st and 14th District Council Offices, and various individuals. It's located at Arroyo Furniture, 6037 North Figueroa in Highland Park. |
"Hearts of America," Eliseo Art Silva with 35 youth, a private commission . At Immanuel Presbyterian Church Parish Hall, Catalina St. and Wilshire Blvd. in Koreatown. Acrylic on concrete, dimensions 7' x 75'. Done in collaboration with Korean Youth and Community Center, Building Up L.A., and the church's Community Organizing Team. The heart is a repetitive element, and within each are visual representations of each of L.A.'s five largest ethnic communities. |
| "Team Spirit," designed by Tim Fields and painted with about 25 youth from the Salesian Boys and Girls Club. Commissioned by the L.A. Clippers for the Club building. At 3218 Wabash Ave. in City Terrace. Illustrates what would happen if basketball met an Italianesque religious painting. It was inspired by a similar painting inside the club. |
"Running to Win," Alfredo Diaz Flores artist, commissioned privately. At the Retail Clerks Union, interior 4th floor, 630 Shatto Place, in Mid-city Los Angeles. Painted in acrylic on plaster. The subject is the 50-year history of the union from its beginnings to the present, showcasing past and current union leaders as well as workers in hospitals, groceries and the meat industry. |
| "Giving Colors a Home," Sacred. Louis Place at Goodrich in East L.A. Another spraycan mural this one measures about 12' x 75'. This mural is an example of wildstyle writing. |
HISTORICAL PROFILE:
HUGO BALLIN
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Hugo Ballin was one of the more colorful and controversial artists to work on the government-sponsored art programs during the Depression. While other artists ran afoul of government censors or offended public sensibilities with daring compositions, Ballin's problems began when he decided to teach a lesson to the so-called "art experts," whom he felt were ruining art by pushing "modernism" down the throats of the public. The artist's controversies were the result of a deliberate attempt to show people how inept the Federal Art Program administrators and the art critics were that supported their policies.
For many years Ballin was a fixture of the Southern California art scene. Born in New York City in 1879, the artist moved to Los Angeles in 1921, where he found work in the film industry as a set designer. He also established a successful career as a muralist. Locally, the artist is best known for his murals at the Los Angeles Times, Griffith Park Observatory, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, County-USC Hospital, and the B'nai B'rith Temple. Yet Ballin represented the older generation of painters who were being eclipsed by younger artists, whose European-influenced modernism was favored by local government art administrators. Ballin must have felt that, little by little, artists like Fletcher Martin, Helen Lundeberg and Grace Clements would corrupt public murals (and consequently taste) with their avant garde approaches.
However, this artist was a force not to be taken lightly. Acknowledged by his peers with election as an associate member of the National Academy and Southern California Co-Chair of the National Society of Mural Painters, he decided to defend the old school, whose artistic style was theatened by the "cancer" of modernism that was gradually gaining acceptance in the United States.
"School Days," the one mural that Ballin executed under the Public Works of Art Project at El Rodeo Elementary School in Beverly Hills (1934), is one of the most stunning of the local federal murals. Situated in a breathtaking Spanish-style building with heavy wooden beams, his Byzantine-influenced mural is beautiful in execution and didactic in composition. It is the perfect artwork to instruct young impressionable children in concepts of beauty.
Ballin must have become very disturbed by the art being created under the various federal programs. The "battle" between modernism and conservative art, as it was then called, was a very heated debate, filling pages of the paper in the 1930's. "Sanity in Art," a conservative art association, took aim at modern artists with diatribes regularly published by sympathetic art critics in papers like the Los Angeles Examiner and the Evening Herald and Express, and held exhibits to educate the public to the values of traditional art. The modern view was espoused by Los Angeles Times' critic Arthur Millier. Ballin's first salvo was to send two paintings to an exhibition at
the National Academy of Design. One was a traditional portrait of "Dolores del Rio" under his own name; the other was a spoof, titled "Mrs. Katz of Venice," under the pseudonym A. Gamio, which the jury accepted into the show. The title pokes fun at Leo Katz, a leading Southern California modernist whose murals were removed from the Frank Wiggens Trade School as offensive to public morals. New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell pointed out A.Gamio's work as one of the highlights of the exhibit. Ballin had pulled off a major embarrassment against the modernist art establishment, believing he had revealed their lack of judgement. As one sympathetic Los Angeles critic, Herman Reuter, chortled, "a mighty deflation of stuffed-shirt." However, both Millier and Jewell insisted that the hoax work really was superior to the "Delores del Rio" composition, which was tagged "a piece of imprudent vulgarity, best quickly forgotten."
Ballin upped the stakes when he took on the Section over a mural commission. The artist was bitter about earlier being denied the prestigious Beverly Hills Post Office commission, and was insulted about being offered the decoration of "so unimportant a space" as the Inglewood Post Office. He circulated a false story that he had submitted six serious sketches and a hoax sketch that showed "licentious and low brow" behavior by California 49'ers. The government, he claimed, only wanted the "almost communist" composition. The truth was far from this. The committee had recommended that Ballin be given the commission, but that appointment was subject to the submission of preliminary sketches. They knew his reputation as an artist, and felt he could do much better work than the "trite" designs he submitted. Unfortunately, Ballin was out to reek havoc, and he opted to inflict damage on the federal art programs' public image over executing the commission.
Needless to say, Ballin never did another federal mural. Los Angeles was only one of many battlegrounds between the conservative and modern factions of the art world. The Ballin affair stands as a small skirmish that helped mark the evolution of our Southland art scene.
