Street artist tapped into L.A.'s spirit

Hailed as "the Artist of Olvera Street," Politi, who died in 1996, is commemorated in other neighborhoods and in cities including South Pasadena, Redlands and his native Fresno.

A park near Dodger Stadium bears his name, as does an elementary school in the Pico-Union district. Later this year, the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Echo Park Avenue, near the artist's former Angeleno Heights home, will be named Leo Politi Square.

Marking this year's centenary of his birth, a yearlong exhibition of Politi's oils and watercolors, ink sketches and murals and his movingly simple prose will begin Jan. 26 at the Pico House near Olvera Street.

He often painted and sketched on the historic street, which still displays one of his murals. The exhibit will include sketches made for his children's books, among them "Pedro, the Angel of Olvera Street" and "Juanita," which were set around the old Pueblo de Los Angeles.

The exhibit will include wood sculptures, including a mother and her child, and dozens of his elegant watercolors of the now-vanished gingerbread Victorian homes on Bunker Hill and of others still standing in Angeleno Heights.

"Growing up, I always thought my father was a dreamer and a little naive," Paul Politi, the artist's son, said in a recent interview. He and his sister, Suzanne Bischof, have organized dozens of events over the next year with cities, schools, libraries and museums throughout the state.

"It wasn't until later that I realized that he was a man ahead of his time, a deep thinker and very spiritual," said Paul Politi, 64, a music writer who lives in Woodland Hills.

"He believed that reason and understanding was the key to everything, that if he could open people's eyes to racial understanding, it would be a better world."

The elder Politi's life was like one of the many picture books he wrote and illustrated -- simple and humble.

He was born in Fresno in 1908, the son of Italian parents who grew grapes, made wine and raised horses on a small ranch. In 1914, as war got underway in Europe, Leo, then 6, and his family returned to his father's family home in northern Italy.