Muralists

Though the precise moment is uncertain, the modern Los Angeles public mural was born sometime in 1968 within the concurrent shock waves of era-defining political assassinations, Nixon's presidential election victory and the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers boycott of table grapes.

It has taken 80 years, but Los Angeles today does honor to its history. After a painstaking rehabilitation, a long-hidden mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros will be unveiled. The mural has a rollicking history. It was once the center of controversy, and then it was shrouded for decades. Siqueiros was one of Mexico's great muralists - ranked with Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. His radical politics and his bold use of color and arresting imagery won him renown. An ardent Stalinist, he conspired to murder Leon Trotsky after Trotsky settled in Mexico City.

It has taken 80 years, but Los Angeles today does honor to its history. After a painstaking rehabilitation, a long-hidden mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros will be unveiled. The mural has a rollicking history. It was once the center of controversy, and then it was shrouded for decades. Siqueiros was one of Mexico's great muralists - ranked with Jose Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. His radical politics and his bold use of color and arresting imagery won him renown. An ardent Stalinist, he conspired to murder Leon Trotsky after Trotsky settled in Mexico City.

Catching up with Ed Fuentes isn't easy. A running start helps. The 52-year-old Fuentes - I call him the human cyclone - moves so fast on so many fronts in any given day that whiplash is possible: photographer, muralist, blogger, modern-day historian, humorist. He briefly touched down in the Arts District last week. But it wasn't that simple, of course. Like one of the Weather Channel's "storm chasers," I tracked him from where he was interviewing a muralist in East Los Angeles to a site just off Alameda Street in downtown L.A., where he had been hired to shoot publicity stills for a local theater company.

The Social and Public Art Resource Center will accept applications for its 1993-94 Great Walls Unlimited: Neighborhood Pride Murals Program. The center will select artists to design and produce murals throughout Los Angeles. In addition to a commission, artists will receive paint and materials, scaffolding, paid youth assistants, insurance, administrative and technical support.

From a distance it all seems so wildly romantic: the life of a roving mural painter and his devoted soul mate, the bohemian swirl of hip parties, high-profile commissions and proletarian politics. Makes you long for the open road and the scent of turpentine, doesn't it, like a sepia-tinted photo of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, effortlessly glamorous, traipsing across North America, trampling bourgeois respectability and each other's hearts ... Well, so much for drama.

The murals on the J. Paul Getty Museum's garden walls have been seen by millions of visitors since the Malibu institution opened 20 years ago. But who knew that the artist who painted--and is now restoring--the realistic likenesses of columns, garlands and still-life arrangements is Garth Benton, a third cousin of Thomas Hart Benton?

A group of teen-agers and a well-known local artist are using a Lemon Park block wall as the canvas for a mural to deter graffiti vandals. The wall had long been a popular "tagging" spot in Fullerton until last month, when the group began converting it into a mural titled "Children of the World," city officials said. "This painting is the heart of Fullerton and people will respect it," 16-year-old Daniel Rodriguez said as he painted an ocean on the wall Wednesday afternoon.

Re "Artist Allowed to Challenge Legality of Arrest for Mural," May 27: Artist Mike McNeilly paints gigantic advertising murals on the sides of buildings for profit. When L.A. Councilman Mike Feuer blocked the painting of one of these unsightly monstrosities, McNeilly decided to try an end run by claiming his right to free speech was being violated. Knowing that an advertisement would elicit little sympathy for his claim, however, he began to paint the Statue of Liberty. Who could complain about something as patriotic as the Lady?

The Workmen's Circle, a Jewish cultural group, will accept applications through May 1 from artists interested in creating an exterior mural for the group's Southern California headquarters. A $10,000 commission will be awarded. Three finalists will be selected, based on evidence of their past work, to submit designs.

Along old U.S. Route 66, the once-kitschy Overland Motel is crumbling, vacant lots pock downtown and, as if this remote desert outpost weren't suffering enough, the last car dealership folded up and left behind a blanket of empty asphalt. Not a pretty picture for travelers who might pull off the highway for a burger or to spend the night. Then, about five months ago, a man with a sun-stained face and paint-crusted fingernails drifted in, and the tiny old railroad town of Needles started looking a little brighter.

For years, a painting of a whale's tail splashing out of the gray, misty ocean has been one of the most popular license plates in California. Nearly 200,000 have been sold, raising millions for coastal and environmental conservation programs. But the artwork by Wyland was deep-sixed after the Laguna Beach muralist's request for 20% of the state's profits from the plates to fund his environmental foundation was rebuffed. Rather than tangle with the artist over the rights to the painting, titled "Tails of Great Whales," the state decided to retire the plate instead and hold a contest to replace it. The new plate to debut Aug. 2 is a crisper, brighter rendering of a whale's tail that California Coastal Commission officials say more closely resembles an actual whale — a humpback — than Wyland's more dreamy design.

The mural outside Erma Winfield's Mid-City home has a Grandma Moses look to it. And not just because the artist who painted it is 94, either. The artwork stretches across a 40-foot fence and depicts the four seasons in a linear, primitive folk-art style that captures scenes from Winfield's past, just as Grandma Moses' work did when she took up painting in her 70s. Like Moses, Winfield was raised on a farm and is a self-taught artist whose...

Alix Soubiran could live quite happily without a stick of furniture. "A chair can be wonderful, but walls are what you see all the time," she says. "To me, walls that create a story or a mood are the starting point. " As a muralist, Soubiran is accustomed to using walls as a blank canvas. But she recently began experimenting with decorating techniques, creating a line of high-end wallpapers called Princes & Crows. Inspired by her memories of her native France, those designs have helped to transform a ramshackle 1923 duplex in Los Feliz into the charming home she shares with husband Joe Mauceri, a film and TV director and writer, and their 61/2-month-old daughter, Monica Moonshine.

In this city on wheels, this city of wheels, an image has to be large and vivid and striking to make an impression. For more than three decades, the light, the climate, the speed, the invitation of long blank walls have made Los Angeles one vast plein-air gallery, the mural capital of the world, exterior-decorated by artists like Kent Twitchell, Willie Herron, Glenna Avila, Leo Politi — and Judy Baca. Baca leads brush-first, blending aesthetics and politics, first as the mother of the city's original community mural project, Neighborhood Pride, and now as founder of the Venice-based Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC.

Tucked away inside of one of Los Angeles' oldest buildings, the artist could be mistaken for a squatter. He sleeps on a ragged piece of carpet. He makes do without a shower. He wears nearly the same clothes every day: a plain T-shirt and worn-out sweat shorts. But around the corner from where he sleeps is Hugo Martinez Tecoatl's masterpiece: an elaborate array of murals vibrantly splashed across 4,000 square feet of space. Aztec gods, bicycles, serpents, marigolds and tributes to Pancho Villa, Benito Juarez and Emiliano Zapata stretch from the hardwood floor up 30- to 40-foot walls and across the ceiling.

In a program aimed at discouraging vandals from marring the neighborhood with graffiti, a group of Heninger Elementary School students have been donating time on weekends to paint a mural at the school entrance. The artwork, projected to cost about $3,000, depicts a Mexican folkloric dancer. The project is being directed by Operation Clean Slate, a nonprofit Costa Mesa group dedicated to graffiti prevention.

Much is made these days of politics and art. A few painters and sculptors feel pretty set up about themselves for having the courage to make pictures that express indignation over, say, violations of human rights. It is laudable to let conscience guide one's art but our chaps are going to have to get cracking if they hope to equal the intransigence of the hemisphere's leading social-rebel artist, David Alfaro Siqueiros, the great Mexican muralist.

All it took was one look. The artists behind a vibrant mural depicting community protection of black youth were a mystery to the folks at UCLA. An image of the work, part of the school's archive, would eventually grace university publications, including an edition of the museum's newsletter Fowler Now, but they didn't know who had painted it. That's when Richard Wyatt came upon it. "The winter newsletter came in the mail one day," recounted Wyatt, 54. "And there it was. I was like 'Whoa!

Ruth Duckworth, a noted modernist sculptor and muralist who created abstract ceramic forms for pieces breathtakingly large and charmingly small in her studio in a renovated Chicago pickle plant, has died. She was 90. Duckworth died Oct. 18 at a Chicago hospice after a brief illness, said Thea Burger, her agent. She was both a master of ceramics and of escaping easy definition, the Washington Post said in a 2006 article on a traveling retrospective of Duckworth's work, which was shown at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery.