Murals

"I'VE always said that there's something inherently selfish about leaving every wall completely white," says interior designer Jarrett Hedborg, whose clients include Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges and "Deadwood" creator David Milch. "I call it the tyranny of the white wall, which is something that is so distinctly American." For Hedborg and others, the wall painting is one solution. But what kind? The term mural simply means anything painted directly on a wall -- indoor or out.

The fantastical murals of San Francisco's Mission District are an intriguing dialogue between artists and their city that you can easily experience on foot. On any given day in Clarion Alley, tourists from all over the world mingle with field-tripping students (and the homeless). Start at the Mission Street end of Clarion Alley, then exit at Valencia Street and head south (turn left). Check out the murals all the way to 20th Street. Typically, walk one or two blocks (east or west) to view.

The fantastical murals of San Francisco's Mission District are an intriguing dialogue between artists and their city that you can easily experience on foot. On any given day in Clarion Alley, tourists from all over the world mingle with field-tripping students (and the homeless). Start at the Mission Street end of Clarion Alley, then exit at Valencia Street and head south (turn left). Check out the murals all the way to 20th Street. Typically, walk one or two blocks (east or west) to view.

From cycling celebrations to protest marches to filming, street closures are a part of life in downtown L.A. But it's something altogether different this week for a section of Main Street from Arcadia Street to Cesar Chavez Avenue, where the road is being blocked to make room for a restoration effort involving one of the city's key pieces of public art, "América Tropical. " Part of an ongoing partnership between the city and the Getty, the only mural by Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros that is still in its original location will be fitted for a protective canopy, starting today.

It's a simple yet strangely moving mural of clouds, framing a skylight and visible from the guest room. "Our guests say they have fantasy dreams when they stay here," screenwriter Carol Doumani says, describing effects of the Terry Schoonhaven mural and other art in the Venice home she shares with her husband, Roy. "Murals don't just belong in public places. It's quite wonderful to live with them. This one doesn't shout out at you: 'I'm important. Look at me.'

As the bus leaves Atlanta, Dennis Climpson is eager for conversation. He wants to talk about college football this Sunday morning, but I have a question for him. "Have you ever heard of the Freedom Rides?" I ask. Fifty years ago next month, a group of 15 passengers travels the same route. Like us, they were blacks and whites sitting together on buses, then a violation of segregation laws. Climpson, 48, says he hasn't heard of the protests, but he's intrigued. As Interstate 20 passes by, he turns to his smartphone to check Wikipedia.

Some of Kent Twitchell's murals are best known because they no longer exist. His "The Old Lady of the Freeway" greeted travelers along the Hollywood Freeway from 1974 until it was painted out by a billboard company in 1986. More recently, "Ed Ruscha Monument," a six-story portrait of artist Ruscha on the side of a government-owned building in downtown L.A., was painted over, in June 2006.

"Taggers, Caltrans Take a Toll on Freeway Murals," May 3: Caltrans seems to have a budget to put up those horrible, prefabricated vacuum-formed flowers on sound-barrier walls yet won't fund artists to restore their damaged murals. What's worse are those scary "law enforcement" frescoes that make downtown look like a police state. Gray paint would be welcome on such propaganda posing as art! Dennis Snyder Long Beach

"Home of the Artists"--this is the slogan at the entrance to Laguna Beach High School's football field. I find it a delightful change to have a high school athletic team recognizing art instead of some ferocious animal or warlike people. However, what priority does art really have in the Laguna Beach Unified School District? It was good news to hear last week that the Laguna Beach Board of Education voted to save from destruction "Shadows of the Past," the life-size murals of Laguna Beach students from the mid-1980s by the late Megan Hart Jones (" 'Shadows' Shaking Up the Present" by Cathy Curtis, Calendar May 27)

The frescoes encapsulate Depression-era California: Scenes depicting idyllic farm and factory life roll out beside those of grueling economic hardship. Urban shoppers browse for toys. A small boy witnesses a mugging. No one disputes their historical value. But the works — along with their iconic Art Deco home, San Francisco's fluted Coit Tower — are in trouble. Mineral blooms on the concrete pillar's interior walls, a byproduct of this city's legendary fog, have marred the earth- and jewel-toned images.

At exactly noon on Thursday, 30 pianists sitting at 30 colorful pianos scattered at public spaces throughout Los Angeles County will simultaneously break into the first prelude of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier. " The so-called play-in will mark the Southern California debut of a globally oriented public art project called "Play Me, I'm Yours. " But the real fun won't begin until after the opening performances have finished. That's when the pianos - in locations that include L.A. Live and Monterey Park, USC and UCLA, as well as Santa Monica Pier and Old Pasadena - become available to the public, for anyone and everyone to play 24 hours a day for the next three weeks.

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.

Occupy L.A. protesters want their murals back. During their eight-week encampment on Los Angeles City Hall's lawn, protesters painted colorful pictures and slogans on plywood walls that city workers installed to protect two monuments near Spring and 1st streets. After police cleared the park in the early morning of Nov. 30, arresting about 300 people, the walls were taken down. In January, the city's Department of Cultural Affairs issued an open call "to public and private entities, including but not limited to museums, galleries, arts organizations or educational institutions" wishing to store and exhibit the murals.

They were bold enough to call it a revolution. Back in the 1970s, when Chicano art was synonymous with East Los Angeles, its storied murals and its art center, Self-Help Graphics, a group of Mexican American artists decided to break away. They headed north, seven miles, to start their own Chicano arts collective in Highland Park, an area that was still mostly white with little presence of Latino art. "Our mission was to transform Highland Park into a super-revolutionary Chicano town," said artist Richard Duardo.

The frescoes encapsulate Depression-era California: Scenes depicting idyllic farm and factory life roll out beside those of grueling economic hardship. Urban shoppers browse for toys. A small boy witnesses a mugging. No one disputes their historical value. But the works — along with their iconic Art Deco home, San Francisco's fluted Coit Tower — are in trouble. Mineral blooms on the concrete pillar's interior walls, a byproduct of this city's legendary fog, have marred the earth- and jewel-toned images.

For decades, Los Angeles was a mecca for muralists. Lush and bold, murals sprouted like indigenous flora from Boyle Heights to the ocean to South Los Angeles. The themes were as compelling as the muralists themselves — including emerging black and Latino artists — and the neighborhoods that nurtured them. Los Angeles became identified with murals and they came to define the city — Highland Park residents immortalized on a building in that neighborhood, a line of children romping along a freeway wall.

In Los Angeles, the good things often slip away in the night. One morning you head for your favorite breakfast spot only to discover it's been turned into a used-clothing store. No one seems to know why. It's just got switched. When I first came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, I remember walking past the old Sunkist building in downtown and thinking how perfect it seemed.

From the aging homages to Chicano history on the Eastside to Shepard Fairey's towering "Peace Goddess" watching over downtown, Los Angeles has earned a reputation as the street mural capital of the world. But for nearly a decade, much of this artwork has been done illicitly. City ordinances make it illegal to create murals on the vast majority of private properties. Officials estimate that more than 300 murals have been painted over in the last several years, a fact that has frustrated artists as well as property owners who commission the murals.

A large but little-noticed mural that a noted ceramic artist, F. Carlton Ball, created in an alcove of a public library branch in Whittier is having its moment in the spotlight after what may or may not have been a near-brush with the wrecking ball. "Pictures of Children's Stories" is 12 feet high and 8 feet wide and has stood in a short passageway between the circulation desk and the adult wing of the Whittwood Branch Library since the building opened in 1968. It consists of more than 100 square and rectangular tiles of irregular size, in glazed-over shades of blue, green, copper and silver.