Social And Public Arts Resources Center

A nonprofit center in Venice dedicated to preserving public art was one of two Southern California groups chosen to participate in a program aimed at making such agencies financially self-sufficient, the group announced Monday. The Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, a 20-year-old agency that creates and preserves murals, will participate in the Ford Foundation's Working Capital Fund for Minority Cultural Institutions.

Using photographs of a chef and a bellhop in combination with historical pictures from labor demonstrations, Judith Baca and Patrick Blasa are creating a collage featuring hotel and restaurant workers in Los Angeles. Altogether, Baca and Blasa will spend 2 1/2 months blending the images using computer programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

As artist Judith Baca sees it, the resurrection of a city-financed mural program could mean nothing less than a "mural renaissance" for Los Angeles. Baca and other organizers of the $250,000 Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited Program, revived when Mayor Tom Bradley signed the city budget July 1, plan to produce nine murals by next summer, employing young people to assist professional artists.

An evening reading of the new play "Road to Los Angeles" will highlight a day of activities on Olvera Street today as part of the Social and Public Art Resource Center tribute to the late Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The art center, commonly known as SPARC, is hosting a week of events to celebrate its 20th anniversary, which coincides with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Siqueiros. SPARC is best known for creating or commissioning more than 70 murals throughout the city.

An evening reading of the new play "Road to Los Angeles" will highlight a day of activities on Olvera Street today as part of the Social and Public Art Resource Center tribute to the late Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros. The art center, commonly known as SPARC, is hosting a week of events to celebrate its 20th anniversary, which coincides with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Siqueiros. SPARC is best known for creating or commissioning more than 70 murals throughout the city.

The "unibrow" was the fashion news at the Social and Public Art Resource Center. In case your eyebrows didn't grow together naturally, the ticket-taker Friday night had an eyebrow pencil handy so you could draw in the silhouette of a vulture hovering above your nose. Mexican artist Frida Kahlo had eyebrows like that, as well as a faint but distinct mustache.

Using photographs of a chef and a bellhop in combination with historical pictures from labor demonstrations, Judith Baca and Patrick Blasa are creating a collage featuring hotel and restaurant workers in Los Angeles. Altogether, Baca and Blasa will spend 2 1/2 months blending the images using computer programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

Strength, perseverance and resolve are frequently the byproducts of pain, despair and oppression. The murals exhibited through the Los Angeles cityscape and documented in "Signs From the Heart" express the full range. Paralleling the sentiments of el movimiento of the late 1960s, murals began to spring up with full and legitimate force in the Chicano community, acting as barometer, Greek chorus and a collective community voice in response to the shortcomings in American mainstream social-political-economic-educational policy, practices and delivery.

The mystery of the whitewashed Venice Beach Graffiti Pit has been solved. The culprits--a group of painters in unmarked vans who covered the popular tourist attraction with a coat of beige--were workers cleaning graffiti as part of their sentences for committing misdemeanors. Project Heavy West, a nonprofit Westside community agency that coordinates graffiti removal, was contracted by the city to remove graffiti from the Venice Beach Pavilion, next to a sunken amphitheater called the Pit.

Permanent collections may be the stock in trade of art museums, but temporary exhibitions bring in the crowds and the critics, not to mention box-office receipts. Inevitably, that simple fact leads to competition. As long as human beings are more interested in new attractions than familiar cultural resources, museums would seem to be locked into a genteel battle for the attention and support that keep them going. Or maybe not.

A nonprofit center in Venice dedicated to preserving public art was one of two Southern California groups chosen to participate in a program aimed at making such agencies financially self-sufficient, the group announced Monday. The Social and Public Art Resource Center, or SPARC, a 20-year-old agency that creates and preserves murals, will participate in the Ford Foundation's Working Capital Fund for Minority Cultural Institutions.

The "unibrow" was the fashion news at the Social and Public Art Resource Center. In case your eyebrows didn't grow together naturally, the ticket-taker Friday night had an eyebrow pencil handy so you could draw in the silhouette of a vulture hovering above your nose. Mexican artist Frida Kahlo had eyebrows like that, as well as a faint but distinct mustache.

Strength, perseverance and resolve are frequently the byproducts of pain, despair and oppression. The murals exhibited through the Los Angeles cityscape and documented in "Signs From the Heart" express the full range. Paralleling the sentiments of el movimiento of the late 1960s, murals began to spring up with full and legitimate force in the Chicano community, acting as barometer, Greek chorus and a collective community voice in response to the shortcomings in American mainstream social-political-economic-educational policy, practices and delivery.

As artist Judith Baca sees it, the resurrection of a city-financed mural program could mean nothing less than a "mural renaissance" for Los Angeles. Baca and other organizers of the $250,000 Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls Unlimited Program, revived when Mayor Tom Bradley signed the city budget July 1, plan to produce nine murals by next summer, employing young people to assist professional artists.