I am not really sure what to write here other than another beautiful mural in Los Angeles is gone. This one was named “Only Time Will Tell”. Murals in LA are a endangered species not only from the law makers with vendettas but people pasting advertisements over them. This is the fourth mural in a month that has been destroyed by advertisers using street art tactics. Its part of the game to get dissed by jealous haters, or buffed beige by the city, but it is especially difficult to swallow when a nonprofit raising awareness for a noble cause decides to blatantly disrespect you. I hope that every time I blow a head gasket over this issue people become more aware that they are encroaching into a world they obviously don’t understand and that there is a code of conduct that must be respected. Murals are our artistic legacy in Los Angeles and we as Angelinos need to be protect them……
The nonprofit group Falling Whistles is sorry for the destruction of the mural.
Three years ago we learned about a war in Congo. A war that has taken millions of lives and continues to rape and kill daily.
Since that day we have hitchhiked, ridden bikes across the country and gone door to door building a coalition of people who want to see peace in Congo.
In our travels, the first place we felt truly welcomed was the Arts District. This was the neighborhood that accepted us for who we were and showed us – literally on the walls – how to speak up.
And so it was tragic to learn today that other members of that community felt disrespected by us and our actions.
After weeks of searching for a free wall, the wall on 2nd and Garey was donated to us. We were told by the building manager that the beautiful mural on the wall was scheduled to be sandblasted clean to the brick in the next 2 months. Before the wall was cleaned, we wanted to use it to make a statement of solidarity in the community.
And so we gathered hundreds of faces from around LA and Congo who all stood for an end to our worlds deadliest war, and we pasted them side by side. Instead of asking for signatures, we asked for faces. And each of those faces will be faxed directly to the White House.
The man in the center of the wall was a music photographer in the 70s who documented the peace movement of Dylan, Marley and Hendrix. The man on the left built a hospital in the war-region and does over a dozen surgeries a day for raped women and injured children. The woman on the right has pulled together women from across the war-region to take a stand and publicly take rapists to trial.
It was not our intention to disrespect the artists of that wall. Or any wall. We love the art in our community and treasure the freedom to say what we feel however we feel it. The point was to elevate the heroic nature of protest. And give people a chance to make themselves heard and seen. Something this neighborhood helped teach us.
But in the end, we did all of this on the wrong wall. And we screwed up. We respect the time, energy, money and talent that went into creating that mural. To the MSK crew and supporters – we apologize.
Had we known yesterday what we know today, we would have gone directly to the artists and talked about how we could do it together. We did not.
We learned today of the campaign against LA’s recent mural ban. Whistleblowing, like art, is about saying what needs to be said. And we are joining a chorus of voices in saying that that this ban must be revoked.
We are committed to partnering however we can to gather signatures for this petition, offering policy support and doing all we can to continue to make our city an evolving, provocative, and beautiful place.
Tomorrow at 6pm, I will be at the wall at 2nd and Garey to speak openly and freely with anyone who would like to talk further.
The reason I hired five jet planes to sky write over City Hall and downtown Los Angeles is to bring awareness to how ridiculous a moratorium on public art is.
The city states that all public murals are signage, effectively banning art from the walls of Los Angeles. And it is removed at the taxpayers’ expense. Money is given to private graffiti removal companies, who have broken onto private property to paint murals beige. The owners of small businesses where murals have been painted have been harassed and threatened with fines if they do not remove the artwork. Police officers raid homes and places of work, intimidating artists and building owners. During this time of economic crisis, “mural signs” are an easy target for the city to extract money. This moratorium is a clear violation of the first amendment right to free speech and enforcement for these unreasonable laws is a complete waste of taxpayer funds.
To put things in perspective I recently visited the beautiful set of murals inside the Terminal Annex Building on Alameda. This mural was painted in 1941-44 and was funded by the “Works Progress Administration” (WPA). Murals are just a part of the legacy of a national program that put the country to work during the Great Depression.
Fast-forward to the Great Recession, taxpayer money is now used to obliterate all traces of the artwork my generation have created. I believe this is city-funded censorship pushed by lawmakers with personal vendettas. Potential jail time is more probable for us than the opportunity of creating an artistic legacy for the next generation. In a city that used to proudly call itself the “Mural Capitol Of The World,” the officials who enforce this ban should be ashamed to call themselves “Angelinos.”
Art Is Not A Crime… End Mural Moratorium.
- SABER
Tell Mayor Villagaigosa and the L.A. City Attorney’s office to end the mural moratorium now:
* In 2007, the graffiti gallery Crewest, along with help from the activist group Friends of the L.A. River (FoLAR) organized “Meeting of Styles: LA.” The event brought together over 100 graffiti artists to spray paint a 10,000 square foot section of the L.A. River at the Arroyo Seco Confluence in Highland Park. Despite the fact that the organizers secured all necessary permits for the mural project, and that the event was fully licensed by the county; supervisor Gloria Molina objected to the work after the fact and introduced an emergency measure to the County Board of Supervisors that forced the mural to be whitewashed from the flood walls. A spokeswoman for Molina called the legal graffiti murals a “public nuisance and a potential safety hazard,” and justified Molina’s decision to introduce the mural’s removal by saying the county was “trying to save lives.”
A view of “America Tropical,” partly whitewashed. (Credit: PBS)
* Of course, this sort of thing has a long history in Los Angeles. In 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted America Tropical in a rooftop beer garden on Olvera Street. The mural’s centerpiece featured a crucified Indian, hovered over by an imperial American eagle. The part of the offending mural that could be seen from the street was covered almost immediately; the rest was whitewashed within a year.
Risky and I recently stumbled upon this amazing mural in the Terminal Annex building on Alameda in Downtown Los Angeles. Boris Deutsch painted the mural, from 1941 to 1944 during the tale end of the Great Depression and in the run up to the Second World War. This mural was made possible by the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which put Americans to work during difficult times. The WPA is responsible for a variety of projects throughout the country including hiring artists to create beautiful historical pieces of artwork.
Without the WPA we wouldn’t have this amazing mural in LA, not to mention hundreds of other amazing murals all over the country. This particular mural reflects what was happening historically at the time. The artwork ends with a visual description of the beginning of World War Two, leaving the viewer with a sense of anxiety knowing what was ahead for our country.
Now fast forward to my generation. The timeline we reside in is coined ”The Great Recession”. We are facing severe economic difficulties due to the decisions of current and previous lawmakers that created a wealth gap so vast that there seems to be no end in site. To put things in perspective the current city government of Los Angeles actually spent millions of dollars each year to remove art and criminalize artists. New laws have been put in place that actually ban public murals and deem them signage and not art. Groups of sheriff go to local business to harass them for having murals on their premises and threaten them with fines and jail time if the owner does not comply and remove the artwork. Basically taxpayer’s are providing the funds to pay many private “Graffiti Removal” companies to censor art at will.
The supposed war on graffiti is actually a war on small business and freedom of expression. The City Of Los Angeles, once known as “The Mural Capitol Of The World”, is now specializing in the criminalization of public art. In 2011 its more probable that an artist will go to jail to quench the private prison industry’s feeding frenzy then a tax paying citizen of the city actually get a permit to paint a beautiful mural.
As we left, a group of security guards told us terminal annex is no longer a federal building, and we needed permission to film the murals that once belonged to the people of the USA. It seems a private company that doesn’t appreciate visitors enjoying the historical artwork that was originally for everyone now owns Terminal Annex. Of course as we leave we acknowledge the generic large corporate sign “corpocorp” displayed outside that basically is equal to a no trespassing sign. Is this the future of America?…………………………
In 2008, a deco-style fortress built in the ’50s and originally belonging to a prominent family in Santa Monica fell into foreclosure in the middle of an extensive renovation. Until three months ago it stood vacant, an eerie house on a bluff with a homeless woman squatting the top floor. The terraced gardens in back had overgrown and were infested with rats. The neighbors on this otherwise upscale block wondered and complained.
Then came Adam Corlin, with a cause, a dare, and an endless supply of tarps. Corlin, a successful builder and a fourth generation Santa Monica resident, had his eye on this property, and when the price dropped to 50 percent of its original asking price, he jumped at the opportunity to own it.
But this was no ordinary flip — Corlin had some time in his hacienda rehab schedule and wanted to raise awareness for his favorite charity, Heal the Bay, the environmental group working to restore Santa Monica Bay. In speaking to the organization, he knew it had to be different than the usual donation or doing volunteer work. He had a blank house in Santa Monica, he had resources to do something big, and he had just met a graf artist appropriately named Risk………..
When I arrived to look at the amazing work my friends have done, the police were all ready there. The Santa Monica Police were actually really cool and thought the project was awesome. Once they got on the phone, the deminor suddenly changed. Their chief was contacted by some “higher ups” all the way from downtown LA, apparently forcing them to harass the people involved. They couldn’t find a reason why they were called then left. Right after, a city & code representative showed up and said he was told from those “higher ups” to figure out some sort of citation to write against the project. Even he was amazed on why he was called to harass this project so he basically had to make up a citation. Then the police came back and still couldn’t believe the pressure that was put on them to cause any sort of problem for the people involved. A couple hours past and another city & code person showed up this time armed with a $5000 dollar a day citation fee for the resident’s owner, basically the violation was working with the artist Risky. No laws were broken on this private property, the install is up to code and safety standards were clean. The Sheriffs even sent an undercover over in the morning posing as a journalist, of course that was a waste of their time as well.
So two local artist come together to raise awarness and possibly money for a great cause to help clean up the local beach and what unfolds is a complete abuse of local city power, sending multiple departments over to shut this amazing project down. That’s four different agencies spending hours of their day running around harassing private citizens to fine an organization $5000 a day when the goal was to raise money for a great cause. This abuse stems from city hall and even went as far as using other jurisdictions man hours to satisfy some assholes with sticks up his asses. If this is how the City Attorney spends his time on his daily basis then know wonder this city is falling apart. First Amendment rights were clearly violated not to mention taking the money away from a positive cause. This is a perfect example on why we should vote these assholes out of office…….
After prominent public interventions in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, you’ve probably got the memo that no place is too far to travel for the urban collective known as TrustoCorp. Check out their latest project poking fun at our secret guilty pleasure – the tabloid magazines. Similar to their hilarious NYC rebranding campaign, they’ve gone into magazine stands, bookstores and pharmacies throughout Hollywood, Manhattan, Williamsburg, LAX and JFK to drop copies of these little artistic interventions for the unsuspecting public.
