Duncan Campbell
New techniques are revolutionising the art of creating murals in the world’s mural capital, Los Angeles. A new generation of artists is exploring the potential created by digital imaging.
“Digital imaging is going to bring muralism into the 21st century,” said Judy Baca, founder of the city’s Social and Public Art Resource Centre (Sparc). In the 1970s Baca was responsible for the Great Wall of Los Angeles, the world’s longest mural, which traces the history of California from prehistoric times to the 1950s. It was completed over six summers by 400 teenagers and established artists and historians, and runs for 800m through the San Fernando Valley.
Now digital imaging techniques allow muralists to work on aluminium, which has a longer life span than the average wall, and lets them adapt the design to the available space, as well as take advantage of temporary sites in the knowledge that the mural will not be lost when the wall is knocked down. Baca, a professor of art at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the methods mean the cost of a mural can be kept low: “We have to advance and adapt and keep evolving.”
She and her colleagues at Sparc, who run the first digital mural laboratory in the United States, are campaigning to persuade cities to make available empty space for public painting.
But patronage from a city can lead to restrictions on the subject matter. When Sparc worked in 1994/95 on a mural celebrating the Black Panthers, there were problems, too. The artists received warnings that their work would provoke a riot.
Attempts to water down content are becoming more common, Baca said. “We get direct calls from police departments saying, ‘We don’t think this is a very good idea.'”