My new career as mural detective started, as such things do, with a morsel of intriguing information. In the course of writing about Eduardo Carrillo’s retrospective at the Museum of Art & History last year I saw an image of the mural that Carrillo and his UCSC students painted in the tunnel entrance to El Palomar Restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz and learned that, decades ago, this powerful work, called Birth, Death and Regeneration, was painted over.
Months later, while researching the history of murals in the U.S. for a grant-writing project, I realized that in California at least, murals have been as close to a Rosetta Stone of social evolution as this young culture has. The Old World had a thousand years to make stone buildings with faces of the mighty peeking down from parapets. In the left coast of the New World, though, a freeway overpass or the concrete wall of a tilt-up civic building might be as significant a site on which to depict the faces of The People.
The mural tradition in the United States was inspired by the Mexican Muralist movement of the 1930s, a time of great turmoil when the Mexican government commissioned artists to paint inspirational or political imagery on walls of public institutions. This flowering of art by such mighty painters as Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros and Jose Orozco was a model for the program in U.S. public buildings funded by FDR’s Works Progress Administration, the source of some of the country’s most beloved public art. The most famous WPA murals in the Bay Area reside in San Francisco’s Coit Tower, the Anton Refregier murals in the Rincon Center and the frescos by Lucien Labaudt in what is now the Beach Chalet. In Santa Cruz, the Henrietta Shore murals in the Santa Cruz Post Office lobby were commissioned by a program that grew out of the WPA, the Treasury Relief Art Project of 1935. Shore’s murals honor the laborers in local fields, fisheries and quarries.
Since that time, murals on public building have largely been funded by local ordinances or by private funding. Murals on private property are often a business owner’s gift to its neighborhood, depicting local scenes and characters.
Businesses change, however, and many beloved murals have been lost. I am now researching these lost murals in order to recapture them for history. If you remember a mural that once resided in Santa Cruz County but is no longer, please contact me at [email protected] with as much detail as you remember. The outcome of this research will reside in the MAH’s historical archive and in a national database for public art, assuring the art its proper place in history. Read more at KUSP.org/exhibitionist.
