The community enthusiasm impressed city officials, who commissioned Hanrahan and Mora for $36,000 to reprise the project. Then there was the elderly man who asked that he be figured into a panel showing “Salad Bowl Curve,” where produce trucks often spilled over in front of the city jail, because he was proud to have been a trusted inmate allowed out to help pick up the mess. One woman provided a photograph of her father who was killed during World War II, and the artists, as a tribute to his sacrifice, painted him into a portrait of surviving soldiers based on a different photograph. The tagger’s bandage was placed like a label under one of the girls in the picture with these words in tiny letters: “Me, graduated at 16 years old.” One of the pictures shows the 1948 graduating class of Holy Cross, the Catholic school next to Mission San Buenaventura. The neighborhood snapshots, some of which inspired the paintings, are ingeniously mounted on colorful boards and scattered throughout the work, which lines both sides of the street. Almost forgotten, many of the former residents are now depicted larger than life in a series of painted panels on a steel grid under the Figueroa Street overpass, between the old mission and the ocean. The tagger had targeted one of the historic photographs used in the mural to celebrate the displaced residents of Tortilla Flats, a lively, multieth- nic neighborhood on Ventura’s west side, just north of Surfers Point. ![]() Instead of writing directly on the artwork, the tagger left a message on the back of an adhesive bandage, which was then applied as carefully as a mother treating a scrape on a child. ![]() The tagger was considerate, however, taking pains not to mar the piece, which commemorates a neighborhood destroyed in the 1950s to make way for the 101 Freeway. It took just one month for a new freeway mural in Ventura to be hit by graffiti.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |