Forging connections between lost L.A. murals and muralism in San Francisco

Most good ideas, the ones that last long enough to be executed, are birthed through trial and error. That was what the Exquisite Mural Project was - hard work, laden with questions that needed to be answered, but ultimately a product of love. It was born out of a desire to share the exhibition Murales Rebeldes: L. A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege (co-produced with LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes), with young people, to help forge connections between lost and disappearing murals in Los Angeles and muralism in San Francisco, and to always emphasizing that each individual could be and is an artist in his/her/their own right.

It began with the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse. Exquisite Corpse is played with a piece of paper folded (portrait style) into thirds. One person draws the top portion, another draws the middle, and the final person completes the bottom portion. The surprise is that no one can see what the prior person drew, so when it is completed, an oftentimes wild and hilarious image is produced. Jessica Hough, CHS's Director of Exhibitions, loved the game and told me about how artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo played it, albeit in a much more tongue in cheek way. Drawing from that concept, I thought it would be really fun to take a large piece of paper, fold it (landscape style) into thirds and have different students, artists, friends, and colleagues join in. The final "exquisite mural" piece would have three different people communicating across it, from different times, different locations, and perhaps without ever meeting each other. It was exciting to think of what connections, disconnections, and continuities might appear. Thus, The Exquisite Mural Project was born! That was the idea.

Mural created as a collaboration by three participants during the Exquisite Mural project

All good ideas face the challenge of execution. Who would do it? How would we do it? What if it didn't work? What if the kids didn't understand the concept? These questions helped us develop the the project and avoid many pitfalls, but not all of them! I began to work with my colleagues at CHS to identify after school and summer programs we might collaborate with. I immediately thought of Mission Beacon, an after-school summer program that we have worked with in the past. Another colleague suggested Jamestown and introduced me to his contact there. We were on our way to the answer of one of our questions: who would do it?

In order to figure out how the project would work, several CHS staff members from different departments came together to share ideas and concepts. Each person presented a few options and we even brought in an outside arts educator who offered great feedback and ideas. Finally, we devised the process: sites and site supervisors would be informed of the project ahead of time and would be sent examples of completed Exquisite Murals, in order to prepare them for the project and a visit to CHS. Groups of students would come to CHS, where they would meet a docent who would engage them in a discussion about muralism, graffiti, and the public art in their own communities. The group would then have a conversation with the docent inside the exhibition galleries about concepts embedded in the murals and stories on display: the Chicano Movement, social activism, art making, and preservation. Finally, they would sit down with snacks, be taught the "exquisite mural" concept, and create their own piece of art.

(L to R) CHS Executive Director Anthea Hartig, Programs & Visitor Experience Manager Patricia Pforte, poet Eileen Torrez, Guest Concierge & Docent Erik Zuniga, and L.A. muralist Ernesto de la Loza.

Once we had the project concepts nailed down, I elicited feedback from staff at Mission Beacon and Jamestown  to ensure that the project would work well with their students. I learned that it was essential to have docents that spoke Spanish as well as English, that the kids receive snacks, and that the trip be several hours long. They also made suggestions as to how to engage the students with the content. I took that feedback and incorporated it into the project.

We decided to do a test-run of the project shortly after the opening of Murales Rebeldes in San Francisco in April. Barbara Carrasco, one of the exhibition’s featured artists, was in town, and was eager to participate. We learned a lot from the trial run, including the importance of language skills, and that every group was unique and required flexibility.

One of the first changes that we made was involving Erik Zuniga, who works at CHS as a Guest Concierge. Erik had expressed interest in the exhibition, is originally from Los Angeles, and is bi-lingual. After Erik confirmed his availability, we discussed the types of questions we might ask the kids and devised strategies to engage them if they strayed from the content or became bored. We continued to re-work the tour and after each one, discussed new strategies and questions to pose. Towards the end, Erik independently devised methods that were successful with the younger kids. So much of the project involved circling back, occasionally abandoning old processes for new ones, and not being too hard on ourselves when things did not go as planned. I reminded myself, Erik, and others that keeping it simple and being flexible would be our constant friends during this process. Those two ideas stayed with us through the project’s four months.

So, what came of all of this? We served 250 individuals from after school and summer camp groups from Mission Beacon and Jamestown between April and July, and brought the project to the Oakland Museum of California to serve another 100 people, bringing our total reach to 350. We also hosted tours from schools across San Francisco, Dewitt Anderson School, and a Mission dance group, among others. With hundreds of kids inspired by the exhibition and now aware of its message, we could step back and be proud of the work.

Exquisite Murals adorning the gallery walls above the ¡Murales Rebeldes! exhibition. 

What did we learn? We learned to reach out and collaborate, take suggestions and try out new ideas, utilize our strengths, and think positively in challenging moments. Lastly, we learned to expand and contract the project based on our needs as well as those of  the group. Erik also developed new skills, and got to work with muralists from Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

I look back at this project with great fondness and am reminded of what it taught me: that if you have a good idea, remember to think about how to execute it and do that thinking with all the people involved. With collaboration as your shining light and your foundation, you can never go wrong.

Watch a video of our Exquisite Mural celebration and poetry reading:

by Patty Pforte, Programs & Visitor Experience Manager

Engaging Local Youth Through Exquisite Mural Project

During the Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, public murals became an essential form of artist response and public voice. They were a means of challenging the status quo and expressing both pride and frustration during a time when other channels of communication were limited for the Mexican American community. Because they threatened established authority, Chicana/o murals were often censored, neglected, whitewashed, or destroyed

As part of the current exhibition ¡Murales Rebeldes!—L.A. Chicana/o Murals under Siege, the California Historical Society created a program to engage youth, many of Latino heritage, who live and go to school in the Mission District of San Francisco, an area renowned for its murals. We named the program Exquisite Mural after the old parlor game “exquisite corpse,” in which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled.

Over the course of the program, roughly 200 students from Jamestown Community Center and Mission Community Beacon joined us in our gallery to take part in the project.

Before the children participated in the Exquisite Mural Project, I lead them on a tour of the gallery and discussed three of the mural artists featured in the exhibition. The kids have shown an incredible amount of empathy for the artists, asking multiple times “Why did they have to paint over the mural? Why did they have to destroy the mural?” The children are also very keen on knowing if the muralists were still alive and were fascinated when told that I had met a few of them. Some of the kids were able to meet muralist Ernesto de la Loza, who led a personal tour of his section of the exhibition and stayed to participate in the mural making activity.

Resurrection of the Green Planet by Ernesto de la Loza

In our version of the game, a mini mural is created collaboratively as a triptych, which basically means a three-part picture. A child would complete the first panel of the picture, then, two mural artists, one from Los Angeles and one from San Francisco, each drew on one of the remaining two panels. The person drawing did not know what the person before them had created due to the paper being folded, rendering the other images hidden. I explained to the kids that they might treat the Exquisite Mural as a concept drawing that they could use to build on if they were to paint a full-scale mural.

Using stories as a backdrop, the youth explored themes raised by the exhibition and its featured mural artists such as displacement, activism, immigration, cultural heritage, racism, memory, feminism, and censorship. The art created by the kids embodied similar ideas with many of the kids expressing pride towards their heritage by painting the flags of countries from where they or their families are from. Much of the art included imagery of peace, unity, and friendship.

The most fulfilling thing about this project was seeing the kids who were initially adamant about “not being able to draw” or saw themselves as “not artists” come up with really creative pieces of art inspired by iconography that they saw in the gallery. Some spoke with me about how they were used to seeing the Virgen de Guadalupe at home. Mermaids and dinosaurs were other popular subjects that resonated with the group. These conversations were a great opportunity to help the kids understand that anybody can be an artist and that each muralist they had learned about were once kids themselves.

The Exquisite Mural art will be showcased in the CHS galleries beginning August 25th. We plan to celebrate the hanging of the murals with the youth participants and their family during an afternoon reception, poetry reading, and discussion with artists of all ages.

by Erik Zuniga, Guest Concierge and Exquisite Mural project group leader

This Day in History - May 20, 1942: “S.F. Clear of All But 6 Sick Japs”

Clem Albers (Photographer), Evidence of the Forthcoming Evacuation of Residents of Japanese Ancestry, San Francisco, March 29, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library 

From May 1942 to January 1945, in the name of national security, nearly 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry occupied ten permanent camps in isolated inland areas for the duration of World War II. Their forced evacuations and relocations following the bombing of Pearl Harbor were not secret: there was much controversy over the government’s action, and a number of photographers officially documented the event.

Nevertheless, it was not until the 1970s that individuals and institutions—within and outside Japanese American communities, where they were a source of shame—began to open a wider window into this egregious chapter of American history.

On this day seventy-five years ago, as the San Francisco Chronicle recorded, “for the first time in 81 years, not a single Japanese is walking the streets of San Francisco.” Today, we remember the incarceration of Japanese Americans through the work of one press photographer whose “professional eye,” scholar Arielle Emmett notes, “captured contradicting realities between the government and public perceptions of the Japanese and the people themselves.”

Clem Albers (1903–1990)

 

Courtesy http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html

Under contract by the War Relocation Authority’s Information Division, San Francisco Chronicle press photographer Clem Albers photographed the incarceration of Japanese Americans, primarily in northern to southern California. From March to late April/early May 1942, with his 4-by-5-inch Speed Graphic press camera, he documented relocations to and arrivals at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Poston camps. After his brief assignment, he was a warrant officer at the U.S. Maritime Service, returning to his job with the San Francisco Chronicle after the war.

Clem Albers, Impounded Japanese American automobiles,

Manzanar Relocation Center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, A truck packed with Japanese American residents of San Pedro, California, leaves for a temporary detention center, April 5, 1942

Courtesy extranewsfeed.com

Clem Albers, While military police stand guard, this detachment watches arrival of evacuees at Manzanar War Relocation Authority center, April 2, 1942

Courtesy The Bancroft Library

One of Albers’ photographs contrasts a young girl wearing simple clothes and a kerchief around her head with a sign that calls her barracks “Manzanar Mansion.” As Arielle Emmett writes in a study of internee portraiture, he “depicted the emotional extremes of evacuees in a full range of facial expressions, including frowns, grimaces, and even the ‘beguiling’ smile that he may have encouraged in his quick, ‘get it done’ newspaper style.”

Clem Albers, “Manzanar, Calif.—In the doorway of her barrack apartment at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry,” 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

As we now know, the U.S. government impounded not only cars of Japanese families, but also
photographs taken of the incarcerations, such as the military’s oversight of camps and residents. As the New York Times has observed, “Photographs of barbed wire, machine gun-wielding guards or dissent within the camps were forbidden . . . photographs of resiliency and civic engagement in the camps were encouraged.” And as Karen J. Leong notes, “particularly those depicting the reality of armed guards supervising the evacuees” were censored.

Such images by Albers and other internment photographers, notably Dorothea Lange, were reviewed by military commanders and branded “Impounded.” Housed at the National Archives, where they were rediscovered only in the last decade, they have lost their restricted status.

Clem Albers, Military police officers checking their weapons at

Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Clem Albers, Dressed in uniform marking service in the First World War, 
this veteran enters Santa Anita assembly center for persons of Japanese ancestry 
evacuated from the West Coast, 1942

Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration

Today, internment photography continues to have wide-ranging impact: from connections made between the internment and the current administration’s call for Muslim bans and registries, to studies about prison photography, to representations by contemporary artists of minority populations and their roles in the histories of communities, cities, and nations.

One example is Albers’ haunting and perhaps most iconic image depicting the mass relocations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. His 1942 photograph of two-year-old Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa awaiting evacuation at Union Station in Los Angeles found relevance nearly forty years later in L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a mural by Chicana artist Barbara Carrasco.

Clem Albers, A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before

leaving by bus for an assembly center, April 1942

Courtesy National Archives

Ironically, Carrasco’s mural, featuring scenes of the marginalization of Los Angeles’s minorities among more celebratory historic events, itself was censored. Objections to less laudable depictions of the city’s history were, perhaps, unwelcomed during Los Angeles’s bicentennial (1981) and Summer Olympic (1984) festivities.

Detail, Barbara Carrasco, L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective, 1981 (Censored 1981)

California Historical Society/LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes; photograph by Sean Meredith

Even how we speak about the internment era is undergoing change. Organizations such as Densho suggests internment terminology conforming to the Resolution on Terminology put forth by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which has recognized the limitations of the wartime-era terminologies in today’s world. For example, “relocation” is suggested as “imprisonment, incarceration, internment, detention, confinement.” “Relocation camps” are better described as “internment camps, detention camps, prison camps, or concentration camps.”

At a press conference on October 20, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called relocation centers “concentration camps,” despite the War Relocation Authority’s denial of the term’s accuracy. Seventy-five years later, we have come full circle.

Shelly Kale

Publications and Strategic Projects Manager

skale@calhist.org

Sources

Tim Chambers, “Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of FDR’s Concentration Camps,” https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

Chronology of WWII Incarceration; http://www.janm.org/projects/clasc/chronology.htm

Arielle Emmett, “Silent Soliloquy: An Unknown Photographer Chronicles the ‘Inscrutable Laughter’ of Japanese American Internment,” Visual Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2, 2013; http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hvcq20/20/2

James Estrin, “A Lesson from the 1940s: ‘America Is Capable of Being Un-American,’”

Feb. 23, 2017; https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/a-lesson-from-the-1940s-america-is-capable-of-being-un-american/?_r=0

Karen J. Leong, “Envisioning a Usable Past,” in Todd Stewart, Placing Memory: A Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)

Resolution on Terminology, “Civil Liberties Public Education Fund; http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html

“S.F. Clear of All but 6 Sick Japs,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 1942

Patricia Wakida, “Clem Albers,” Densho Encyclopedia; http://encyclopedia.densho.org/Clem%20Albers/

WWII Japanese American Internment and Relocation Records in the National Archives: Introduction; https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/internment-intro

Read more about Japanese internment on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/it-cant-happen-here-executive-order.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/01/this-day-in-history-precedent-for.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-this-day-february-19-1942.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/02/day-of-remembrance-2017-75th.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-quiet-civil-rights-hero-mitsuye-endos_27.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/day-of-remembrance.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/02/this-day-in-history-california.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/12/day-of-infamy-75-years-later.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/04/ms-mondayppie-part-2-anti-japanese.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/05/uncovering-history-through-art-and.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/08/this-day-in-history-august-10-us-rights.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/11/70-years-ago-today-world-war-ii.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/12/this-day-in-history-bombing-of-pearl.html

Barbara Carrasco’s mural is part of CHS’s forthcoming exhibition and publication ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Art under Siege. Read more on the CHS blog:

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/murals-creating-legacy.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/honoring-cesar-chavez-march-31-201.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2017/03/new-grant-for-murales-rebeldes-la.html

http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/10/murales-rebeldes-contested-chicanao.html

Cinco de Mayo: Two Wars, Two Nations, and a Holiday with California Origins

Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, Fountain Valley Mural (1974–76)  

Detail, Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862 

Copyright © O’Cadiz Family Private Collection

155 years ago years today, on May 5, 1862, an assault was waged by French soldiers against Mexico. Its outcome was decided when Mexican troops victoriously defended their country. The Battle of Pueblo, an early battle of the 6-year-long French-Mexican War, helped transform a country divided by regional interests into one united against foreign intervention.

It was a David-and-Goliath story: 2,000 Mexican soldiers prevailing against 6,000 well-provisioned troops of the world’s most powerful and largest army. The battle began at daybreak, and when it concluded with the French in retreat, only 100 Mexican soldiers had been killed, compared to nearly 500 enemy forces.

Battle of May 5, 1862

Museo Nacional de la Intervenciones, Ex Convento de Churubusco, INAH

Across the border in the United States, where Latinos of Mexican heritage anxiously followed the conflict, Spanish-language newspapers in California reported the victory. As David Hayes-Bautista writes in his groundbreaking book El Cinco de Mayo: An American Tradition: “In town after town, camp after camp, mine after mine, ranch after ranch, Latinos eagerly absorbed the news. Those who could read shared the glorious details with their illiterate fellows, and up and down the state, Latinos savored the blow-by-blow reporting from the front lines of the conflict that had so riveted their attention.”

However, these celebrations were not just for the Mexican homeland. The United States itself was engaged in Civil War, and Latinos sought to preserve California’s status as a “free state,” particularly as Confederate soldiers advanced into New Mexico and Arizona. “When Latinos here got the news that French were stopped at Puebla, it electrified the population, and propelled them to a new level of civic participation. Latinos joined the Union army and navy and some went back to Mexico to fight the French,” Hayes-Bautista explained in an interview.

In parades throughout the state, Latinos proclaimed their support against French imperialism in Mexico and against the Confederacy in the United States, carrying U.S. and Mexican flags and singing their anthems. As Bautista-Hayes writes, “Cinco de Mayo was made in America, by Latinos who proudly bore the U.S. and Mexican flags to show their support for both the Union and its values and for the Mexican victory over the French, who sought to undermine those values.”

Daniel Greene, Romualdo Pacheco, 2005

Collection of the U.S. House of Representatives

Many Mexican Americans in California (called Native Californians during that era) joined volunteer units of the Union Army. In 1863, Governor Leland Stanford commissioned Romualdo Pacheco—who later became California’s twelfth governor, the only Hispanic to serve in that position to date—as a brigadier general in the California state militia. Pacheco commanded Hispanic troops in the First Brigade of the Native Cavalry of the California Volunteers. As cavalry recruits, these Californios from the state’s vast ranchos were expert horsemen, skilled as lancers, and experienced in the field.

California Lancers, 1846

Published in Tom Prezelski, Californio Lancers: The 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry in the Far West, 

1863–1866 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co./University of Oklahoma Press, 2015)

Captain Antonio Maria de la Guerra

Company C, First Battalion, Native California Cavalry

Courtesy www.findagrave.com

The Native California Cavalry in California, 1863–1865

Courtesy www.militarymuseum.org

With its origins in 1860s California, Cinco de Mayo was rediscovered 100 years later. During the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican Americans across the nation—primarily in the Southwest—protested inequalities for U.S. Latinos. Chicana/Chicano muralists also took to the streets, embedding their expressions of cultural pride, their heritage, and their challenges to the status quo on the walls of city buildings, housing projects, and other community structures. Though many are no longer visible, to this day Chicana/o murals remain an integral part of self-expression, Chicana/Chicano culture and heritage, and a significant contribution to the historical record.

(Detail) Cinco de Mayo, May 5, 1976 

Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma, Fountain Valley Mural, 1974–76

Copyright © O’Cadiz Family Private Collection

An example is the sequence of 25 scenes that comprise Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s Fountain Valley Mural, painted in the Colonia Juarez neighborhood from 1974 to 1976 but destroyed in 2009. Beginning with the arrival of Mexican peasants in California when Orange County was still farmland, the mural’s narrative jumps into the future to the Chicano Movement, and then goes back in time to tell the history of modern Mexico. With the mural’s replacement by a bland block wall, a significant part of Colonia Juarez’s unique and colorful history was lost.

Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org

Sources

• Romualdo Pacheco, 1831–1899; https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-108hdoc225/pdf/GPO-CDOC-108hdoc225-2-2-6.pdf
• David E. Hayes-Bautista, “Cinco de Mayo—a truly Mexican American holiday,” March 5, 2014; http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/05/opinion/la-oe-hayes-bautista-cinco-de-mayo-20140305  
• Michael Martinez, “Cinco de Mayo history: Not exactly a Mexican import,” May 4, 2016; http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/05/us/cinco-de-mayo-origins/ 
• Tom Prezelski, “Lives of the California Lancers: The First Battalion of Native California Cavalry, 1863–1866; http://www.militarymuseum.org/1stNatCavCV.html 

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Learn more about Chicana/o murals in September 2017

The stories of Southern California murals whose messages were almost lost forever

A PUBLICATION of the California Historical Society and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes in association with Angel City Press, Los Angeles

AN EXHIBITION at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes, Los Angeles, September 20, 2017–February 27, 2018

Part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank of America.