Why does the San Pedro Waterfront Arts District focus on creating public artwork for this community?
Because we know the goal of public art is to make us engage with art every single day. Our relationship with the arts is essential for the social and cultural aspects of a society. Public art extends beyond the gallery space and out into the real world, giving access to huge audiences from all walks of life. No longer confined to commemorative statues featuring dead white men and horses, contemporary artists have broadened the scope of public art to encompass a wide range of media, from mirrored abstractions to acts of political protest.
You may have seen the CNN and 60 Minutes stories about the artist JR. He began his career as a teenage graffiti artist, and by his own admission, he was not interested in changing the world but in making his mark on public space and society. After finding a camera in the Paris Metro, JR and his friends began to document the act of his graffiti painting. At 17, he started applying photocopies of these photographs to outdoor walls, creating illegal “sidewalk gallery” exhibitions.
In 2007, JR put up enormous photos of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities on either side of the separation barrier. Upon his return to Paris, he pasted these portraits up in the capital. For the artist, this artistic act is first and foremost a human project: “The heroes of the project are all those who, on both sides of the wall, allowed me to paste the portraits on their houses.”
JR calls himself an “urban artivist” — he creates pervasive art that he puts up on the buildings in the Paris area projects, on the walls of the Middle East, on the broken bridges of Africa, or in the favelas of Brazil. During the pasting phase, community members take part in the artistic process. In Brazil, for example, children became artists for a week. In these creative acts, no scene separates the actors from the spectators.
How does this desire for community engagement manifest itself in San Pedro? The Arts District received a 2022 Community Grant from the Port of L.A. to paint a mural on the side of the Los Angeles Maritime Institute’s Building G shop. To accomplish this, we will continue our community public art program, Adventures in Public Art. Conceived in June 2019, our goal is to give high school art students and community members hands-on experiences creating public art. This six-week mural workshop program is designed to engage participants in public art projects, encourage more astute arts enthusiasts, and foster a sense of community ownership and inclusion.
High school students were given community credit hours and were urged to include this program on their resumes and college applications. All workshop participants were given sketchbooks and were encouraged to use them for mural imagery.
We hired a teaching artist to guide the students through the foundations of design, perspective, color theory, and public murals while working collaboratively with the property owner and us to create an acceptable, appropriate mural image.
Adventures in Public Art consists of two parts: a design phase and a construction phase. By the conclusion of the design phase, the teaching artist used student work and feedback from the property owner to formulate a design for a mural to be executed on a wall in San Pedro during the project’s next phase. After the first phase concluded, there was a three-week construction period where the teaching artist executed the finalized design with the volunteer assistance of participants from the design phase.
Before the program began, we worked with the chosen teaching artist to finalize a lesson plan. The teaching artist led workshop participants through activities focused on producing the visual material to serve as the basis of the mural design. During this process, the teaching artist produced a design for the mural, incorporating the student’s work and the property owner’s feedback, as well as a reasonable schedule for executing the approved design within the project period.
The project started in mid-June 2019 and concluded six weeks later with a formal mural unveiling ceremony during the August 2019 First Thursday ArtWalk.
Want to participate? Visit SanPedroWaterfrontArtsDistrict.com in early 2023 for details. spt
Do you have arts and culture story ideas? Please share them — email to 55lindagrimes@gmail.com.
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