The Highland Park mural war erupted in earnest in 2017, when two city-owned sites – including the wall with the Frank Romero-esque heart – were whitewashed, and a radical group calling itself Restorative Justice for the Arts started accusing local city officials of colluding with incoming property speculators to destroy the neighborhood.Ī building on the corner of Figueroa Street and Avenue 58 is up for lease.
Commissioning new artwork, meanwhile, often proves perilous, as muralists endure personal taunts and threats as they paint and never know when their work will get spray-bombed with loud slogans telling the hipsters and gentrifiers to go back where they came from. Old murals, even those protected under a 2013 citywide ordinance, continue to disappear without warning, triggering noisy protests. Now, the consternation that Gallegos and others once felt has degenerated into a full-blown conflict, with the murals of Highland Park acting as a proxy battleground for a variety of other tensions – over property prices, the pace of gentrification, tenant evictions, the integrity of once-venerated local artists, and the ability of local city officials to act as honest brokers between the competing interest groups. But Gallegos and many others in Highland Park recognized that these new erasures were different: the result of dizzying change in one of the most rapidly gentrifying parts of LA and, it seemed, a failure by the newcomers to understand the culture of the neighborhood they were starting to call their own. Urban murals are fragile artworks at the best of times, subject to the whims of taggers who may deface them, and of property owners who often want to paint over them or knock down the walls. A mural on the wall of the Highland Park Florist in Los Angeles was painted by Rodolfo Cardona in 2018.
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