Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles

The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles formed in 1987 to protect the Chicano mural tradition that had flowered across East Los Angeles, Wilmington, San Pedro, Boyle Heights, and Pacoima through the 1970s and 1980s. The city’s graffiti-abatement policies, property-owner whitewashing, and weather damage had begun to destroy public murals at a faster rate than artists and community groups could replace them.

The Conservancy maintains an online database of more than 2,000 Los Angeles murals and a restoration program that works with original artists, apprentice painters, and community groups to repaint weathered murals, often to the original specifications. The restoration work in Wilmington has kept the visual record of Mexican-American harbor-area communities legible on the same walls where the artists first painted it during the Chicano Movement decades.

The Conservancy draws a direct line from the Harbor Freeway’s displacement of Wilmington’s residential grid in the 1950s and 1960s to the community muralism that emerged along the freeway’s edges in the 1970s. The murals held the names, faces, and stories the federal highway program and the state Division of Highways had erased from the street grid. The preservation work is the organizing counterpart to keeping that record visible in the landscape the communities still inhabit.