Art for the People

The enduring history of the freeway murals in Los Angeles, and their future at the 2028 Olympics.

by

The Latest

This summer, more than 560,000 fans gathered in Los Angeles, California to watch the World Cup. With its duties as a host city for the FIFA World Cup now over, Los Angeles is now redirecting its focus to another international sporting event: the 2028 Summer Olympics. It will have been forty-four years since the city last hosted the Summer Games—and since Alonzo Davis, activist and artist, brought Los Angeles muralism to the Olympic stage.

After travelling to cities like New York and Chicago, Davis noticed the West coast lacked a space where Black artists could come together. In 1967, Davis co-founded the Brockman Gallery with his brother, one of the first Black-owned art galleries in Los Angeles. Following his involvement in securing a mural site for the Los Angeles Bicentennial in 1982, Davis saw a chance to further his public art goals. He wanted to enhance the 1984 Olympics by creating murals around the city that showcased Los Angeles’s diverse culture. The project would be the first time artists used the U.S. 101 freeway as a canvas for their art.

As the director of the Olympic Mural Project, an initiative formed by the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Davis chose ten artists inclusive of the total Los Angeles community, among them Judy Baca, a Chicana muralist known for The Great Wall of Los Angeles, Kent Twitchell, known for his large realistic murals across Los Angeles, Frank Romero, a pioneer in the Chicano art movement, and Davis himself.

But finding a location for the murals was a tougher task. “We needed ten sites, and we needed ten highly visible sites,” Davis later said in an interview with the University of California, Los Angeles, Library Center for Oral History Research.

While putting murals on the freeway had never been done before, Davis saw the 101 freeway as an ideal site for the project. 

“[It was], from my vantage point, the most visible place in the city, where the most amount of people travel. It was the gateway from the Hollywood Freeway and the Harbor Freeway into the [Los Angeles Memorial] Coliseum area where the games would actually take place,” Davis told the UCLA Library Center.

After being approved by the California Department of Transportation, known as Caltrans, the ten murals along the freeway were underway. That summer, the 5.79 million people who attended the Summer Games passed murals like Baca’s “Hitting the Wall: Women in the Marathon,” which commemorates the first women’s marathon in Olympic history. In the mural, a female marathoner crosses a finish line, breaking down the walls that prevented women from being Olympians.

Other murals, like Frank Romero’s “Going to the Olympics,” highlight the influence of Chicano and Latin American car culture on Los Angeles’s greater culture.

Together, the murals create a comprehensive and inclusive perspective of the Los Angeles community. Over time, the Olympic murals have struggled to receive proper care and maintenance. Aside from natural wear and tear, murals are targets for graffiti. 

The murals’ forty-two-year lifespan reflects a bigger issue: Public art is not seen by city governments as valuable enough to both protect and keep visible. Maintaining public art is not only costly, but time-consuming and complex. Graffiti-removal techniques include high-pressure powerwashing, chemical solvents, and repainting. Last year, Los Angeles and Ventura counties spent $4.2 million removing nearly four million square feet of graffiti, according to a statement by Caltrans District 7 to The Progressive. 

In late January of this year, Caltrans chose to take a cheaper, simpler approach to protect the seven remaining Olympic murals. The department installed artificial ivy along the U.S. 101 freeway, concealing the murals from the almost 241,000 vehicles that travel to downtown Los Angeles via the freeway.

In a written statement to ABC News, a spokesperson for Caltrans said: “Due to mural and related agreements at this location and several walls along the U.S. 101 in downtown Los Angeles, Caltrans is not legally allowed to paint over or remove graffiti. As a temporary measure, to protect the mural artworks, Caltrans has been installing artificial ivy which has aesthetic benefits and acts as a graffiti deterrent and is a more environmentally friendly solution to graffiti removal.”

This isn’t the first time Caltrans has struggled with protecting these murals from graffiti. In 2007, Caltrans coated the murals with an environmentally friendly organic material and then covered them with gray paint, which could later be peeled away. The department said at the time its intention was to protect the murals until it had the funds to restore them. 

It wasn’t until 2013 that the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles started restoring the murals in advance of their thirtieth anniversary. Three murals—Wyatt’s “James and Spectators,” Sykes’s “Unity,” and Davis’s “Eye on 84”—were wrecked due to a lack of maintenance. These murals are all protected by the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) under moral rights, which give artists ownership of their work regardless of who owns the physical piece. Under VARA, artists can prevent their work from being destructed, distorted, or modified if it damages their reputation or intention behind the piece. In 2019, an anonymous freeway graffiti paint-over program covered up Baca’s “Hitting the Wall” without the artist’s knowledge. As a result of VARA, Baca should have received a ninety-day notice of the intention to cover the mural, but she did not. In response to this violation, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) took accountability for the incident and agreed to work with the Social and Public Art Resource Center, a nonprofit founded by Baca, to restore the mural. Baca chose not to take legal action.

While the cost of maintaining murals may be high, the historic value of these murals will only rise. In 1984, each artist received $15,000 for their work from the International Olympic Committee. Now, these murals are estimated to be valued at millions of dollars. Their size, location, and historical significance prove they not only need to be protected, but displayed.

In a written statement to The Progressive, Caltrans District 7 stated the artificial ivy “will remain in place until the mural artists come to a decision about what to do with the murals.” 

It is unclear what will happen to the murals or how long they will remain behind artificial ivy. But the community hopes that the remaining murals will be restored in time to greet the anticipated twelve to fifteen million people projecting to attend the Olympics in 2028. 

In an interview with the University of California, Los Angeles, Library Center for Oral History Research, Davis said when news broke of the city’s intention to paint murals along the freeway, many residents feared the project would cause car accidents. Instead, the murals “[took] the monotonous quality of freeway driving in [the] slow, drudging, rush-hour section of downtown Los Angeles and [made] it a little more interesting.”

And while graffiti remains a concern of Caltrans and the artists themselves, the maintenance of the 1984 Olympic Murals is a necessity because of the mark it has left on Los Angeles muralism. What Bob Goodall, art coordinator for Caltrans in 1984, once described as “a wedding of public art and the freeway system [and] a breakthrough in the use of the freeway system as an artistic background” is now a “way to present the region to the world and say ‘something special about the city.’”

Forty-two years later, the Olympic Murals’ ability to withstand vandalism and erasure speaks to the resilience of the Los Angeles communities they depict and the need for this piece of history to be preserved and amplified.