How Do You Keep a Mural Alive?

Murals transform ordinary walls into brilliantly painted artworks, filling our streets with the symbols and stories of our communities.

Their bright colors and bold artistic style can literally stop us in our tracks. Yet it’s all too easy for passersby to take murals for granted. Designing a mural, obtaining the necessary permissions to add one to a city wall, enduring the often-grueling process of bringing the design to life, and fighting off destructive forces like weather and vandalism isn’t easy. In fact, says Los Angeles muralist Judith F. Baca, at one point there were over 5,000 murals in L.A., and only around 50 percent remain. It takes a dedicated team to keep each mural alive.

Baca, Getty Museum senior curator of drawings Julian Brooks, and Getty Conservation Institute senior project specialist Leslie Rainer teamed up to de-mystify how murals are created and maintained. We invited our social media followers to share their questions, and our team of mural experts went to work answering them.

Life as a Muralist

What are some pros/cons of murals in cities?

Leslie Rainer: Murals can beautify neighborhoods, bring together communities, convey ideas and tell stories, and greatly enhance the life of cities. Those are just a few of the pros. On the other hand, murals can suffer damage, deterioration and/or neglect, and must be maintained, which can be costly for cities to manage.

What is the most difficult part about creating a mural? How long does it take?

Judy Baca: The most difficult part is beginning the communication with the people you are painting it for and determining what the community needs. What would elevate that community? The second part is research and design and the creation of the maquette (model), which is more than 50 percent of the process. The easiest part is the actual production after everything else has been created. How long it takes depends on the scale of the mural and how difficult the site is to work with.

Do you need city permits to develop art murals?

L. Rainer: The City of Los Angeles has a Mural Ordinance to allow original art murals to be painted on private property. These must be registered. There is also a process for creating public art murals.

Judy, how did you begin your career in painting murals?

J. Baca: I painted my first mural while working with youth. I was teaching live drawing in a high school and the students didn't get along with each other, so I created a plan for them to work together to make one drawing and blow it up 10 times larger. They each worked on a different section, and then we put it all together and hung it from a second story window. That created a team, a collaboration. I saw the power of it. I saw through my work with youth how they used the walls as a community newspaper, a billboard, so it was natural for them to think of big walls as places to communicate.

What inspired you to create your murals Hitting the Wall and La Salsera?

J. Baca: “Hitting the wall” is a term used to describe runners hitting the 24th mile when running a 26-mile run. At that point they are often completely out of energy and resources in their body. They therefore must run on pure will. When the Olympics came to L.A. in 1984, women were allowed to compete in the marathon event for the very first time. I was commissioned by the Olympic Organizing Committee to produce a mural for the 110 freeway (nine other artists were also asked to create murals). I felt that the story of breaking through barriers represented women’s lives in general. In fact, it was the story of all people of color in Los Angeles.

La Salsera is about a domestic worker running to catch the bus in MacArthur Park and behind her are caretakers with babies. Though she suffers many hardships, she is resilient and joyful and represents the economic underpinnings of L.A. It is on display in the west pavilion at the Getty Center until at least June 2023 (the Judy Baca: Hitting the Wall exhibition will close on September 4).

Where did the idea come from to create your mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles?

J. Baca: The idea came about when the Army Corps of Engineers completed the concreting of the L.A. River and began to see that there were eyesores on either side of the river and that the work completed was aesthetically unpleasing for the entire L.A. River system. They approached me to work with them to create a mural that would run along a greenbelt and park along the river. I proposed this idea of doing narrative work and that's how it began. But I had no idea in the beginning that work on the mural would still be ongoing.

Were any iconic murals in L.A. painted over?

L. Rainer: Many iconic murals in L.A. have been painted over. David Alfaro Siqueiros’s murals Street Meeting and América Tropical, Kent Twitchell’s Ed Ruscha, Frank Romero’s Going to the 1984 Olympics on the 101 freeway, Jane Golden’s Muir Woods in Santa Monica, Judy Baca’s Hitting the Wall (which has since been recovered), and hundreds of others. Sometimes artists will repaint their murals. Some murals are uncovered and conserved or restored. Other murals, sadly, are lost.

J. Baca: At one point in Los Angeles there was a recording of over 5,000 murals and I would say that we have lost about 50 percent of that legacy or more, and no comprehensive survey of all murals in L.A. has been done. A lot of those works were social-justice-based and primarily in minority communities.

What makes murals such a special medium?

J. Baca: Muralism is one of the oldest art forms. We can look back in history and we can see a continuation of the form through different periods. The work that is displayed at Getty shows work through the Renaissance period. It’s interesting that there is a continuity within the art form. The method of blowing images up, the method of creating maquettes, studying the architecture, and the method of engaging larger groups of people to produce the work.

Why are murals still relevant today and how are their themes different from historic ones?

Julian Brooks: I would say that they are more relevant than ever in bringing communities together for common causes, raising issues, and beautifying public spaces. In the 1500s and 1600s the themes were generally related to aggrandizing the building or city where the mural was painted, while today more murals deal with social and/or political issues.

Restoring Damaged Murals

How do you determine which murals need conservation treatment?

L. Rainer: Conservators work with owners, artists, and community members to assess the condition of murals and determine if they need conservation treatment. An assessment consists of an examination of the mural to check for damage, including vandalism, graffiti, structural issues, flaking and powdering paint, and deterioration. Following the condition assessment, the conservator drafts a proposal and plan for conservation.

Is there a correlation that we should acknowledge between murals and climate?

L. Rainer: Yes, there is often a correlation between outdoor murals and climate. To give just a few examples, direct sunlight can affect pigments and coatings; freeze-thaw cycles (not a big issue in L.A.) can lead to damage; direct exposure to the elements with no climate control can impact murals.

How do you become a mural conservator?

L. Rainer: Mural conservators have training in art conservation, with a specialty in wall paintings, murals, and architectural surfaces. There are graduate degree programs in wall painting conservation, paintings conservation, and architectural conservation that serve as a foundation for this specialized area of conservation. Mural conservators may also have previous training as artists, architectural artisans, and decorative painters in addition to their conservation degree.

What are the processes involved in restoring a mural?

L. Rainer: The processes involved in conserving or restoring a mural depend on the condition and conservation issues of each mural. After a thorough condition assessment, a mural might require a series of treatment operations. This can include graffiti removal, reattachment of plaster detached from the wall, re-adhering flaking paint, cleaning, retouching damage and losses, and often applying a protective coating. In some cases of restoration, conservators work with artists, who may choose to repaint areas of their mural to align with their original intent.

How many experts need to be in the mural conservation team?

L. Rainer: This varies with each mural. Experts often include a team of conservators, an architect, an engineer when necessary, and whenever possible, the original artist who painted the mural. It is a very collaborative process, and many types of expertise are needed to address conservation issues of murals.

What was the most challenging mural to conserve and treat?

L. Rainer: The most challenging mural I have treated is América Tropical, by David Alfaro Siqueiros from 1932, located on the Italian Hall at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument. The mural was whitewashed shortly after it was completed. After decades of neglect, the whitewash degraded, and the mural was rediscovered. The Getty Conservation Institute has partnered with the City of Los Angeles to conserve, protect, interpret the mural, and make it accessible to the public. Whitewash was removed. The mural, damaged by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, was detached from the wall in many places, so plaster was reattached to the wall. Cleaning was necessary, and conservators carried out sensitive and minimal in-painting to reinstate the legibility of the mural and the harmony of the composition without erasing the history. Importantly, a canopy shelter was constructed to protect the mural from the elements.

What are some art mural organizations that I can get involved with to support?

J. Baca: You can join us at SPARC in Venice as a volunteer or join a cleanup crew. You can also support Mural Arts Philadelphia, which is the largest mural organization in the country.

Ed. Note: The Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles also maintains a free database of Los Angeles mural history and raises money to help protect public art.

How can people help protect art murals across L.A.?

J. Baca: People need to report vandals destroying our work and to contact SPARC so we can clean it up. Also, you can advocate to our council representation that these artworks are important for the spirit of our city and urge them to provide respectful treatment of cultural representation in our city.

Traveling Back to the Murals of Centuries Past

How were public art murals used in Rome?

J. Brooks: In the Renaissance murals were mainly commissioned to decorate the facades of private houses and palaces. The principal intent seems to have been to draw attention to the building and bring kudos to the owner, but they were also used to reinforce civic pride (most of the scenes were stories of the founding of Rome and tales of military successes for the ancient Romans).

Are there any Old Masters that were also muralists in their day?

J. Brooks: There were actually many Old Masters who painted external wall frescoes, including Titian, Giorgione, Andrea del Sarto, and Holbein. The most famous Italian muralists were Polidoro da Caravaggio and his partner Maturino. There were many facade frescoes in northern Italy, and the main piazza of Verona has some great examples. Lelio Orsi deserves a mention here too. There were also strong mural traditions in Renaissance Spain and many other countries, but my studies have focused on Italy so far.

A handful of Renaissance facade frescoes survive in Rome, but they are quite damaged and what we see is mainly actually paint from 19th-century “refreshment” campaigns. Nevertheless, they give a sense of what Renaissance facades looked like—there were literally hundreds existing in Rome at one time. Here are images of two Roman survivors, the Palazzo Ricci and Palazzo Milesi.