By Ken Gonzales-Day
Excerpt from essay in Frieze magazine:
“..Few would debate that Los Angeles is the city of images. Enormous billboards and moving graphics line the Sunset Strip and literally mark the hillsides. In Venice, I photographed metallic paint dripping from palm trees that had been tagged so many times it was impossible to decipher. There are local and international mural artists who live double lives; commissioned by cafes, corporations, and schools by day, they often make unsigned “street art” under cover of night as I learned from one young man. Murals in L.A.’s booming downtown Arts District are seen by some as part of gentrification and blamed for displacing lower income and working class communities, while murals reflecting civic and cultural themes in culturally or economically homogenous neighborhoods are often embraced as empowering to those communities.”
