Los Angeles' War on Street Artists

The City Council has spent a full four years trying to undo the mess it created, by writing a special "mural ordinance" to allow art on walls. Still months from approval, it would require a building owner to pay a $60 fee and hold a neighborhood hearing before any mural could go up.

In the meantime, the Department of Public Works often gives minimum-wage buffers — like Sight — the discretion to decide which walls would look better beige. More often than not, artists say, works done with spray paint are targeted over pieces by European artists or designs that look more calm or traditional.

Earlier this month, Man One and Vyal, local graffiti icons, saw their neon-electric collaboration on a brick wall downtown painted over in the early morning hours. A week later, they were flown out to the United Kingdom and Germany to stage live graffiti demonstrations for fans abroad.

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Sight: "I know I did a lot of damage, but I'm in a cell with a guy doing half the time for attempted murder. I'm like, 'Wow, I better be nice, or he'll try to kill me, too.' "

PHOTO BY NANETTE GONZALES

Vyal: "The cops have all of a sudden become art critics."

Details

See also:
How the City of Gardena Turns Every Piece of Graffiti Into a Felony Crime

The Secrets of L.A. Street Art: Bumblebee, Sharktoof and Linelinedot Discuss Their Work

Fuck New York: Street Art Began Here in L.A.

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• Carmen Trutanich
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"How is it that we can't paint in our own backyard?" Man One asks. "It's destroying our mural culture, our art culture in L.A."

The city denies it ordered the buff-out. But a security guard at a building across the street tells L.A. Weekly that the buffer was dressed like a city employee, and carried a bucket of paint matched precisely to the wall's dead-brown hue.

"The upsetting part is tracking down who the hell is responsible for this coming down," Man One says. "Someone is dictating whether that should happen. I'm curious about who picked this wall, and why."

Smear asks, "Do people really want to see boring old walls, driving around, just like bland beige and gray and palomino walls? Just concrete, and everything all manicured?"

Detective Findley, with LAPD's anti-graffiti unit, has an answer to that: "There's still a sense of fear to [aerosol work]," she says. "It reminds people of the downfall of a neighborhood. In the community's mind, it means gangs. It scares people."

It apparently scared Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, who ordered a massive community graffiti project led by Man One to be buffed from the L.A. River in 2007. That was followed by the recent obliteration of an all-female production commissioned by A&K Auto Repair in East Los Angeles. Just days after bouncy graffiti chick Sand One and a visiting Miami artist, Miss Reds, put up a stunning mural on the auto repair shop — to ward off gang tags — L.A. County sent a crew of buffers by to blot out their work.

"It was helping keep the taggers away," says auto shop manager Maria Martinez. Not only that, but Asian tourists were stopping by to take photos in front of the mural.

When the Weekly called the L.A. County Department of Public Works, graffiti-abatement staffer Tino Kallamanis rushed over to apologize to Martinez. The shop manager says Kallamanis told her that Supervisor Molina ordered the mural removed because it featured the words "Eastside Chola" in a heart in the bottom right corner.

Molina's spokeswoman denies that. However, Public Works spokesman Bob Spencer affirms that the mural was destroyed "because of the gang-affiliated term that is featured on it: 'Eastside Chola.' " The county's policy, he says, is to remove any paintings that "contain gang-affiliated references or vulgarity."

Directly above the painted-over wall looms a billboard reading "1-800-GET-THIN," touting a controversial medical procedure. The county's Department of Building and Safety spokesman says that if it got a complaint about offensive language on a billboard, it wouldn't paint over it; it would seek a resolution between the company and the neighbors.

Sand, who adores the word "chola" and says it is part of her culture, is furious. "When I say the word 'chola,' it's not negative," she says. "It's so Latin girls can relate to what I paint. What I'm showing is that if you come from a low-income, gangbanging area, like me, you can break out of that."

Her trademark characters — sexy cartoon girls with giant, feathery eyelashes — are among the cutesier outdoor artworks dotting the L.A. area. But since last year, Sand, who's in her early 20s, has seen five of her murals, all painted with permission from a building owner, destroyed by officials in downtown Los Angeles and in East L.A.

"It's, like, 'Dude, I just painted a mural with a girl eating a cupcake. You're really going to send your squad every single morning to bother the owners and harass them to erase the wall?" she says.

Another artist who's been putting up a lot of work around South Central, Chelo from the K4P crew, says he soldiers on because "around my neighborhood, everything has to do with gangs. Everything has to do with negativity. I thought I could change that."

His admirers see his intricate, alienlike characters and eye-popping wildstyle as being on par with major MSK works in Hollywood, giving South Central something to be proud of.

But anti-tagger legislation like Molina's "graffiti ordinance" and Chief Deputy District Attorney Jackie Lacey's "Graffiti Prosecution Program" — which the women drafted in response to tragic murders by violent taggers — have made it easier to lock up graffiti vandals on felony convictions, even if they are not part of that violent world. (Lacey is running for DA, touting her toughness on graffiti.)