Santa Ana’s Sullivan neighborhood leaders are in search of a mural that fits.
Neighbors got together this week inside the community room at the Country Club Mobile Park along S. Sullivan St. to talk about ideas, challenges.
The cost of the mural. Fundraising ideas.
How much labor goes into a mural?
“Anything from 5 years to a couple days…depends on the artist,” said one attendee.
What makes a mural important to the community? How does it deter graffiti?
“The best graffiti deterrent is making good quality art, one that is not a decoration,” explained Kim Duran, a muralist with nearly 30 murals in Santa Ana.
“How can we incorporate the youth?” asked Rosa Pizano, a lead neighborhood organizer on the project.
“We have to guide them,” said Santa Ana artist Eduardo Camarena.
“We can make stencils for the children and have them fill them in,” suggested Thalia Pizano, Rosa Pizanos’s daughter.
Maricela Peńa, 37, a drawing and painting teacher at Lorin Griset Academy, brought sketches incorporating animals from Latin America.
“I just heard about the project, I felt the need to be here,” said Peña, “We have a lot of animals that represent a lot of important aspects of our cultures in Latin America, even going way back to Aztecs and Mayan, and we have so many areas that need to be represented.”
“We need to expand that and make it unified.”
Asking for community input on a mural is common in Santa Ana neighborhoods.
Santa Ana continues to have one of the largest collections of murals in southern California.
Just two miles away from the S. Sullivan St. proposed art project are the murals depicting Chicano culture along W. Civic Center Dr., made by inexperienced muralists in the 90s who wanted to create a public art piece for their neighborhood.
That mural still stands today while it is in the process of being restored by the city, as it was recently discovered that the walls were on public property, prompting the city to help save the deteriorating murals.
Making a mural has many moving parts, including identifying who owns the walls, which sometimes can throw in a wrench in receiving funding or permission to create art.
The S. Sullivan St. walls on which the murals are being proposed are considered private, according to Margarita Macedonio, the Principal Community Planner for the City of Santa Ana Neighborhood Initiatives.
“So regardless of technically, whether it falls on private property or not, it’s facing the public right of way,” said Macedonio, “this is the experience of neighborhoods working together, having an inclusive process to reflect on what they would like to see in their neighborhood.”
“It’s through these arts and culture and funding that’s available; they can now access those resources and plan together–exactly what Rosa has been doing, by having a pre-workshop.”
The Sullivan community plans to hold another meeting soon to discuss more concrete plans.
Councilmember Johnathan Hernandez plans to visit the blank walls with city staff and other city leaders in two weeks to see how a collaboration could happen.
“It’s in the very early stages,” said Hernandez.
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