East LA
East Los Angeles invented Chicano muralism. In the late 1960s, artists here looked at the Mexican muralists — Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco — and decided to bring that tradition to the barrio walls. What followed was one of the most extraordinary explosions of public art in American history. Fifty years later, East LA remains the spiritual home of Chicano mural culture, with surviving classics alongside new work by the generation that inherited and transformed the tradition.
Featured Artists
All artists →Judith Baca
Founder of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) and creator of the Great Wall of LA — at 2,754 feet, the longest mural in the world. Painted in the Tujunga Flood Control Channel beginning in 1976 with a team of hundreds of youth workers, the mural documents California history from the age of dinosaurs to the 1950s, with particular focus on communities of color erased from mainstream historical narratives.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
One of the three great Mexican muralists alongside Rivera and Orozco. "América Tropical" was painted on Olvera Street in 1932 — a politically incendiary work depicting a crucified indigenous Mexican figure under an American eagle. It was whitewashed within two years of completion and only rediscovered and restored in 2012. Its history is inseparable from the politics of whose art gets preserved.
Noni Olabisi
Los Angeles artist whose figurative murals center Black and Brown women's leadership. "La Dueña de las Calles" (The Owner of the Streets) depicts East LA women activists across five decades — from the Brown Berets of the 1960s to community mothers fighting gang violence in the 2000s — rendered in a warm, realistic style that prioritizes dignity over drama.