Muralist Francisco Letelier: “Human Being at-Large, Culturally
Engaged”
By Suzanne
Thompson
Born in Santiago, Chile, his
family left Chile in the wake of the military overthrow of the democratically
elected Salvador Allende government. His father, Orlando, was assassinated by a
car bomb in Washington, D.C., in 1976.
Francisco and his brother José, along with
Chilean painter René Castro, formed "Brigada Orlando Letelier," painting
murals in 12 American cities and traveling to Nicaragua in 1980 to paint five
more as part of a national literacy campaign. Now based in Venice with his wife
Kayren Pace, sons Matias 11 and Salvador 13 months old. Letelier has worked on
public art works, performances, installations, publications, and exhibitions in
the United States and internationally. He writes, teaches, and lectures, and has
worked with people of all ages creating collective and individual works, such as
portable murals, banners, flags, books, medicine wheels, and earth mounds. In
spring 1998, he traveled to Belfast, Ireland, to paint a mural of reconciliation
with Protestant and Catholic community groups. He is currating an exhibition
“Lights Among Shadows” to open this summer in Washington
DC.
I first heard of Francisco through
Greg Landau, when I asked him to do the art work for a program cover. A very
dear friend of mine and wonderful photographer, Mary Ann Dolcemascolo, was hit
by a truck on Main Street and did not have health insurance. Jackson Browne,
whom Francisco had done album covers for, and I knew through my Central American
solidarity days, had agreed to perform a benefit concert for Mary
Ann.
Ever since then I’ve been
interested in finding out more about Francisco and his work.
Suzanne:
Besides
being a muralist, you are also a performing artist and a poet and an educator,
and…What am I leaving
out?
Francisco:
Human
being at-large, culturally engaged. Things take a different route many times
when you are kind of, just involved organically with groups of people. You are
sort of called upon to fill a particular role. Which, I have always sort of
done, in a willing and natural way. I think it has to do with my early political
education. In Chile, I was a member of the Socialist youth and there was a lot
of emphasis on taking rounds and leadership. You know, different people act as
a leader - today it’s your turn.
Suzanne:
How
old were
you?
Francisco:
I
started in the Chile Socialist Party as a youth; I’m not a member of the
party anymore, when I was around 13, with the youth group. That was after the
coup, in Chile in 1973. Returning to the United States, my brother Jose, who
lived in a territory of Chile, but now he lives on Easter Island. He and I
started a muralist brigade with young Chilean exiled youth. Since we were all
very young kids working with older
artists.
Suzanne:
Is
that the Brigada Orlando Letelier named after your
dad?
Francisco:
Yes.
So it sort of came from that it would fall to us sometimes to be spokes people,
other times to be doing the work on the wall, other times to be doing
organizational things or logistical things. For example, I remember during a
period when a lot of solidarity for Nicaragua was going on and you were in
involved and Mancatol, and you were involved with a community of people bring
groups. I would do a little bit of art work but most of the time; I was driving
these guys around. I would offer to do it and do it. I would drive them around.
I have given myself room to write. I really finally came out of the closet as a
writer about 5 or 6 years ago when I finally took all of this stuff that I had
and put it into a book. And said, “Okay, I guess I
write.”
Suzanne:
And,
which book was
that?
Francisco:
Well,
this is a self-published book. There are thousands of them around, circulating.
And you know the other thing is that I’m not in a poet’s community.
Poet’s have a very close knit community, especially here in
Venice.
Suzanne:
Your
art is not necessarily playing to packed houses. You are making a living on your
art?
Right?
Francisco:
Yes.
Suzanne:
But
your poetry, or writing or your performances are something you don’t have
to rely
on.
Francisco:
I’ve
made a little bit of money over the years writing. I’ve gotten a little
bit of support in order to do it. The way I make my living is as a visual
artist. Although, I’m the art director for a magazine called El Andar
which is a national, bi-lingual, Latino
magazine.
Suzanne:
Which
takes me to your mural on Rose Avenue. It seems to me that you had a lot of
community involvement in that project. Is that your first mural in Venice? You
have
others?
Francisco:
I
have a couple murals in Venice. One is on Machado Street, off Lincoln Boulevard.
There’s a taco stand that people stand out on the corner. I forget the
name. Then there is this little street called Machado. There are these garden
apartments on the left hand side called Machado Court Apartments. Some of the
smallest apartments you could ever see. It is an environmental mural. It shows
native species and animals of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was a mural in
direct response to the people that lived there. They are mostly people from
Mexico and other places. It was commissioned by the owner of the building. It is
called
Ambrosia.
Suzanne:
And
where is the other
mural?
Francisco:
The
other mural is a mural that I finished concurrently with Becoming the Circle.
That is at Phoenix High School. Which is the continuation high school behind
Venice High School. It is a continuation high school for kids who have had
trouble or who haven’t been able to get through high school in
conventional ways. It is a small school on a street called Zanja. It was all
done with high school students there last spring. It’s called
“Phoenix Rising.” It’s not just a kid’s mural. I’m
mentoring them all the way along. So I do a lot of the
painting.
Suzanne:
Do
you do the design? Or, do they do the
design?
Francisco:
They
do the design. I tweaked the design for them. I work the design and make it a
little bit better. But basically, they are the art directors. It’s not
just about painting. It’s about coming up with an idea, addressing issues
that pertain to the community and the people involved with creating the mural.
For them to feel free to image, to be creative and not worry about
production.
Suzanne:
I
think the Pioneer Bakery story is a wonderful story and I want to hear that.
Francisco:
About
the mural at the Pioneer Bakery. I already had it in me that I was going to
paint a mural. Somewhere in Venice. Somewhere in Oakwood. I wanted to paint a
mural in Oakwood. I moved over to Oakwood on 6th Avenue. Now I’ve moved to
Brooks Avenue. But it had been a really long time. These are the challenges for
an organization like SPARC. . . Judy Baca is one of my cultural heroes. What we
are talking about in community is human inter-action, friendships. It is your
daily life with people in your community. If you’re a community member
that gets along with lots of different people, you have friends, you have people
you love, know this kid since they were two and you’ve known that person.
I was looking for a wall. Then I saw
that SPARC was going through another funding cycle. So I wrote to them and said
you know I want to apply for your funding cycle. I don’t have a particular
site but I really want to paint a mural in Venice. In Oakwood. Because I feel
that this is really the community that is undergoing the transformations that we
talk about. They’re the people that are the living subjects of history.
Los Angeles has this reputation as a mural mecca. SPARC has help create this
mural mecca by commissioning all these murals for several years. The Venice
Boardwalk is known for all its murals. And there are no murals in the Oakwood
Community.
I approached Pioneer
Bakery. They did not commission the mural. I just came in and said, “Can I
use your wall?” I got some funding. I imagined that the mural will cost
more because they had very little money at SPARC but I had enough money to start
this project. And they said okay. Great! Since my idea for the mural was to
actually paint portraits of a lot of people that lived in Venice – this
really diverse group of people who lived in the community – who I felt
were protagonists and leaders in their own kind of sub circles in community. It
was automatically a community project because it was basically bringing all
these different people together into one
place.
Suzanne:
Did
you do it alone? The
design?
Francisco:
Yes.
I did all the design. We really ran into some classic Venice situations. SPARC
requires that you have public, community meetings during the design of the mural
to have community input. So we called for a community meeting at Pioneer
Bakery.
Suzanne:
What
did you
do?
Francisco:
We
put up flyers all over Venice but mostly more towards the surrounding community;
it was down on this side of Abbot Kinney, up along Rose, across Lincoln. So they
put up these flyers. I come to the meeting. And guess what kind of people do you
think showed up to a meeting like that? It’s at 5pm on a Wednesday. So,
that pretty much leaves out a lot of working people. There is a link missing.
The majority of community activism is engaged in confrontation and adversarial
situations. Which of course it is. A lot of community activism is about
“Hi. What’s your name?” “Where do you live?”
“Oh, I live over here.” “Oh, so nice to meet you”. What
goals can we create in common? What common ground do we have? So it was amazing
because I had the initial designs for the mural and basically this room of
people who I had never seen or met before, trashed all the
designs.
Suzanne:
How
many people were in the
meeting?
Francisco:
Maybe
15 people. A few of my friends. They came, pre-disposed to say “Why is
something happening in my community without my power?” So we are
determined to come in and not let it happen because anything that happens is
bad. We live in a world were everything is bad. I know a lot of people.
So if I go to a community meeting in
Venice and I see a lot of people who are professional meeting goers but they are
not involved in the community. I don’t see them at the drum circle. I
never saw them hanging out somewhere at a coffee shop just being one of us.
I’ve never seen them. I say, well I’ve lived here for 15 years I
must have run into you somewhere. And did we catch our eyes? Did you look at me
with some acceptance? So, I was feeling like there must be someway to win these
people over to make them see that I’m not their enemy. I’m really a
community artist. You must have me confused with someone
else.
One discussion that occurred was
that one part of the mural had a portrait of a young African American man, based
on a photograph of one of these kids. I’ve worked with a lot of kids that
have been involved with gangs, all over LA County. Kids that have been
incarcerated and it was based on a portrait of a kid who had gone through this
whole experience of being locked up, being in gangs, committing crimes and
somehow managed to pull himself together, finish high school and go on to
college.
This portrait was just my way
of acknowledging that I live on the corner of 6th and Brooks Avenue in a place
where over the years I’ve seen dozens of children get shot. Dozens of
children get shot. You know it is very different to live in another place in
Venice then to live right on the corner of 6th and Brooks where you see the
crack come in and out. Attitudes are very different about the police, about what
needs to be done, about racial harassment – about many things. I myself
have been stopped by the police and put up against the wall and harassed before.
Nevertheless, I welcome the police presence in my neighborhood because I have
children and I have seen children die. My neighbors have died. I’ve seen
kids die on the street. Children are killing themselves on the streets. So in my
mural I thought it would be immoral to create a community mural without
acknowledging the fact that dozens of children have died right in front of my
house. There are no monuments. There is no mention of them. We need to leave a
place where people can carry the pain and the memories of violence in their
neighborhoods onto the wall. And, we are going to find an appropriate way of
doing that. We are searching for that. That is what this project is about. It is
about searching for common ground.
Suzanne:
Getting
back to the Pioneer Bakery mural. What is in
it?
Francisco:
During
one of the first meetings, one of the oldest members of the family from the
Pioneer Bakery, when we were coming up with ideas for the mural, said that he
remembered that Rose use to be a really hot street. It was like the entrance to
Venice, like the whole area. We used to have this parade here. Every year. One
of my earliest memories was sitting on the balcony of this building. This is the
same building. Just the facade got stucco covered.
Suzanne:
Did
you know that Arthur Reese was brought to Venice from New Orleans by Abbot
Kinney? I’ve read some books on the history of Venice and Kinney’s
chauffeur was this black man, Arthur Reese who was very, very talented. He made
these huge paper Mache Mardi Gras types of figures. He used real fruit, grapes
to decorate the arches on Windward during Mardi Gras. At the end of the
festivities, people were invited to enjoy the fruit or take it home.
Francisco:
It
was great. You know, I wasn’t in anyway adverse to the idea of integrating
the Pioneer Bakery into the mural. I found that to be the perfect image to start
the mural with. So I said, let’s create a mural that has you on the
balcony and the building as it was and that way we also show a little bit of the
architectural legacy. The changing nature of what our place looks like. All very
subtle but powerful. Here are three generations of families that lived here.
This is beautiful. I love that. Where can we find a site? The idea was
let’s show a parade and have locals be in the parade. So then it will turn
into panels of different people doing there things in different places in
Venice. So that is how the whole mural got
developed.
Suzanne:
So,
we didn’t really talk about money. Public money for art, for
murals.
Francisco:
I
came of age as an artist during the Reagan/Bush era. And so, the mantra that was
given to me by my mentors, teachers and the social world was there is no money
for art.
There’s no money for
art. There’s no money for art. From then, to here, 20 years later or
whatever, they are telling me, “They’re talking the money
away.” But I thought there was no money? So guess what? I grew up and
learned to be an artist with no money for art. And, I’ve been doing art
this whole time with no money for it. I know there are some people who are
loosing their fellowships. Some people who have the time. I’m always
working really hard to survive and to pay the rent. They’ve had the time
to be able to create the space in their life for two months where they could
actually apply for this grant. Oh, there is some money coming up. The deadline
is in October and I don’t have time…. you know it’s like
fucking insane. Who has time to do that? I have to get up and go to work. So I
realized, especially after the Pioneer Bakery, if I had been waiting to get the
funding from somebody else, that project would never have occurred. A politics
and the cultural politics and the multi-diversity blah…blah…blah...
or the whole thing. I just choose to bypass it and go start to the heart. It
just takes my body working on the wall.
Paint is pretty cheap. I can start it.
I will create some momentum through the power of what human beings can do. Keep
talking to one another. The old grassroots way. That’s the way I’ll
do my projects for now. Maybe someday, I’ll get some enormous funding from
things because I’m getting better. You know, like its Thursday night.
There’s a deadline. I’m just going to do it. Everyone leave me
alone. The kids won’t eat. Everyone in their spaces for forty-eight hours.
I can pump it out and crank it out. I manage to do that sometimes.
Suzanne:
So
then, how do these murals stay
preserved?
Francisco:
If
they are community murals, the community will take care of them.
The other thing about public art is
that the state and cities don’t have mechanisms to which the population,
or the electoral public, or the community can articulate their ideas about being
people in the world. You know, they build this big enormous sky scraper right
here and in no way does it talk about people. But you have to for this for your
little thing over here. It’s all too crazy for me at this point. It just
doesn’t make sense. It is wrong. Something is wrong there.
I feel like on one hand it is tragic
that perhaps the city of Los Angeles will not be commissioning any more murals,
at least through SPARC. I do think that it is a wonderful opportunity for SPARC
to create murals in a different way, instead of being dependent on city funding
and in that particular way they were depending on city funding. If your funding
comes from one source and you do things in only one way you become ghettoized.
Your audience starts becoming smaller and smaller. I don’t really have
clear answers for everything. But, I am so grateful that I’m not
completely encumbered by the bureaucracies that exist in this city in terms of
cultural activities.
Suzanne:
And
you brutally lost your father. Do you work in
Chile?
Francisco:
I
was just in Chile. We had an amazing thing happening in Chile right now. The
present government, which is a socialist government, has decided that all the
Chilean Diaspora, which is around a million individuals that left Chile, now
number about 2 million or more Chileans living outside and abroad, they’ve
decided to call us the 14th region. So we are another state. So, now for example
I can receive healthcare. I can apply for public arts money as a Chilean. And,
soon, perhaps I’ll vote. Chile is on the forefront of countries and
nations imagining the idea of a nation completing surpassing national geographic
borders.
So now my Chileaness
isn’t any greater or less because I live outside or inside. It is about
what is inside of me. Let’s say there were around 800,000 uniformed people
that time in the country. Then, think about all their families and their
children, we are talking about a third of the population in a small enough
country still to image that we had the power to create a new way of life. You
really start seeing the us and them. You understand to create a new society; you
really better start shaking hands with a lot of
people.
Suzanne:
I
was reading your press release for the Pioneer Bakery mural and you said you
were not interested in whether Pinochet goes to jail or not. It is more
important to you that there is justice and people know the truth. A friend of
mine disagrees with that. He feels that Pinochet is a criminal and he should be
in
jail.
Francisco:
I’m
not saying the Pinochet shouldn’t go to jail and I wouldn’t fight
the good fight for him to go to jail. It is more in response to what creates
justice. Because the whole idea is to create justice. It’s not about
revenge.
Suzanne:
So,
what should we do with him? Pinochet. The truth is coming out and your family
worked very hard for that to
happen.
Francisco:
Other
people involved in Pinochet’s regime can be put on trial. We can create,
for example an international library. We’ve created the archives of memory
which are akin to the kind of work the tolerance museums have done all over the
country which is to rescuing all the information from those years. Also,
creating mechanisms that allow people to have more healing.
Along with getting funded for
commissioning murals, SPARC was also funded to maintain a mural inventory and
restoration program. That’s been rustled away from SPARC. The thing is
murals also need to be maintained. Public art needs to be maintained and there
is nothing uglier than a mural in disrepair.
Especially, when it is a big, enormous
mural. All the murals are covered with graffiti and where there is no mechanism
to which we can repair the murals. The whole deal about a mural is that it
perseveres and lasts through time. We do all this stuff to make sure that it
lasts and we use the right materials.
I
do think that there are a lot more crucial problems right now. I’m not
going to be sitting around saying that “you should be restoring
murals” when there’s hundreds of homeless on the street, when
there’s kids being shot on the streets, and there is still crack running
up and down ruining people’s lives in Oakwood. I think that the priorities
are wrong. So, public art needs to be community art. Art that somehow,
supposedly has its root in actual community.
Community is capable of bringing up
the funds and taking care of these things. The community is capable and we have
to give ourselves that power. We have to acknowledge that we have the power to
do that.
This is only a fraction of the
Letelier interview. The complete interview can be read on
www.freevenice.org
All photos are from the
Pioneer Bakery mural, except the center, bottom one with a deer. It is from the
Machado Avenue mural.
Posted: Thu - May 1, 2003 at 06:01 PM