LOS ANGELES — After more than four decades, Barbara Carrasco’s 80-foot-long mural “LA History: A Mexican Perspective” will finally have a permanent home. The painting was initially commissioned for the city’s bicentennial in 1981 by the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), which ultimately rejected the work because several scenes were too controversial. This weekend, the mural will be unveiled as one of the centerpieces of NHM Commons, a new wing of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
“I’m just very grateful,” Carrasco beamed during a press event on Wednesday, November 13.
After being commissioned for the mural in 1981, Carrasco spent months researching to select her subject, consulting with Bill Mason, then the NHM’s in-house historian, who gave her access to the museum’s vast photographic archives. He told her that the Spanish called the city “El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles” (“The City of the Queen of the Angels”), a detail that became the conceptual framework of the mural: 51 scenes from the history of the city embedded in the flowing locks of a proud, brown-skinned female figure modeled on the artist’s sister.
Working with three assistants – Glenna Avila, Rod Sakai and Yreina D. Cervantez – and a team of young artists from Los Angeles County’s Summer Youth Employment Program, Carrasco portrayed the area’s original inhabitants, the Gabrielino/Tongva people; episodes from Spanish and Mexican history; and remarkable figures and events, both heralded and unheralded, painful and celebratory, that have marked its transformation into the heterogeneous, sprawling metropolis it is today.
The mural showcases the city’s diversity, including images of LA’s first synagogue; Jewish baseball player Sandy Koufax; Chinese immigrants build the railroads; Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California; snapshots from Japanese-American concentration camps; and Biddy Mason, a formerly enslaved woman who became one of LA’s most prominent landowners.
The CRA found 14 of the 51 scenes too controversial, including those illustrating the lynching of 22 Chinese men and boys in 1871; the relocation of families in Chavez Ravine to make way for Dodger Stadium; the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, in which American soldiers attacked Latinos pachucos in downtown LA; and the whitewashing of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1932 mural “America Tropical,” an indictment of American imperialism, depicting a crucified indigenous figure. (The Siqueiros mural was restored by the Getty in 2012.) Mason’s portrait was also deemed inappropriate by the agency.
When they asked her to remove the images, Carrasco refused. “She’s too tough,” William D. Estrada, NHM’s curator of California and American history, said at the event Wednesday. “She just wouldn’t tolerate people trying to essentially eliminate some of her work.”
“When I came out, they got very upset and said, ‘We’re washing our hands of this mural, you can do whatever you want with it,’” Carrasco recounted. Hyperallergic. “But I lost the exhibit location at 3rd and Broadway, outside of a McDonald’s.”
Carrasco was forced to put the 43 wooden panels in storage. “It was at the United Farm Workers headquarters in Bakersfield,” she said. “César Chavez let me keep it there.”
The massive mural has only been exhibited a handful of times over the past four decades. It was shown at Union Station in 1990, and again in 2017 when it was shot in ¡Murals Rebeldes! LA Chicana/o Murals under siegeA Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibition co-curated by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and the California Historical Society. The following year it was the center of Sin Censura: A Mural Remembers Los Angeles at the NHM, which acquired it in 2020 with a grant from the Vera R. Campbell Foundation. In the new installation, digital touchscreens provide the visitor with information about the depicted figures and events.
The mural is one of two cornerstones of NHM Commons, a $75 million renovation on the museum’s southwest side that aims to better welcome and connect with the public, especially the surrounding South community. -Los Angeles. The design of the new wing by Frederick Fisher and Partners is characterized by transparency and openness, with a simple glass facade connecting the interior space to Exposition Park, in which the museum is located. The project includes 25,000 square feet of new landscaping designed by Mia Lehrer and Studio-MLA, who worked in collaboration with a Native American Advisory Council to select plants that would honor the area’s Tongva and Gabrielino heritage.
In addition to Carrasco’s mural, NHM Commons’ 50,000-square-foot interior includes a theater, a South LA Cafe outpost, an exhibit highlighting community science initiatives, and “Gnatalie the Green Dinosaur,” a 75-foot-long sauropod fossil. whose unique color comes from the mineral celadonite. Admission to NHM Commons is free and the new wing will be officially opened to the public on Sunday 17 November with a festive block party.
