Monterey Park Public Art - Ava Flores

 Monterey Park Public Art- Ava Flores

The Site:

   I choose to focus my time on Monterey Park as it is the city I have known for the majority of my life. I love the mixture of cultures in this city, so it was a pretty simple choice. 

The Fieldwork: 

ELAC; 1980, Los Angeles. This art piece is showing an indigenous community at a marketplace. This piece incorporates bright colors, drawing the viewers eyes to look at the details. A friend said "I really like how many colors are in this one. It's like your eyes just want to look at everything all at once but then there's so many smaller details that you're just forced to focus on one area at a time to get the full picture".



ELAC; Date / Artist unknown. This statue appears to be partly holding onto itself while the other arm is open. The face of the statue is looking off to the side, making viewers wonder what / who it is looking at. A coworker of mine said "It makes me feel uncertain, like the statue is staring at something that caught its attention while stopping whatever it was doing. Unable to move as its stuck upon its own gaze at whatever caught its interest, never able to move forward due to this distraction or blessing that might be preventing the statue from making an impulsive decision". 





George E Elder Memorial Park; "Resilient Forever", DJ JAVIER. This hand-painted piece represents the courage and strength of the AAPI community, and it is one of the first large murals in Monterey Park. A friend said "I like the strong blue background that it has. I feel like it makes the dragon pop out more and it kind of makes it look like its flying". 




ELAC, Date / Artist unknown. This art piece seems to use small colored tiles as a way to make a larger image. Personally, this art piece creeps me out a bit because all of the people have really wide eyes that just stare into your soul. A coworker of mine said "Yeah I don't know about this one. I mean like it looks cool from far away but then you get up close and their eyes just don't really look like they have any life behind them, you know?"








ELAC; "Education Suite",1981, East Los Streetscapers. This is a piece of a larger mural inside the ELAC library located in Monterey Park. It is a colorful mural that incorporates many different aspects figures and themes throughout the walls. 















Analysis: 

    Throughout the process I felt that there was a good representation of AAPI and Latina/o community in these pieces of art. I mean the statue, I still do not know what that is, but I think that is the only piece that is a bit of the odd one out. That one honestly stood out to me the most because of how odd and confusing it was to try and figure out what was happening there. 
     As for the histories that are being represented, I feel like the majority of the pieces do a good job at representing specific groups. Like in the first piece, it solely shows indigenous representation. The third piece shows AAPI representation through vivid colors and strong imagery. The fourth piece is one that I do not personally really like because of their creepy eyes. But it does show people of different colors (the purple one), although I am not entirely sure what this piece represents because of the owls and music notes, it definitely represents something. But the final mural from the library has a lot of representation, from historical people to ideologies. As for the funding of each piece I was unable to gather the information on that. 

Proposal: 

    From my own experience being in Monterey Park for so long, I wish there was more public art. Of course, there had to have been some more pieces I missed but I think there is a need for more art in the area. Even though I am Mexican, I know Monterey Park has a large Asian community here so I would like to see more public art done by Asian artist to give them more representation in the city and to get more Artist of color recognized.  
    But overall, I did enjoy going out and finding random pieces of public art that I have / have not seen before for this project. I felt I was able to engage with my community more and I especially enjoyed getting the perspectives from other people on a few of the pieces. I think community input is important so that we can learn from one another. 

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