813 East 4th Place, Los Angeles, CA 90013 (click to view)
Daniel Dodd, artist and associate director of Art Share, began this three mural project in 2002 and executed one mural a year until finishing in 2004. Art Share is a community based afterschool arts program, which collaborated with Roosevelt High School students to produce these three ceramic tile murals. Dodd’s other artworks can be seen at the Santa Monica Conservancy River Garden Park, pedestrian footbridge at 53rd Street and Long Beach Avenue in Los Angeles, and Foothill Family Center in Pasadena.
The first mural depicts the city’s ethnic diversity with the representative use of the Los Angeles cityscape and freeways juxtaposed against a globe and four portraits of children from various ethnic backgrounds. The second mural, 9 feet in height, was inspired by a Buddhist mandala symbolic of the cosmos and the desire for harmony. Lastly, the third mural was inspired by the Aztec stone calendar or sunstone. The calendar depicts the 20 daysigns around the Sun god or Female Earth Monster, depending on the interpretation, and the central deity reaches out squeezing human hearts. Each daysigns is dedicated to a god or elemental force, which provides the life energy for the day.
Cited from lacountyarts.org, azteccalendar.com, and Arts of Mesoamerica by Mary Ellen Miller.
Photo © Ian Robertson-Salt