A tribute mural to the late artist Gilbert “Magu” Lujan honors the years he spent in downtown Pomona’s Arts Colony. Crowded with detail and bursting with color, it’ll blow everyone’s mind when it’s installed in a few days.
For anyone who loves the work of Lujan, the mural checks all the boxes:
An aerial view of a broad expanse of geography. Ribbon-like roads traversed by lowriders. Anthropomorphic rabbits and dogs, some in guayabera shirts. Cactus and palm trees. Pyramids. Day-glo colors. A reference to Aztlan. A shift from daytime to nighttime. A heart like the sun, setting in the ocean.
Muralists David Botello and Wayne Healy have been hard at work on the sprawling piece, which will measure 42 feet by 10 feet.
The two men met Lujan in the 1970s and stayed friends. Like him, they are Chicano art pioneers, producing murals and other public art around Southern California under the name East Los Streetscapers.
I was invited to meet them last weekend at the dA Center for the Arts, where they’ve been laboring over the mural in semi-privacy since October. Lujan’s immediate family — Mardi, his wife; sons, Naiche and Otoño; daughter, Risa — drove up from Diamond Bar to see the progress.
Did Healy and Botello ever produce any art directly with Lujan?
“I don’t recall a collaboration,” Healy tells me. “This is it.” He adds: “Every now and then I’ll be doing something and hear his voice: ‘No, not there, over here.’”
We are chatting on the sidewalk in the 200 block of South Main Street, by a formerly blank wall next to a record shop where the mural will be placed. Botello and Healy have already painted an elaborate border directly on the wall in pastels.
That was an idyllic scene, according to Margaret Aichele, executive director of the dA.
“They paint with the jacarandas falling around them. There’s so much beauty and poetry about it,” Aichele tells me days earlier with wonder in her voice. “And then they ride off into the sunset.”
Healy says the duo drew lots of interest from passersby, many of whom were unfamiliar with Magu.
Magu was nicknamed for the nearsighted cartoon figure Mr. Magoo due to a childhood squint. And he was, dare I say it, a visionary.
Lujan set much of his art in a kind of fantasyland of his own devising that he named Magulandia, a sunny, cartoon version of the Southwest. Everything was exaggerated and brightly colored like a piñata.
He was part of the Chicano artists collective Los Four, whose work was part of a revolutionary exhibit at LACMA in 1974. His most high-profile piece came in the 1990s: the design of the Hollywood and Vine subway station. It’s a tribute to the movies with a vintage film camera on display, pillars that resemble palm trees and a yellow brick road path laid into the floor tile.
Shortly after its completion, the artist, who grew up in East L.A. and La Puente, and attended El Monte High, decided to give Pomona’s arts district a chance.
“He was needing to start a new project in a way, to start something new,” reflects Naiche, 40, who lived with his father in that period. “The Arts Colony was the perfect place to dig in with other artists, to stir up the local art scene. He enjoyed being here. He was stimulated by what was going on.”
I knew Magu.
His arrival in Pomona in 1999 helped legitimize the arts district, and he was a regular at gallery shows and the monthly art walk. We were introduced and in 2004, when he was 64, I interviewed him for a column. It’s in my “Pomona A to Z” book, with Magu as the letter M.
What was a well-known, if poorly financed, artist doing so far east?
His joking reply: “People ask why I live in Pomona. I say: ‘Parking.’”
He left around 2007, first for Ontario — perhaps the parking was better — and then back to La Puente when prostate cancer was taking its toll. He died in 2011.
A utility box across from the dA Center was painted in recent years with an image of Magu. Antonio Mejia based it on a shot by staff photographer Will Lester that ran with my column.
The idea of a more permanent tribute percolated until the city’s Cultural Arts Commission put out a request for proposals, which resulted in the $50,000 contract to Botello and Healy.
Healy, who has an engineering background, plotted out how to convert their drawing into a canvas that stretches across six panels. It’s so large that what we saw at the dA, filling a wall, was only the last half. The first panels, already completed, had been rolled up for safekeeping.
The pair had put in 40 seven-hour days. They worked efficiently as two old pros who’ve been doing this stuff for nearly half a century, painting to an eclectic soundtrack of Sinatra, Led Zeppelin, bebop jazz and Native American music.
“They’re pushing 80 and they’re hopping up on the scaffolds,” Aichele marvels.
The two friends, both 75 this year, met in elementary school, lost touch and then reconnected by chance in their 20s when they were both at the same gallery show, looking at the same painting.
“Oh, they’re a hoot,” says Jocelyn Ayala, 27, one of their interns. “They balance each other out so well. They had a plan, but they experimented a lot along the way. I just had to roll with it.”
Healy says to Naiche in my presence, explaining how he and Botello work: “Simplistically, I’m in charge of line and he’s in charge of color. Of course we all took a backseat to your dad and do it like a team, as if we were collaborating with your father.”
Seated together in the dA, Botello shows Mardi and Otoño small color images of the full mural and explains some of the myriad small touches in a piece as crowded with them as a Will Elder story in the original Mad.
At a point where the colors purple and gold suggested themselves, Botello dressed a girl in a Lakers jersey, numbered it 24 for Kobe Bryant, and put a basketball in the lap of a character seated in a car next to her. The mural may have hundreds of bits like this.
“We can’t stop adding,” Botello says with delight.
Ayala had painted a rainbow flag billowing from a car in the background just the day before at Botello’s direction.
I ask Healy: When will the mural be done?
“It was done last week,” Healy replies. “That’s a chronic affliction (Botello) has. Every mural we’ve done has claw marks because I have to drag him off of it.”
The mural, claw marks and all, is expected to be installed before the end of June and dedicated Aug. 14. The family was overjoyed by the pieces they’ve seen and by the overall concept.
“This is more than we could ever have asked for in a tribute,” Naiche says. “What a special thing to see it develop, and to feel him.”
David Allen writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday, which is more than you wanted. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.
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