Some weeks ago a homegirl of mine from school named Susie Ra told me that during a law school field trip she toured San Quentin, California's oldest and most notorious prison, and was struck by the murals in the prison's cafeteria. They depicted the history of California in lush landscapes and scenes. She was amazed and said I should look them up. Well on Sunday The New York Times published a piece about those very murals and their maker, a former inmate named Alfredo Santos, now retired at age 80 in San Diego:
In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.
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The murals chronicle not only California’s history, but also the evolution of Mr. Santos’s style. The first scenes, including an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, are rendered in the listless fashion of a 1950s textbook illustration, with isolated vignettes surrounded by areas of blank wall. "At the beginning I wanted to be conservative, to please the prison officials," he said.
But soon vignettes crowd the walls, playing like a crazy newsreel of random images; at one point a covered wagon rumbles westward not far from where an owlish Groucho Marx peeps over a movie screen. Unifying compositional elements — the World War II bomber that dominates the fourth mural, for example — lend a W.P.A.-era monumentality.
Santos later worked at Disneyland and then painted and operated galleries in Mexico, building a fine career as an artist. Here is the link, which goes to the International Herald Tribune in Paris because NYT links go behind their firewall after a week. (Unfortunately the IHT does not have the complete story.) The NYT piece has a cool multimedia feature that allows you to scan the murals up-close. They're really brilliant, like Riveras almost. The fourth one is kinda trippy and futuristic.
* Hold up: The SF Weekly did a piece on Santos and his murals with rich background detail back in 2003. Link.