This site has pictures of many murals in Los Angeles county -- a world center of muralism. I have a page explaining more about the site, as well as a FAQ. Seeing pictures of murals can't replace seeing them in person, so use this site to find and visit murals if you can. Although this is a hobbyist site, I hope that it will one day be useful to art historians.
Since mid-2002, I haven't lived in L.A., so I can't take any more pictures. This site is now an archive.
The site has a list of all the murals, one by area of the city, one by artist, a list of my favorites, or you can look for a particular category. The categories are:
| commercial | murals designed to enhance or advertise a business |
| community | murals about or by a local community |
| cultural | murals largely about a particular culture |
| religious | murals with religious content |
| political | murals with a political theme |
| places | murals in types of places, such as houses of worship or unions. |
| Virgin of Guadalupe | a common mural image in L.A. |
| other | murals inside or outside, spraypaint, memorials, landscapes, destroyed murals, and that symbol of advertising Coca-Cola. |
Permission to put pictures of murals on the Web is a thorny problem. For all murals within non-public buildings shown here, I obtained permission from the building owners to take the pictures and put them up on this non-commercial Web site. I also obtained permission for many of the murals on the outside of commercial buildings. Public murals in other locations are harder to obtain permission for, short of tracking down the artist -- which is often difficult to do. In general, I will take down any picture that an artist or owner asks me to take down.
Note that some organizations have refused permission for me to put pictures on this site, including SPARC.
Almost all of the pictures on this site, except a few that are explicitly noted as being sent in by someone else, were taken by Rich Puchalsky. About half of them were taken with a cheap point-and-shoot 35 mm camera, and digitized using Kodak Picture Disk, producing 600 by 400 pixel images. Most of the other half were taken with an Olympus C-2020 digital camera, and a few with an Olympus C-3040 digital camera. These pictures were degraded to 600 by 450 pixels for the site. I may send copies of the original higher resolution pictures to those who request them for certain noncommercial purposes, or to artists who want pictures of their own murals.