Inside the lobby of Santa Monica’s City Hall, an enormous mural flanking the entryway shows Father Junípero Serra, founder of the California missions, standing next to a Spanish soldier; below them, anonymous Native bodies kneel, drinking from a spring, faces obscured. In the panel opposite, a cluster of white figures engage in leisure activities like tennis, polo, and flying model airplanes.
For some people, the images by Stanton Macdonald-Wright, History of Santa Monica and the Bay District, installed in the PWA building in 1939, are an attractive banality, one of many that flatten our state’s story into a few key moments: the Portolá expedition, Father Serra, mission bells. But for many others, this mural is an atrocity, a daily reminder and renewal of past harms, a reminder-by-omission of the violence of the missions, the theft of land, enslavement, forced conversion, and the individuals and communities made victims. Erasing this history through pastoral nostalgia hurts. But representing this history as violent trauma can hurt too. The reason this and other murals make people feel bad is far less about the past than about unattended traumas of the present.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
HUMAN SCALE
By early 2022, after years of protest, debate within the Santa Monica community over the mural was at a standstill between those who wanted it removed from public view and those who were determined to keep it in place. The city council had reversed itself a number of times. Take the mural down. Cover it with screens. Leave it be. Eventually, the council chose an ambiguous solution. Through a project called Reframe: City Hall Mural, the Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division would hire consultants to lead a public program wrapped in a public process. Often, this kind of invitation is a hedge, an attempt to outsource controversy and leave some outsiders holding the bag or to kick the can down the road—to let the reckoning happen later, after one more study is done, preferably during another administration.
Alongside my colleagues at the Indigenous youth arts organization Meztli Projects, I entered this controversy willingly. Sometimes, taking the bait is the only way to move the situation forward. What passes for public process—a series of disconnected, polemical three-minute statements in the chambers of a city council—had not brought results. We designed our engagement to advance the conversation not within the confines of an expert panel or a formal group of decision-makers but within the communities that cared for and railed against the mural. We looked at citizens’ assemblies, increasingly popular and influential experiments in participatory democracy in which everyday people are given time and resources to meet with one another and discuss and craft policies together—like a jury system but for governance. We were equally influenced by The Gatherings: Reimagining Indigenous-Settler Relations, a chronicle of talking circles in Maine and eastern Canada. In a talking circle, individuals speak one at a time, taking care not to interrupt one another and granting every person a chance to talk.
We created a “working circle.” Ours had 13 members in it, including Indigenous people, an arts commissioner, a city staffer, students, professors, a nonbinary youth, and white-haired elders. This group was given time and resources to meet regularly over six months. By empowering people to make recommendations and decisions, we aimed not just to make a specific controversy over a mural “resolve” or “go away” but to widen the sphere of engagement, using the mural to bring up larger issues of representation, sovereignty, democracy, power, and access.
It worked. Talking together about the mural for more than a few minutes quickly led the group to other, deeper considerations. We also held town halls for the public. Without fail, people arrived at these events primed to make public comments, only to be surprised when they could not find a formal body to make a speech to, as there were only small-group conversations to join. They didn’t want to spend their time having to speak and listen at human scale. Indeed, listening, in small groups or one-on-one, over long periods, tried the patience of some participants. But it also bled out the cursed public discourse that had surrounded the issue for so long—exhausting those who had just one point to make and no interest in connecting or communicating, only in winning. It is hard for people who are used to holding authority, especially those who wield it carelessly, casually, to listen—especially to people they believe are not qualified to speak. By the same token, it is also hard for people who have felt unseen and disregarded to believe that they will be listened to. Over the months, despite some frustration, we began to feel new possibilities emerge and multiply.
LISTENING
One simple exercise we used throughout the process was to ask two people to practice reflective listening, describing to each other what they saw when they looked at the mural’s images. The artwork became a tool of mediation, allowing deep and rich perspectives to be shared through the interpretation of a single object. Unsurprisingly, the more we looked, the less clear the images became. In this way, we used the mural as a portal to an even murkier and more complicated conversation. The polarized feelings about the mural brought people to the room, but through actual dialogue, we were able to ask about, sharpen, and clarify bigger issues—the larger civic art landscape, land rematriation, reparations, representation in government for first peoples and other working-class people of color, Santa Monica’s governance structure.
Nearly a year later, the group concluded that a new artwork should be commissioned at a scale that would balance the existing mural and create a welcoming environment for Indigenous people, working-class people, and people of color and that, while the 1939 mural should remain for now, it should be accompanied by large interpretive panels that condemn colonization, white supremacy, and the mural’s portrayal of first peoples.
The working circle, which included many people who initially imagined themselves to be diametrically opposed to one another, had found near consensus on nine recommended actions: two pertaining to the mural, seven to pressing equity issues evoked by the mural but extending to policies beyond the City Hall lobby. These recommendations, presented alongside historical research, hundreds of visual surveys, and summaries of public events, were passed unanimously by the city council on February 13, 2024. More important, the people who engaged in these conversations were able to reach new understandings. People who initially approached the process in protest became supporters of the new agendas they were able to shape.
Santa Monica’s mural is far from unique. These kinds of images in civic spaces across the West once felt as familiar as wallpaper but are everywhere glaring and disconcerting now. They aren’t one-off embarrassments that can be discreetly fixed or painted over and made to go away. They are symbols not just of a deeply uncomfortable history but also of a troubling present. But by honestly reckoning with these images and their meanings, we can encounter the past in a way that moves us toward more-just communities right now.•
Rosten Woo is a Los Angeles–based artist and designer who works with community organizations and local governments to help people navigate complex systems and participate in group decision-making. He is a cofounder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, winner of the 2016 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award.
