I’ve gotten to the point with these street art features that I plan my trips around them. If I can get a day to myself, I’m gonna wander around with my camera all day until I find 100 murals I love. And I’m not just doing it “for the ‘gram” anymore! Seriously, these days of wandering are often what makes me feel like I have gotten to know a city at all. That is especially true for a place like Los Angeles.

In a city where most of the time spent between two points is in the back of an Uber, staring at your phone, walking the streets isn’t exactly “normal.” This is a car city. So going through the exercise of walking 10 miles in day, exploring this city street by street, looking in nooks and crannies for murals, poking around small businesses—this can really give you a feel for the DNA of Los Angeles. Of course, whatever I’ve managed to see so far is just a drop in the bucket! But it’s exposed me to a lot. And it helped me internalize the map of this city, so that I started to be able to find my way around without a map.

The majority of the murals below come from the Arts District, Silver Lake, and Beverly Blvd (roughly Rampart Village/Historic Filipinotown). However, to get to all these places, I traversed lots of different pieces of the city, including time spent in Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Central LA, Downtown, and Skid Row 😬. If you don’t know why I just used that emoji, Skid Row is infamous for being the epicenter for homelessness in Los Angeles, serving kind of the same role that the Tenderloin does for San Francisco.

Sidebar: The homeless situation in LA is crazy. There are literally tents set up in every alley and under every overpass. In making the counter-cultural decision to see LA on foot, I walked through and past a lot of these campsites. I hope it doesn’t sound uncool to admit that it made me feel uncomfortable, like a zombie arm was going to spring through the flaps of a tent and grab my ankle. It was a bit dystopian, but I don’t want to over-hype the issue. People always point to homeless when they want to hate on California, but I don’t think that’s totally fair. I think it must be at least 50% because of the weather. I mean seriously, can you think of any better place to be homeless than Southern California? For all the homeless people freezing their asses off in Chicago, how hard can it be to get a greyhound bus ticket?

Anyway, unsurprisingly, Los Angeles had some INCREDIBLE murals. The Arts District was especially amazing. I had a really good time exploring this area. But to elevate this above any particular area of the city, this day in general shed light on elements of LA that were not top-of-mind for me prior. Seeing all this diversity, art, culture, history, and food casually flow through the veins of this city as people went about their day-to-day lives—all against the backdrop of palm trees, gentle dry heat, and surprisingly temperate weather—was very cool. I don’t know if I’m yet sold on the idea of potentially ever living here… but I wouldn’t rule it out.

So here’s a substantial but statistically insignificant sampler of the murals of Los Angeles! Next time I’m back in this city, I’ll need to go do this again in a different area, so you can consider this to be “volume 1.”

How about these murals? Aren’t they freaking INCREDIBLE?! I mean, some of these really took my breath away. How about those women in the kimonos? That one really stopped me in my tracks. Or how about the man with the Pacific-Islander face tattoos? Or that incredible portrait of artist Ed Ruscha (the old white guy) at the bottom? Or that iconic image of Kobe Bryant at the top?

I did my best to track down all of the artists behind these murals, but haven’t been able to figure all of them out, so here’s an incomplete list of credits. If you are reading this and happen to identify one of the muralists I’ve missed, please let me know! I’d love to be able to give them credit, for whatever it’s worth.

For now, it’s time to say goodbye to the city of angels, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I’m back here. I’m looking forward to the next time I have a free day in Los Angeles so I can get back out there and compile volume 2 of street art! For now, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite LA-based (music) artists…

 
 
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