18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY JULY 31-AUGUST 6, 2025 www.montereycountynow.com this outdoor gallery of three murals through a beautification grant program in cooperation with the City of Salinas and Arts4MC in 2023. In total, they received 40 applications from across the state. One of them was from La Neta Murals, a local mural collective based in Monterey County. The group’s mural on the Alisal Street underpass, titled “Anáhuac,” refers to the word’s multiple meanings. It was the core of ancient Mexico and means “land surrounded by water” in Nahuatl. Today, many use the term to highlight their cultural and indigenous connection to Mexico. A new mural, produced this year by Los Angeles artist Fabian Debora at the Juvenile Hall in Salinas, is located in the garden where incarcerated youth spend a chunk of their time. It shows a hopeful, purple horizon with butterflies and flowers floating around. About 20 young men there helped Debora paint it. Murals in Salinas started to pop up in the 1990s thanks to painter José Ortiz, the founding director of nonprofit Hijos del Sol Arts Productions. Since then, Ortiz and his team of young artists of Hijos del Sol have created over 80 murals in Salinas alone. More initiatives followed. In 2001 came the Monterey County Summer Youth Employment Training Program, a collaboration among different agencies that recruited a whole team of California artists. Among others, they produced “The Life and Works of John Steinbeck” mural by One Main Street, home to the National Steinbeck Center. There are over 20 murals by Salinas muralist John Cerney; a 2000 Vincent Van Gogh mural, now in progress, on the Star Shopping Center building on South Main Street at Abbott is among the most impressive. There is a long row of murals painted in 2019 at the Security Public Storage on Sun Way, a private company initiative along a popular walking path. Today, we are in the middle of another wave of murals, the one we are observing right now—the underpass murals, the murals of Midtown Lane and more. The list of muralists taking part in making Salinas a city of murals is long. It includes Dong Sun Kim, Colleen Mitchell, Cynthia Mitchell, CJ Gonzalez, Gregory the Artist, Basic Lee, Jose “Pepe” Nolasco and many more. Salinas murals have been noticed and described by many, but no one has been doing a more thorough job when it comes to tracking them than Kat Morgan of Seaside. She created a map (viewable at bit.ly/ MontereyMuralsMap) documenting as many murals as she can find (some 500 and counting) throughout Monterey County, including 80 in Salinas. “Part of why Salinas is the center is because of José Ortiz and the new generation of artists he has mentored,” Morgan says. “He’s in keeping with the tradition of Los Tres Grandes. He’s still doing so many public buildings… The purpose of public art is telling the stories of communities, especially communities whose stories haven’t been told in textbooks.” ••• At Hijos del Sol, a spacious studio and exhibition space on East Alisal Street, Ortiz is leaning above pages of design for yet another mural. He is accompanied by artist Pepe Nolasco, who has been with the organization since childhood and recently designed his first work, the big blue Salinas Habitats mural that was introduced to the public in 2024. “I’ve always known there will come a time when he will design a mural on his own,” Ortiz says. “Now, I’m his assistant.” Before he started, Ortiz, who could be called the unofficial muralist-inchief of Salinas, didn’t know much about murals or Diego Rivera’s tradition. Like Michelangelo, he wasn’t trained in painting murals at all. But his interest in social issues helped him to quickly figure out what murals are about. They are not about the artist, he says, and it’s not only because painting a mural typically takes a team. They are agreed upon within a community (often via community meetings or public comments) and designed collectively—which wall, what to paint on it and why here—and the artist is just a messenger, the executor of a communal will. According to Ortiz, each muralist faces a task that Michelangelo faced JOSUÉ DAVID RUBIO Artist José Ortiz (left) has painted dozens of murals in Salinas, and trained up a younger generation through Hijos del Sol, the nonprofit he founded. Recent work includes (above) “El Abrazo” on a wall of the Monterey County Behavioral Health’s Alisal Integrated Health Center in 2024. One example of an indoor mural (below) is “Destination, Salinas,” painted in 2022 in a stairwell of the Monterey County Administration building on West Alisal Street by Hijos del Sol artists including Ortiz, Jose “Pepe” Nolasco and Juan Carlos Padilla. DANIEL DREIFUSS JOSUÉ DAVID RUBIO JOSUÉ DAVID RUBIO
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==