This art festival has brought more than 100 murals (and counting) to Long Beach
The first sweep of spray paint left the can and landed on the white wall of Renaissance High School for the Arts in Long Beach. A hissing sound filled the air as Rex Richardson, the mayor of Long Beach, added a final touch of paint to the stencil. Four days later, artist Stevie Shao added to Richardson’s beginning strokes and outlined a new mural.
Richardson’s initial stroke of paint kicked off the Long Beach Walls and Art Renzei art festival, which runs through Saturday. The annual festival, which launched in 2015, introduces new murals and artwork to the Long Beach landscape. This year’s celebration brings 12 murals to seven locations throughout the city, including the Long Beach Convention Center, parking structures, Wild Chive, Pippi + Lola, Good Time and Roland Sands Design. The festival offers an online passport so art fans can check out where the murals are located.
This year’s festival centers around the theme of “Follow your Bliss,” inviting artists to create work that inspires viewers to explore their passions. Throughout the weeklong, citywide celebration, Long Beach Walls (previously known as Pow! Wow! Long Beach) and Art Renzei will host parties, ceremonies, pop-ups, a bike tour, a movie on the beach and artist talks.
“A lot of times when you see public art inspired by the local community, it’s place-making,” Richardson said. “It turns a wall that maybe was a place for tagging before and transforms it into a place that really brings pride and highlights our local culture.”
Most artists adding color to the city’s walls are from Long Beach or Los Angeles. Some come from across the globe, venturing from Seattle, Hawaii, Taiwan and Dubai. Julia Huang, the CEO and founder of Intertrend, a sponsor of the festival, considers Long Beach Walls as “bringing the world to Long Beach,” she said.
Since 2015, the initiative has ushered in more than 100 new murals to the city. Richardson witnessed its influence growing up in Southern California. This wasn’t the first time he ever spray-painted a wall — which he admitted while letting out a soft laugh — but this time around, the paint can was weighted with meaning.
“It [Long Beach Walls] recognizes that every single wall, every vacant lot, every corner in the city is a place for someone, a place that can be inspirational, a place for deep thinking, a place for celebration,” he said.
Principal Michael Navia started working at Renaissance in 2019, about a year after the high school’s $40-million renovation.
“We were a blank canvas and I wanted to make it look like a school for the arts,” he said.
Artists Shao, Mister Toledo and Superwaxx are adding work to the high school as part of the festival. Some students will also be assisting the artists, Navia said.
Superwaxx, an educator in West Hollywood, is creating a work that brings color and inspiration to the students, focusing on the theme of realizing your own potential. Their artwork combines animation and street art to create bold portraits.
“I’m looking forward to inspiring anyone that comes by and takes a look at the mural, especially inspiring the youth here on campus, letting them see what’s possible with art and how you can use art as an act of service to give back to others and inspire others,” they said.
For his mural, Toledo plans to create a “full-figured” portrait of his girlfriend floating in space and listening to a tape recorder. Public art inspired him to be a muralist himself. “When I saw art on the walls, that inspired me, like, ‘Oh, I want to do that one day.’ And now I’m doing that,” he said with a smile.
Walking around the Renaissance campus, the walls are starkly white with a dash of color from a banner here and there. Toledo envisions the murals as an opportunity for students to look, feel moved and create memories.
“The students are coming in and they’re going to see art and they’re going to see artists who are able to make a living professionally,” Intertrend’s Huang said. “They’re going to be so inspired by it.”
Both Huang and Richardson found Tristan Eaton’s and James Jean’s artwork on the Dolly Varden Hotel particularly inspiring. Jean’s mural is a black-and-white portrait of a woman surrounded by flowers and mushrooms. It sits right beside Eaton’s, a mural that includes a collage of imagery that represents the city shaped into an outline of people standing in line. The artists added to the walls of the hotel in 2015 during the festival’s first iteration. Now the art is subject to demolition as developers move forward with turning the historic hotel into housing.
“Mural arts are very ephemeral in a sense that I think most of the artists also know that it might not last forever,” Huang said.
Students at Renaissance High School for the Arts will return to classes in late August, where they’ll be welcomed by vivid landscapes on walls that were once blank. “Students are going to be inspired and take on the legacy of art and culture, changing the landscape of the city,” Huang said.
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