About this book:
"Artist finds L.A.'s saints in unlikely places When J. Michael
Walker first visited Santa Clara Street, he felt a twinge of
disappointment. "There's nothing here," he thought as he scanned the
two-block street in southeast Los Angeles, hemmed in by red-brick walls,
barbed wire and railroad tracks. Where could he find St. Clare? Then he
understood. Santa Clara Street lay at the heart of a threadbare
industrial zone. Its windowless warehouses and boarded-up factories were
coated with truck dust, its streets empty of people. Similarly, St.
Clare had sought poverty. She embodied self-denial. So Walker painted
her as a gentle-faced woman standing next to barbed wire and security
bars, lifting a railroad lantern. He inscribed his painting with a poem
he composed for the saint and her street: Santa Clara had sought the
privilege of absolute poverty,And found it here, on this meager portion
of a street. That was seven years ago. Street by street, from Boyle
Heights to Pacific Palisades, Walker has spent the intervening years
studying saints and the histories of the 103 streets of Los Angeles that
bear their names. He walked the pavement to see how the two might
intertwine. Then he created images of the saints in sumi ink and
serigraph on 4-by-6-foot pieces of paper, adding his poetry in ink.
Curving across the top is an arch with the words, "Todos los Santos de
Los Angeles." Publication... (coincides with) an exhibit that will begin
in February at the Autry's Museum of the American West. But along the
way to publication, Walker discovered something magical. His stories of
saints and their streets were really not as neat as the page proofs
stacked at his studio in Montecito Heights. This is an unruly,
ever-changing city, and its stories were changing, too. Last week,
Walker returned to Santa Clara Street and found a changing landscape. He
swerved his dented gray Hyundai past delivery trucks and 18-wheelers.
As he drove with one hand, he pointed out a new taco shop, pricey new
condominiums in the Fashion District and then drab gray warehouses and
barbed wire. The street is still bleak, but now it doubles as a parking
lot and a shortcut to the Santa Monica Freeway, and machines hum inside
the red-brick factory walls. "This project has taken me to places you
would not normally visit," he said. San Pablo Street, for instance, ran
from railroad tracks past weedy lots and faceless buildings northeast of
downtown. Then it turned into a dirt road leading uphill to a bluff
overlooking the city and the cathedral windows of County-USC Medical
Center. He thought of the hilltop as a spot where St. Paul could issue
his epistles. Although he is not a formal Catholic, Walker feels a close
affinity to Catholic spirituality and culture, and despite his Arkansas
roots, "more Latino than not," he said. The project sprang initially
from his years in rural Mexico,where small saints' images, or
retablos,adorned walls in nearly every room in the rural homes,
typically as inexpensive offset lithographs framed in tin. These images
were more intimate than looming stained-glass saints in large city
churches. They kept watch over the rituals of people's lives. Walker
said his pages were "affording the saints an opportunity to comment on
how they've been used in Southern California." His research on the
saints is rooted in a $6,500 grant from the city of Los Angeles, which
commissioned paintings of the saints to hang in bus shelters near their
namesake streets for two months. But Walker delved further. He learned
that the vast majority of city streets with saints' names did not get
those names during the Spanish-Mexican era, as many people assume, but
during the great expansion of the late 19th and 20th centuries.Real
estate developers assigned the names randomly... " Los Angeles Times 10/11/2007"