Street Art at Chicano Park, San Diego

My husband laughed when I took him by Chicano Park in San Diego and wondered if graffiti had lost its touch or as he put it, it's tag...I thought it was funny how he knew the word, being a 6' 2" blond hair blue eyed Caucasian of Norwegian decent.  However, he was born in Los Angeles, he is proud to say on “Sunset and Vein” and his family spent most of his youth moving farther from the “blight” and associated graffiti.  

He did however appreciate the murals at the park and he explained his original laugh was due to the fact that most of his life he had not associated these type of murals as street art.  Instead he had associated street art as the graffiti taggers used as their form of expression the type of which his family kept putting farther and farther in the rear view mirror.  Likewise the street art at Chicano Park are not tag nor have the murals themselves been tagged.  

The mural “Cosmic Clowns” has a surreal form and is drawn in an almost cartoonish fashion.  It appears the artist chose this form of pictorial to sooth children who played in the park, to perhaps divert their attention away from the more serious revolutionary aspects of many of the murals it surrounds.  However, it appears that several park supports found the mural to be a mock of the efforts made by them to have the area taken seriously.  Either way it still stands, and apparently must be held in some respect as no one had made an effort to tag the piece.  The image of three heads donning large eyes and ears appear to be more representative, in my opinion of Bat Boy then of clowns, but perhaps this is why they are cosmic and perhaps not of this world? 

 Kind of like Bat Boy… The feature perhaps overlooked by the protestors is the form of a heart entwined by a serpent with a dagger running diagonally through the center of the heart, a drop of blood rest above the head  of another “spirit” who is breaking free of the chains of bondage.  I am not certain what the “+” figure represents that is on the figure’s forehead, but the reaction of freedom, perhaps induced by the blood drawn from El Corazon…a tagger no less noted by my husband that signed such tags in a part to the Valley he grew up in Canoga Park.