The Muralists of Long Beach Boulevard

If you drive Long Beach Boulevard from the I-91 north to the city border with Lynwood — a stretch of road four-and-a-half miles long — you will pass twenty-two large-scale murals. Not graffiti. Not advertising. Murals: commissioned, signed, often legally protected, painted by a tight network of six artists who have been working this street together since 2008. The collective, which calls itself the Boulevard Six, came together informally after the 2008 housing crash, when storefront after storefront on the strip went vacant and a generation of artists decided to use the empty walls as canvas. The first three murals were not commissioned. They were donated. The fourth was paid for by a barbershop owner who wanted his daughter on the side of the building. By 2012, the city had a small public-art line item. By 2018, the murals had become a tourism stop. By 2024, the original Boulevard Six artists had trained two more generations of younger Compton muralists who now carry the work forward. The walls are a city diary. There is a wall for the Compton Cowboys. There is a wall for Eazy-E. There is a wall for the kids of a 2015 high-school graduating class who chose to go to college instead of leaving. There is a wall, painted in 2020, for the front-line workers of two specific Compton hospitals. There is a wall — the most photographed of all of them — for the women who run the swap meet. This exhibit pulls together preliminary sketches for eleven of the twenty-two walls, donated by the original artists, alongside a self-guided walking map and a 9-minute looping interview reel cut from sit-downs with each of the Boulevard Six. The map is on the back. The murals are still on the boulevard. They have not been touched. The artists are not done. The wall by the Mexican bakery on the corner of 132nd is going up next month.