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GET HOME SAFE

LONG BEACH WALLS

Long Beach Walls (formerly known as POW! WOW! Long Beach) is a week-long, city-wide event that takes place in the summer throughout Long Beach and is part of a globally recognized series of street art events, which since 2010 has brought murals to public spaces in cities like Honolulu, Seoul, Washington DC, Taipei and Tokyo. The core of their mission is to bring art and culture to public spaces while beautifying the city of Long Beach and cultivating community pride.

 
“Get Home Safe” 12 x 250 ft  51 E. Third St., Long Beach, CA 90604

“Get Home Safe” 12 x 250 ft
51 E. Third St., Long Beach, CA 90802
Photographed by Jose Cordon

 

The mural "Get Home Safe" is inspired by that same phrase when prior to COVID-19—we would depart from our loved ones and head our separate ways.

The 250 foot city block wide mural is located inside a parking structure and is composed of segmented friezes. The mural is dedicated to traffic collision victims and honors victims of traffic collisions.

The mural is a series of friezes that depicts people of varying mobilities who move and travel through Long Beach public spaces. Represented is a roller skater, a group of rainbow pedestrians walking and in a wheelchair, a cyclist, a skateboarder and another group fading into a sky background. The pedestrians are surrounded by large graphic shapes that form silhouettes of lily flowers. In this mural lilies are used to honor the deceased and other victims as outcomes to traffic collisions and oftentimes the violent barriers in built urban environments. Those barriers are also depicted in a literal senseas a chain linked fence, the breaking down of chevron shapes, and also in an abstract sense overlaying topographic line drawings that reference language from maps using an aerial perspective to depict motion, movement through time, and untimely collisions.

This mural is located in Downtown Long Beach adjacent to the Harvey Milk Park at the Promenade and is a location used vastly by motorist visitors, city government workers, and downtown residents for parking. It is a location which is often used by people who frequent restaurants and bars.

The mural aims to garner more attention to the ways in which we navigate and simultaneously share public spaces with people of varying mobilities with the intent to primarily plant seeds in the mind of motorists to make motor-related decisions to create safer and more accessible public spaces.

Get Home Safe, 250x12’, acrylic and aerosol paint on cement block wall at a parking structure, 2019
Video Produced by Digital Revolution


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