A new mural celebrating local food vendors was unveiled Thursday, March 31 at the site of the weekly Bixby Knolls Farmers Market.
“We thought if there was a little more beautification that there’d be more pride in the area, people would treat it like more of a place than just a space they’re passing through,” Ryan Smolar of Long Beach Fresh said.
For three weeks in a row, volunteers were invited to help paint the new mural during the Bixby Knolls Farmers Markets on Thursdays. While some signed up online ahead of time after seeing the event on social media, others happened to just be passing by at the time and decided to help out.
“Everyone can own a piece of the mural themselves in this community and say, ‘Hey, I did that and I got to be part of this experience,’” local artist Amy Tanaka said.
The new work of art is the second of three planned murals designed by Tanaka, and was funded through the local nonprofit Long Beach Fresh using a grant it received from the Port of Long Beach.
The mural was unveiled on Thursday during local seafood festival DelicaSea, which kicked-off Long Beach Fresh’s four-day Spring Foodways Summit. The Spring Foodways Summit is meant to connect the public to local food sources, while DelicaSea’s goal was to connect the local community, especially those in North Long Beach, to local sources of seafood.
Tanaka said Smolar reached out to her last year and asked her to design a series of murals that focused on “food and community.”
“What we thought was if the community participates in the mural, they’ll enjoy it even more because of the story and their inclusion in the process,” Smolar said.
Tanaka’s first community mural was created in 2021 and speaks to how the pandemic impacted both access to food and the mental health of the community, featuring illustrations of different produce alongside a line drawing of a human brain.
Her newest mural design focused on local vendors and food trucks, while incorporating elements of seafood. After collaborating with Kelli Johnson of the Long Beach Farmers Market and Smolar, Tanaka decided that her newest mural design would incorporate illustrations of food trucks and vendors as well as abalone shells and shrimp.
Tanaka outlined the design of the murals onto a brick wall along Atlantic Avenue using a paintbrush and a can of white spray paint. The community was invited to fill in the rest.
“I don’t try to control too much of it because I still want them to be part of that experience and own it,” Tanaka said. “I try not to cut in too much and just let it be free at that point.”
Tananka said she had to come up with a design simple enough for volunteers of all ages to paint while considering the texture of the brick wall they would be painting on.
“There’s just so many big blocks of color and details here and there, but nothing super detailed because I feel like it would get lost with the texture and the break up of the bricks on the wall,” Tanaka said.
According to Tanaka, plans for a third mural remain unfunded and there is no timeline for its completion.
Smolar said Long Beach Fresh has applied for a grant from the National Association of Realtors that could potentially be used to create the third mural.
“We really want to place-make where the farmers markets are so that people identify those as community places and gathering points,” Smolar said.