The latest Sonoma County mural created by artist Maria de Los Angeles won’t be permanent but it is expected to have an impact.
“Mi Healdsburg/My Healdsburg,” a vinyl and glass outdoor mural four stories high, will be unveiled Aug. 23 at the Harmon Guest House in Healdsburg.
“It’s about the agriculture of the area. The large central image is a female figure holding a basket of flowers and different kinds of produce,” de Los Angeles explained.
Across the bottom of the mural, there will be images of kayaking, swimming and other activities.
“The smaller images at the bottom of the mural will be by me, but their concept development was during our workshops. The concepts are by participants but I made the drawings from our conversations,” de Los Angeles said.
A $19,000 Healdsburg Public Art Grant helped pay for the mural’s creation. The vinyl installation is not a permanent one, which would have been more expensive, de Los Angeles explained. It will be in place for four months.
“The images were drawn in ink and scanned, then converted to a large-scale vinyl,” she said.
As part of the project, three community workshops — organized by Holly Hoods from Healdsburg Museum — were held last month at the Bacchus Landing wine tasting cooperative, Healdsburg Public Library and Healdsburg Museum.
“A large number of people came through and made paintings,” de Los Angeles said.
Some 60 volunteers created their own paintings based on the “Mi Healdsburg/My Healdsburg” theme, which be on view after the mural unveiling at at the Harmon Guest House and next year at the museum.
“We’re trying to increase the opportunities around town for art and culture, so this really fits the plan. We’ve had a number of different programs,” said Elaine Mitchell, Healdsburg’s vice mayor.
“I think the Harmon Guest House is a work of art itself. It’s such a beautiful building,” she added. “So its to have the mural there.”
The Healdsburg mural project is the her first one there, de Los Angeles said. She has previously created murals in Glen Ellen, at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts and at the Santa Rosa Junior College Foundation.
Born in Michoacan, Mexico, de Los Angeles crossed the border to California with her family in 1999 when she was 11. The family settled in the Roseland neighborhood of Santa Rosa, which was then still an unincorporated part of Sonoma County.
As a youth, she attended Lawrence Cook Middle School and Elsie Allen High School before graduating from Santa Rosa High School and going on to Santa Rosa Junior College.
She earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting in 2013 from Pratt Institute in New York City and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting and printmaking in 2015 from Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2022, she joined the faculty of the Yale School of Art, where she is the full-time interim director of graduate studies for the painting and printmaking program.
You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On X @danarts.
