Asphalt Art Project Gets Underway, Bringing Splash of Color to Downtown Santa Barbara

“Mom! Look at that pink!” a little kid exclaimed, walking by the Zapotec design installation being painted across the intersection of State and Carrillo streets this week. About a dozen artists rolled the brilliant blue background on Monday, on top of which stencils were used to mark the geometric designs that combine bright pinks, oranges, and dark blues being applied during a visit on Wednesday.

“People are really excited about the project,” said Veronica Sanchez, who with her sister, Reyna Sanchez, has been talking with passersby as they work on the piece and overheard the child’s joyful remark. “We hear cars going ‘beep, beep, beep’ as they go by, and people are so mesmerized that they forget to walk across when the light turns green,” she said as the sisters both laughed. Sitting on the street, painting dark blue lines, they had come to the project through the city’s Arts Alliance. They previously had worked on murals at the Eastside Park and the Marjorie Luke Theatre, and this job also came with a salary.

For Austin McCormick, who earned his master’s in fine arts at UC Santa Barbara last year, the paying gig is one among a 20-year career freelancing as an artist. While laying out the stencils, he said, they learned that the streets were not perfectly aligned or at symmetrical right angles.

“The bird’s-eye picture,” he said, “that’s not on us. The street is not on a straight line.” He said they eyeballed the layout, deciding to center it and working with the variations in the street.

What the city is calling “asphalt art” is a bold design funded by a $100,000 grant from the Bloomberg Foundation. Competing against 300 other entrants, Santa Barbara was among four winners and the only one in California. 

“The big driver was the Farmers’ Market,” said Tess Harris, State Street Master Planner for the city. Not only is the intersection the new location for Santa Barbara’s Saturday market, but the market’s farming community includes families from Oaxaca, home to the Zapotec culture that underlies the design, she indicated.

Chief artist Eduardo Jimenez is also involved in the farmers’ market, but the one at Channel Islands in Oxnard. Natives of Oaxaca, his family are well-known weavers who sell their textiles at the market. He worked out the project’s design details with Irene Ramirez, a graphic designer professor at Santa Barbara City College, simplifying his textile designs into an easily installed, eye-catching piece.

“I am honored to share this time and space with all these artists,” Jimenez said, gesturing to the work going on around him in the bright sunlight on State Street. He’d just been chatting in Spanish with Carlos Serrano, a painter on the project from Delgado’s Paint. Serrano thought the project was a good one, and his colleague Julio Rosalio called it a little something different from Mexico.

In both pattern and color, Jimenez’s thoughts went deeper, to the deity Quetzalcoatl and the 1968 Olympics. He explained the vivid colors have their origin in Oaxaca, where from room to room, different hues define the home. The color palette from the Mexico City Dummer Olympics was as much an inspiration as its politics, “which had a significant civil rights component by the athletes,” he said. “We are still fighting the same fight today, and the Latino culture is facing a lot of discrimination.” (During the 1968 summer Olympics, two Black runners stood on the winners’ podium with their heads down and fists raised as the U.S. anthem played, a gesture to affirm human rights, gold medalist Tommie Smith later said.)

The feathered serpent deity of Oaxacan indigenous culture is Quetzalcoatl, represented in the shapes now adorning the intersection. “You know how the rattlesnake has diamond shapes?” Jimenez reminded, going on to explain that Quetzalcoatl is grounded by its serpentine belly but also feathered like a bird. “It brings together the human experience of the body, but also the mind, our thoughts, an imagination that flies,” Jimenez said, an understanding he’d learned from his grandfather and cousins growing up.

To preserve the evocative imagery in the layers of paint, a protective coating will be added before this coming Saturday’s market, said Harris. The work concludes next week as the crosswalks are finished and Carrillo Street shifts its two driving lanes to accommodate the painters.

Completion of the giant artwork will brighten downtown Santa Barbara, but also allow the painters to let their blisters heal and joints recover from the squatting and kneeling they’ll be enduring until it’s done. As a reporter heaved herself up from a conversation at ground level, McCormick kindly offered a knee pad from one of the numerous information and supply kiosks dotting State Street.