The mission of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture is to advance arts, culture, and creativity throughout LA County. We fulfill our mission by providing services and support in areas including grants and technical assistance for nonprofit organizations; professional development opportunities; commissioning civic artworks and managing the County’s civic art collection; implementing countywide arts education initiatives; research and evaluation; career pathways in the creative economy; free community programs; and cross sector creative strategies that address civic issues. This work is framed by the County’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative and a longstanding commitment to fostering access to the arts.
Alfonso’s designs are inspired by the youth that reside immediately around the park, and the families that helped organize to see the park realized. Workshops to help inform the artwork designs were hosted for fourth grade students from Walnut Park Elementary. Ione Aceves (one of Alfonso and Adriana’s daughters) helped Alfonso facilitate the workshops. Alfonso introduced the students to the project, his studio practice, and the tradition of printmaking, and demonstrated how to make mono-prints using simple and inexpensive materials such as rollers, Styrofoam plates, paper, and ink. Students were asked to consider what excited them most about the new park, and themes such as connections to nature, friends, family, and sports became apparent. Each student began with a simple drawing exercise which was translated into two prints. Students took the best version of their print home, and Alfonso kept the second to help inform the final imagery of playful children, loving parents and grandparents and colorful plants and birds that became realized in the final artwork.
About the Artist:
Alfonso Aceves of Kalli Arte Collective, lead team artist, hails from a family collective of artists based in Boyle Heights. Alfonso is an accomplished printmaker who has shown work throughout California as well as in Washington State, New Mexico, and Arizona. He has been commissioned in Los Angeles by LA Commons, Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Self-Help Graphics and Art. Both Alfonso and his wife Adriana Carranza are self-taught, and are joined in Kalli Arte by their four talented children, dedicated to speaking directly to their community and beyond through original designs rendered in printmaking, murals, gallery exhibitions, art installations, community workshops and marketplaces. Kalli Arte’s major mural at Roosevelt High School was recently featured in the LA Times.
