Teena Marie Mural Stalled Over Permits

The proposed mural of Venice musician Teena Marie has been stalled due to City Permits. The project, financed by Venice video journalist Tony Vera, is to be painted by artist Rip Cronk. The mural has the support of the building owner as well as Councilman Rosendahl.

Vera is pretty ticked off that other murals are going up around town while his project awaits approval, as seen in the video below.

The current Los Angeles Mural Code laws have recently received severe criticism from the arts community as they fail to differentiate between art projects and advertisements. The current ordinance, which instituted a city-wide moratorium on both ads and murals, was established in 2002 after a lawsuit brought against the City by a billboard company that argued allowing art murals and not advertisements infringed on the billboard company’s right to free speech.

As of now, most murals that exist on private property are actually illegal.

From the LA Times:

Some City Council members want to tweak the rules to grandfather in many of the best-known murals of Los Angeles and create a way for more recent murals to be legalized. They may also put an approval process in place to sign off on murals.

“We want to define murals as something other than signs and create a process for permitting murals,” Councilman Bill Rosendahl said. “There is a difference between a sign and a mural. One is marketing and one is art.”