A Spade is Not a Spade: The Art of Fabian Debora and the Mystery of Los Angeles
By Essay Issue 71
THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…
Read MoreCorona de Espinas
By Essay Issue 73
Migrant Farm Workers, a Medieval Mystery Play, and the Future of Religious Art in America ON A CLEAR, COLD DECEMBER evening a few weeks before last Christmas I sat in a 215-year-old adobe church and listened to the devil preach the gospel. The devil, or Luzbel as he was named in the play I…
Read More111th Street Jesus: The Art and Faith of Muralist Kent Twitchell
By Essay Issue 82
KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives…
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