Reframe: City Hall Mural Phase I
Client: City of Santa Monica Cultural Affairs (2022-2024)
Project Team: Joel Garcia (Meztli Projects), Robin Garcia PhD, Susannah Laramee Kidd PhD, and Rosten Woo
Tile Image Credit: Kenneth Lopez, Meztli Projects
The Reframe: City Hall Mural project emerged from protest and debates around the WPA-era Stanton MacDonald-Wright mural in the lobby of Historic Santa Monica City Hall entitled History of Santa Monica and the Bay District. Cultural Affairs contracted with our project team in 2022 to design a City Hall Mural project Phase I to engage Santa Monica community members in conversations both in general around representation and belonging, and with the specific questions arising from the lobby mural. Over the course of over a year, our project team led:
A “Working Circle” composed of 13 individuals with strong ties to very different parts of Santa Monica that committed to attend public programs as well as meet as a cohort to act as an advisory body and think tank for six months. The Working Circle engaged one another in an ongoing deep group process to learn together and ultimately develop and prioritize recommendations.
A series of 9 Public Programs on relevant themes including programs through the perspective of Santa Monica First Peoples, a bus tour of sites of memory; virtual and in-person panel discussions about art, civic memory and alternate histories of Santa Monica; a virtual tour of relevant educational resources; a reflective listening workshop and a screening of the documentary Town Destroyer.
The creation and installation of Lobby Displays in Historic City Hall that explained the project and presented updates to City Hall visitors.
Collection of over 300 Feedback Activity responses from people about their perceptions of the mural and ideas for new public artworks.
Interviews and Small Group Engagements with a broad spectrum of individuals who were impacted by the mural conversation or have voiced opinions about it, subject matter experts, and local content experts.
These activities resulted in a Final Report that includes lessons learned and recommendations for the City of Santa Monica for further actions around repair, informed by discussions with the Working Circle in particular. In February 2024, the Santa Monica City Council approved all 9 recommendations offered in the report and included a 10th recommendation that affirms their commitment to restorative approaches that repair harm of past actions of the City of Santa Monica impacting diverse groups from various heritages and cultures modeled in the Reframe process. The City of Santa Monica’s March 2025 launch of a Landback and Reparations Task Force is a result of one of the recommendations that came from this process, specifically out of the Working Circle’s deliberation on the priorities in addressing the harms of the mural and the histories of harm and exclusion that it represents.
In addition to collaborating on overall engagement design and serving as project manager for this project, Laramee Kidd’s role focused on co-design and co-facilitation of the Working Circle, feedback activity co-design, feedback activity responses analysis, interviews, and report writing and editing.