TO PRESERVE AN ART FORM THAT INEVITABLY FADES UNDER THE SUN…

SPARC’s Mural Resource and Education Center (MREC) is the country’s largest one of a kind repository of information about murals and other forms of public art. Since 1976, SPARC’s MREC has amassed an impressive amount of written and visual documentation focusing on multi-ethnic public art, techniques in mural making, and the role of muralism within the historical civil rights struggles of the African American, Chicano, Asian, Women, and Native American movements. A sample of the MREC imagery includes: responses to the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the representation of the Farm workers movement, extensive and varied images of Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, and the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The MREC resources include: hundreds of journals, magazines and newspaper articles; over 60,000 slides of rare historic and contemporary murals and public art projects; audio and video tapes; and an artists’ registry database. SPARC’s MREC also monitors artist copyrights and collects and distributes user fees from publishers, film companies, and other entities desiring to reproduce mural images for commercial use.