The murals that have brought color to the village of La Jolla for 15 years were never meant to last. A newly published book makes sure they do.
Since 2010, a group of privately owned buildings in La Jolla Village area has been home to a set of public art — murals which have been by design, temporary.
Backed by the Murals of La Jolla program out of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library and originally initiated by the La Jolla Community Foundation, nearly all the murals are vinyl prints on billboard-like structures.
The structures are meant to come down after a couple of years, making way for the next artist. Thirty-eight of the 53 murals commissioned since the project launched have already been replaced or temporarily removed, but “Murals of La Jolla 2010-2025” aims to make sure they don’t vanish for good.
The 224-page hardbound volume, released this year by the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, documents the program’s first 50 murals.
The coffee table book is a bold and bright photographic keepsake, with artist essays and biographies, a map and an introduction that traces how the project has evolved. The book is $55 and available at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library at 1008 Wall St. in La Jolla or at ljathenaeum.org.
It’s the second hardcover Murals of La Jolla book. The first was published in 2020 and covered the project’s first decade and 30 murals in 176 pages.
A book with a purpose
Taylor Chapin, executive director of Murals of La Jolla, said the book was never meant to be a simple picture book — each section was built to serve a different purpose, and to bring in voices with different relationships to the project.
Susan Morgan, an arts writer who also contributed to the 2020 book, wrote the individual artist essays, weaving each mural into the artist’s broader practice while situating it within the larger story of the program, Chapin said.
Chapin and Angelica Castillo wrote the artists’ biographies, highlighting each artist’s accomplishments and the range of contemporary voices the project has brought to La Jolla.
Chapin and Lynda Forsha, the project’s founding executive director, wrote the introduction together, drawing on years of work with the program to explain how Murals of La Jolla works and how it has evolved.
Christie Mitchell, executive director of the Athenaeum, wrote the foreword — a nod, Chapin said, to the Athenaeum’s decade-plus as the program’s institutional home.
Working on the book gave Chapin a renewed appreciation for the scope of the project, she said.
“Revisiting all of the artists and murals together, and seeing 15 years of the program in one place, really reinforced what an extraordinary collection of contemporary art the project has brought to La Jolla,” she said. “It also gave me a new appreciation for the collective impact of the murals and how each artist has contributed something distinct to the program over the years.”
Chapin said the goal was to give readers something they can’t get simply by walking past a mural on the street.
“When you encounter one walking through La Jolla, you experience it visually, but you may not know much about the artist, the ideas behind the work, or how it connects to their larger practice,” she said. “The book gives people an opportunity to go deeper and also to see all 15 years of the project together.”
Giving temporary art a permanent record
The temporary nature of the murals is central to how the program works, Chapin said — it’s what allows Murals of La Jolla to keep evolving and making room for new artists. But it also means many works eventually vanish from the landscape entirely.
“The book gives those works a life beyond their time on the wall,” Chapin said. “I think it’s really special to have a permanent record of how this collection has evolved and what it has brought to La Jolla.”
Fifty murals over 15 years felt like a natural milestone to mark with a book, Chapin said, and the timing lined up with Forsha’s departure after founding and running the program from the start. Forsha stepped down as founding executive director in early 2025 but returned to work on the book’s design process.
“The book felt like a fitting way to commemorate her incredible contributions and everything she accomplished during her time with the program,” Chapin said. She said she hopes another book will follow once the project reaches its next major milestone.
Asked whether a single mural or artist best captures what the program is about, Chapin said no one work does it alone.
“I don’t think I could point to just one mural or artist. I think they all do collectively,” she said.
“There isn’t one particular style or idea that defines Murals of La Jolla — it’s the diversity of the collection as a whole that defines it.”
Looking back across 15 years, Chapin said the project has helped make contemporary art part of everyday life in La Jolla rather than something people have to seek out.
“You don’t have to go into a museum or gallery to encounter the work — it’s integrated into the streets and places people pass every day,” she said. “There’s something really special about encountering a work unexpectedly, developing a relationship with it over time, and then seeing the landscape change as new murals come in.”
The cover artist
Roy McMakin’s “Your Favorite Color” — the program’s second commission, painted directly onto a wall at 7596 Eads Ave. in 2010, a departure from the vinyl prints that followed most other murals — graces the book’s cover.
McMakin’s mural was a collaborative concept centered around members of the community choosing their favorite color. He arranged every individual choice into a single composition, an idea he traced back to a roundtable at an artist residency he attended, where he asked a fellow resident their favorite color, and then that resident asked the next artist what their favorite color was, and so on.
The original 2010 piece drew around 900 participants choosing among about 80 colors, with lime green the top pick.
By 2022, with new commissions coming, the building owners asked Murals of La Jolla leadership if the piece could be refreshed rather than replaced, and McMakin was given the green light to redo it.
He kept the concept but rebuilt the process, cataloging choices with the standardized European RAL color-matching system for consistency. This time, 882 people chose from 79 colors, and every color was picked at least once — with the top choices shifting to a more muted pink and blue, which McMakin said gave the piece “a slightly more conservative, somber vibe” than the brighter original.
McMakin said preserving large-scale, outdoor work in a book isn’t incidental — it’s often the only way it survives at all.
“Anything big and outdoors and complicated ultimately goes away,” he said.
McMakin pointed to the recent removal of the late sculptor Joel Shapiro’s “Blue” sculpture from outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, after seven years at the site, as an example of how quickly even celebrated public art can go.
He calls the book “an integral component” of a project like this and praised its “good archival practices.”
Where to see it — while they’re up
Murals of La Jolla currently have 17 murals on view around the village, all on privately owned buildings and funded through private donations (https://www.ljathenaeum.org/murals), selected by an Art Advisory Committee made up of the heads of La Jolla’s major visual arts organizations.
The Athenaeum offers free, guided walking tours, with this month’s at noon, Saturday, Sept. 19, and 5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Sept. 30 (currently at capacity, but there is a wait list). Tours begin at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library and take participants on a walking route through La Jolla to see a selection of the murals, led by docents who share stories about the artists and how each project came together.
Chapin said she’d like to grow the program’s engagement with young people and arts education in the next few years.
“The murals provide such an accessible entry point into contemporary art because they’re already a part of the community,” she said. “I’d love to build more partnerships with local schools, bring more students on tours, and develop programming that connects young people directly with the artists and the ideas behind their work.”
