ACLA Parks

ACLA (Art . . . Community . . . Land . . . Activism!) is a twenty year old public art and land collective committed to working with youth in underserved Los Angeles neighborhoods to transform unused urban land into dynamic, community directed ArtParks. As a daily presence in our neighborhoods and the lives of participating youth and families, ACLA is able to grow programming that is responsive to the immediate and specific challenges of a community while at the same time addressing itself to the holistic needs of individuals.

History and Achievements:

La Tierra de la Culebra: Developed in 1992 in the Northeast district of Los Angeles by artist Tricia Ward as a response to the civil unrest following the Rodney King police trial, La Tierra de la Culebra was ACLA’s first ArtPark. Ward selected a derelict parcel of land, conducted local outreach, and mobilized a group of 35 neighborhood youth volunteers to clear the one-acre site of trash and weeds. In a series of initial neighborhood council meetings organized by Ward, community members described a sense of disenfranchisement and frustration underlying the riots in their neighborhood, and together they imagined into reality the ArtPark's central symbol of strength and regeneration: a 450-foot sculptural serpent constructed from stone, rubble, and piqué tiles found on site. The piece winds through the ground's three levels to connect open spaces, terraced patios furnished with mosaic benches, a large mural garden, and numerous landscaped beds of indigenous plants and flowers. The effect was immediate and powerful, together community members transformed the site from a symptom of blight and neglect into piece of living art, a site of cultural and civic activity whose impact on the neighborhood remains seventeen years later.

Spiraling Orchard: In 1996, ACLA was offered a lease by LAUSD on an 8,500 square foot site in Los Angeles' Rampart district to develop our second ArtPark, Spiraling Orchard. Ward and others implemented the same strong, youth-centered community building curriculum that succeeded at La Culebra, once again working with local youth and families to clean and shape the grounds around a central symbol, an incised spiral-shaped orchard of indigenous fruit trees intended to capture the spirit of connectedness shared between the neighborhood's vecinos, a Spanish word for "neighbors" that came to identify the community councils that grew at the park.


In all, we have transformed a total of four sites into functioning ArtParks. These include a Chinatown facility, which helped to draw many new art galleries and other social amenities to the area before before closing in 2005, and the Francis Avenue Garden Coalition, which now operates as an independent entity. Our long running and successful Walls of Reclamation mural project brought youth together to create twenty-eight original murals at LAUSD schools, including the largest single-concept mural in Los Angeles, “Earth Memories,” at Belmont High School.


We have facilitated over 200 on-site internships for local youth, resulting in nearly as many college scholarships. And in 1999, our innovative model of youth organizing and community revitalization was recognized with a Rudy Bruner Foundation Silver Medal Award for Urban Excellence, and again in 2003 with a Rockefeller “Partnership for Affirming Community Transformation” award. We have also been a recipient of numerous NEA grants, and, in the last year, of awards from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the James Irvine “Cultural Participation” initiative as well.