For over three decades, advocates have sought to establish legal protections for public art pieces in the city of Santa Ana, home to one of the largest concentrations of Chicano murals in Southern California. A new public art policy in the city will help ensure murals and other works are preserved.
The Public Art and Preservation Policy, approved unanimously by the City Council last week, establishes procedures for the stewardship of public art on city-owned properties. It requires the city to maintain an updated inventory and establish protocols for relocating or removing pieces while considering artists’ rights under the law.
“It’s a historic moment for the city of Santa Ana,” said Alicia Rojas, a local muralist and co-founder of the Santa Ana Community Artist Coalition, who consulted with the city on drafting the policy.
“Santa Ana holds one of the largest Chicano art collections in the country,” said Rojas. “Some of these murals are between 30 to 50 years old, yet none of our public art had protections or plaques.”
For Rojas and others, the push for safeguards dates back roughly 33 years — to the partial destruction of a 1972 relief mural by Sergio O. Cadiz that was removed during a renovation. The Mexico City-born artist, who had studied under famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, used cement to create three-dimensional images on a flat surface at Santa Ana City Hall.
Advocates say it was the first incident in Santa Ana to raise questions about artists’ rights under the Visual Artists Rights Act, a federal law established in 1990, which grants artists moral rights over their work, including protection against intentional distortion, mutilation, or destruction.
It then gained urgency after the whitewashing of a mural by Cadiz in 2019 and the near-destruction of Emigdio Vasquez’s Chicano Gothic in 2025 during renovation work at Memorial Park, which advocates said was spared only by community outcry.
The city had adopted a Master Plan for Arts and Culture in 2016, which recommended a formal policy around public art. Even so, without a way to fund it, the framework never materialized. The 2025 scare involving Chicano Gothic was described by Rojas as the “catalyst” that finally prompted the city to formalize the long-awaited policy.
The policy applies only to public art on city-owned property and requires the city to conduct yearly assessments to keep detailed documentation on its entire collection. No time frame has been established for when the city must put together the inventory.
The policy also prohibits the use of AI-generated content and establishes a points-based scoring rubric, awarding bonus points to artists living or working in Santa Ana who apply for future commissions.
Any major conservation work or removal of such public art requires officials to notify original artists beforehand and gives residents an opportunity to weigh in before a piece comes down. If the artist has died, the city must try to contact the family or estate and wait three months before removing or altering the work.
“For too long, we’ve celebrated public art in the city in all of its forms, not just murals, and then have forgotten about it,” Councilmember Jessie Lopez said, adding the policy finally delivers the maintenance and inventory protocols the community has sought for years. “These are pieces of art that mean so much to so many of us that were born and raised in our community.”
She also emphasized the need to develop a concrete plan to endow the Public Art Trust Fund, which exists only as a concept. The policy instructs staff to explore creating a dedicated account that could pay for conservation, emergency repairs and routine upkeep, but it does not allocate any money or identify a guaranteed revenue source.
“Without a dedicated funding stream, even the best policies don’t ever get to be implemented,” Lopez said. “I’d like to see a concrete proposal come back to the council for how we’re not just going to receive and file this and put it away on a shelf and forget about it.”
Councilmember Jonathan Hernandez also credited City Manager Alvaro Nunez for understanding the murals’ significance and championing the policy, noting that it took a Chicano city manager to open the door to artists to participate in city government and have greater ownership over their work in Santa Ana.
Rojas said the moment would not have been possible without him.