Legacies of the Street

With support from California Humanities for the Arts, Pueblo Studio partnered with residents of the West Adams neighborhood in Los Angeles and the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute to explore how community storytelling can meaningfully shape planning decisions and transform the built environment. Together, they investigated how personal narratives—when surfaced, shared, and honored—could influence policy, reclaim space, and strengthen community identity.

Pueblo collaborated with local residents to co-design and install a wheat-paste mural beneath a freeway overpass, a site long marked by disconnection and disinvestment. Through narrative curation, the mural became a visual archive of the neighborhood’s history with the built environment, weaving together stories of resilience, displacement, creativity, and belonging. Residents’ voices informed every layer of the artwork, transforming the underpass into a public canvas that celebrated their past and asserted their presence.

More than a mural, the project stood as an act of reclaiming public space—an embodied declaration that community stories not only deserve to be told, but have the power to reshape the spaces where people live, gather, and dream.