LA UNDERWATER (FROM THE MIOCENE TO THE ANTHROPOCENE) is an in-progress mural project at a communal living house called Sota House, located right next to Flat Top Park in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. I will begin painting this mural in 2026.

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To conceive of the mural content, I have been engaging in a community-based process with not only the residents of the house but also Lincoln Heights residents broadly as well as the Tongva tribe. The project has become deeply intertwined with the struggle to stop the building of a mansion at the entrance to Flat Top, which is sacred land to the Tongva and vital green space to the community. The neighborhood's majority working-class residents also fear the luxury development will worsen displacement and gentrification.

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This community-based process has involved giving questionnaires to residents of Sota House and visiting the Natural History Museum together to see marine fossils found in Lincoln Heights (from when LA used to be a mile underwater!). I also helped facilitate an arts activity at an event organized by GROW Lincoln Heights and the Lincoln Heights Neighborhood Council to rally the community against mansion development on Flat Top. I have been in touch with representatives of the Tongva tribe, who have given valuable direction for how I should represent the Tongva's relationship to Flat Top and the past and future of Indigenous life in the area.

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As it stands now, the mural will bring to life both the natural history and (un)natural future of Sota House and its surroundings, i.e. what we currently know as Lincoln Heights, Downtown LA, and East LA at large. The mural will depict an otherworldly marine environment featuring real (i.e. historical) and imagined (i.e. projected and/or fantastical) elements of LA’s underwater past and future.

The mural will feature a range of both playful and somber imagery, inviting viewers to reflect with both gravity and levity about humans’ humble relationship to time and the earth. The mural will, to a certain extent, represent the dire consequences of human hubris and resulting climate catastrophe, but it will also signify potential for renewal and transformation once we accept, adapt, and build relationships of reciprocity and connection to land and each other — as Indigenous people did in the past, and as the residents of Lincoln Heights and Sota House are trying to do now.

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There will be two main focal points of the mural. The garage will feature a submerged cityscape reminiscent of the view of downtown from Flat Top. The long, short wall will feature the giant whale fossil from the Miocene (8-12 million years ago) found by plumber F.W. Maley in 1931 while digging an irrigation ditch near Flat Top. The whale will look as if it is swimming both forward, toward the viewer, and rightward, toward the cityscape.

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There will be abundant plant life, people stewarding the underwater land, natural overgrowth / reclamation of parasitic elements of the 21st-century anthropocentric city (such as an oil rig, an electrical tower, andor a police car), and homages to more reciprocal, respectful Indigenous relationships to this land (i.e. abalone, tulle, kiches [huts]). The mural will also reference the present-day struggle to save Flat Top from development.