The Alisal community pitches in on the three murals coming to Highway 101 underpasses.

Soon, there will be three new murals adorning Highway 101 underpasses in the Alisal neighborhood of Salinas – each by a different artist team from California. “I can’t wait,” says Karyn Lee-Garcia, programs director of the Arts Council for Monterey County that facilitated the project, financed by the California Department of Transportation and the Clean California Program, with the help of the city of Salinas. “It will transform the city.”

To make sure that the murals transform the city in the right way, the muralists decided to consult the neighborhood directly, presenting their projects on Friday, Nov. 18 in the Alisal Center for the Fine Arts and asking for honest feedback.

The muralists were led by La Neta Murals, a five-member local team who will paint the Alisal Street underpass. They approached the community in both local languages: “In the next few months we will start to paint,” said Arsenio Baca, as his colleague Natalia Corazza echoed him in Spanish. “We wanted to connect with the community before.”

The project began in August 2022 and the selection was made based both on the artists’ merit and the appropriateness for the Alisal community. A budget of $100,000 was allocated for the Alisal Street underpass, $280,000 for Sanborn Road and $300,000 for East Market Street.

So far, the community has not been shy with feedback. “Not enough wrinkles,” was the feedback Timothy Robert Smith, a muralist from Los Angeles who will paint the Sanborn Road underpass, received regarding his farmworkers’ faces.

“I like to play a lot with the perspective,” Smith says, explaining his design. In it, the ground is transparent and the audience sees things from below the ground. There are a bunch of men working, packing strawberries and lettuce, and lettuce heads are suspended in the air like a string of planets in the big Salinas Valley universe.

The East Market Street underpass will be done by a couple, Joshua and MJ Lawyer, from Santa Rosa. Their design shows a dark-haired girl sitting in the middle of a mango-intense sunset that will transform an underpass into art.

“Those passages are corridors to our community,” says Javier Tamayo, executive director of the Alisal Center for the Fine Arts. “I don’t know about you, but I pass them daily.”

Learn more about the mural project at arts4mc.org.