Artwork Detail

The Diamond Bar Library mural is one of six that Frank Matranga created for Los Angeles County Libraries in the 1970s and 80s. It was first installed at the entrance of the original Diamond Bar Library in 1977. In 2012 a new library was built and the artwork was relocated to the new library's reading garden. The mural’s forms are organic and rounded and undulate throughout the work. Inscribed in small letters on the mural’s proper right side are words which comment on a library’s purpose: “An educated people are a free people.”

Frank Matranga received his BA and MA from Los Angeles State University. While working on his MA, he was offered a job teaching ceramics at a local high school. This led him to discover a lifelong love affair with clay. He completed his master’s degree in art and later studied at the University of Southern California under Carlton Ball. In 1961 he started his own ceramic studio in Redondo Beach (later moved to Manhattan Beach) and began to teach in the Los Angeles Community College system, which he would do for the next twenty years. His public art career began in 1970 when Sears, Roebuck, and Company commissioned him to create seven murals for Sears stores in the Southern California area. In the following decades he has completed over 50 ceramic mural commissions for libraries, private companies, and homes. In 1977 and 1979 he was invited to be an artist in residence in Japan, where he exhibited at the American Embassy Gallery in Tokyo. His work has also been shown in Australia and Germany.