The mission of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture is to advance arts, culture, and creativity throughout LA County. We fulfill our mission by providing services and support in areas including grants and technical assistance for nonprofit organizations; professional development opportunities; commissioning civic artworks and managing the County’s civic art collection; implementing countywide arts education initiatives; research and evaluation; career pathways in the creative economy; free community programs; and cross sector creative strategies that address civic issues. This work is framed by the County’s Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative and a longstanding commitment to fostering access to the arts.
In the 1960s and 70s Armando Campero created several works which focused on the Kennedy legacy. His oil portrait of John F. Kennedy was presented to Jacqueline Kennedy in Washington, D.C. and he later painted an outdoor mural in Mexico City about JFK’s life that emphasized his peace ideals. Shortly after that mural’s completion (then called The Kennedy Saga), he was commissioned by Los Angeles County to create a work for the interior ceiling of the City Terrace Park Social Hall.
He chose again to focus on John F. Kennedy, forming a dialog between his murals in two different countries. This second work, The Kennedy Saga II was an acrylic mural measuring 50’ h x 63’ w. It was on a much larger scale than his previous Kennedy mural and took Campero two years to complete. He painted it on the Hall’s floor in long strips and then mounted it to the ceiling. The mural’s theme was the Kennedys’ struggle for minority rights. Within the work there were portraits of Robert and John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Speaking at the dedication ceremonies in 1973, Campero stated that his mural recorded John F. Kennedy’s concern for the welfare of all the peoples of the world.
The mural was removed in 1998 due to seismic upgrade renovations. It is now in the possession of the artist.
About the Artist:
Armando Campero was born in Mexico and attended the San Carlos Academy of Fine Art in Mexico City, where one of his instructors was the legendary Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He later received a scholarship to attend the Fine Arts School in Chicago and he also studied in New York and Paris. Returning to Mexico City in the early 1950s, he worked for two years on Diego Rivera’s Lerma Tunnel project and taught at the Institute of Interior Decorators. He came to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s and since then has divided his time between Los Angeles and Mexico. He was one of the first artists to paint murals in East Los Angeles and was a political cartoonist for 15 years for the Spanish language newspaper, La Opinión. In addition to his Los Angeles works, he has completed murals in Chicago, St. Louis, Spain, France, Mexico, and Guatemala.
