Why Is There a Mosaic of Jim Jones Outside a Silver Lake Elementary School?

ROWENA AVE IN SILVER LAKE is lined with coffee shops, low-rise apartment buildings, and a bunch of cement planters, each about the size of a kindergartener. The plants inside are drought-tolerant, and they don’t appear to be checked on very often. Some of the planters feature mosaic art on the sides — playful designs, like flowers and butterflies.

And one of the mosaics is a portrait of Jim Jones: the cult leader who led more than 900 adults and children into a mass murder-suicide at a settlement in Guyana known as “Jonestown” in 1978.

This particular mosaic sits on a planter directly outside of Ivanhoe Elementary School — one of the oldest and highest-rated elementary schools in the LAUSD system, according to US News and World Report’s rankings.

It’s been on the planter since at least August of 2024, when comedian and writer Alex Fernie posted a picture of it on X.

The post has accumulated more than a million views — but since the Jim Jones mosaic’s discovery, its origins have remained an enigma. Nobody publicly took credit for the work. Neither school nor city staff we spoke to were sure who even maintained the planters. David Omenn, a representative on the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, told us that the council commissioned the planters more than 20 years ago, but he wasn’t sure who was responsible for their upkeep today.

So who took the time to build an intricate mosaic of Jim Jones outside a Silver Lake elementary school — and why?

We found the clue that led us to the artist on the other side of the street.

Across Rowena, on a different planter, there’s another mosaic that also appeared that August. This one is less ornate than the Jim Jones piece, but also depicts a recognizable face — a young man with sideswept bangs and a prominent forehead.

The face is an image reproduced around the city by the street artist Morgan, who doesn’t share his full identity, but cultivates a public Instagram account.

We reached out to Morgan to see if he’d been involved in the Jim Jones mosaic. He told us he hadn’t done it. But he knew who did.

“I don't want to say that you got lucky,” the mosaicist told us when we spoke to him by phone. “But you pretty much asked the one person, or one of very few people, that actually knows who I am.”

The maker of the Jim Jones mosaic is a street artist who goes by the name Regur Mortes. He agreed to speak with us on the condition of maintaining his anonymity.

Regur grew up in the L.A. area, and says he’s a third-generation mason — his grandfather, father, and brother also work in the trade, and he’s spent time helping them out with jobs. “I grew up doing these rich houses… Bel Air, Pacific Palisades, Palos Verdes.”

His father, he said, has worked on a number of celebrity homes, including Adam Sandler’s and George Lucas’. “They all love talking to my dad, because my dad has no idea who they are.”

Regur says he had no respect for masonry growing up. The craft he really admired was graffiti. “And me growing up in this Chicano community… let's face it, it's everywhere.”

But as he got older, he started thinking about working with stone as a way to differentiate himself as a street artist. “I didn't want to do what pretty much all of Los Angeles is doing, because everybody and their mother paints,” he said. “I love that. I respect that. But I wanted to do something for myself… something that I knew would take more time.”

He immersed himself in mosaic, both technique and history: “I could tell you about how it started in Egypt and how Greece and Italy blew it up.” The style he works in is known as “opus palladianum” — using irregularly-shaped pieces, laid out in a non-linear pattern.

Regur started putting up pieces in out-of-the-way corners of L.A. in 2024. He’d bring a pre-arranged design, but sometimes improvise details and equipment on the fly.

“I just understand my craft so well… sometimes I don't even need my tool,” he said, referring to the trowel used to apply mortar. “Like, if we're by a restaurant, I'll be like, I'm just gonna go grab a spoon over there… like, I just make it happen.”

The Jim Jones piece was his first time using stained glass. Why Jim Jones? “I'm a horror fanatic. I collect VHS,” he said. “And then my wife… like any other woman, she's into true crime for God knows whatever reason. And I was into that too with her for a second.”

Morgan, Regur told us, was the one who pointed him to the Rowena location. They’d met through the street art scene, and Regur had been teaching him the basics of mosaic. Morgan was eager to try it out in the field.

They went out together to Rowena Ave the morning of August 9th, 2024 — arriving at the location outside the school around 5 AM with trowels, some grout, buckets of water, and their pre-arranged mosaic designs attached to grout mesh. Fixing his fragments to the planter and then helping with Morgan’s piece ended up taking Regur about five hours. Nobody interrupted their work.

“To be honest, when I was putting it up — I mean, I don't want to seem entirely clueless, but I did not notice that there was a school there.”

Regur says Morgan sent him social media posts about the mosaic as it got traction online a few days later. Some people, he said, were upset that a portrait of a mass killer of children had been put up outside an elementary school. But “a lot of people dug it.”

“And a lot of people were like, man, that's Roy Orbison. And I thought that was funny, because it does look kind of like Roy Orbison or whatever.”

But Regur never came forward publicly as the mosaic’s maker, and he continues to prioritize staying anonymous.

“Nobody knows who I am,” he said. “I’m born and raised in Los Angeles, and graffiti was a lot different when I was a kid. It revolved around anonymity. You didn’t want people to know who you were. You just wanted the streets to know that you’re there.”

Since the debut of the Jim Jones piece, Regur has continued to install projects on the streets — and below the streets. He and Morgan are part of a collective called Operation Under that places art deep in tunnels around the city, where they know almost nobody will ever see it.

“The art that we're putting in these places, we want it to have this lore, you know? Like when you find it, it’s like you just found an ancient tomb or something.”

Regur has also brought his work to other cities — including a John Wayne Gacy portrait in Savannah, Georgia and a pole-dancing witch in Salem, Massachusetts. Whenever he travels with his wife and daughter, he tries to leave a piece behind somewhere on the streets. “I'll spend a day absorbing the energy of the city, because every city breathes differently than all the other ones,” he said. “And I'll get a feel for, like, law enforcement, for the lack of better words.”

Regur continues to work day jobs, including working alongside his father in the masonry business. Mosaic art has brought them closer. “My dad's, like, hardcore Mexican workaholic type — just straight about business,” he said. “And then he’ll see my pieces, and whether he's impressed by them or not, that's one of the few things that we could talk about.”

But the impact the art form has had on Regur goes well beyond his relationships. “I just apply the rules of mosaics to every aspect of my life,” he said. “I'm not scared to, like, break something and put it back together differently, you know?”

“Because some people are like, oh man, my life's falling apart. But it's like — what if it's falling together?”

In L.A. Mystery, we dig into some of Los Angeles’s most unsolvable enigmas — and solve them. Got a mystery you want us to look at? Email [email protected]. And read some previously solved mysteries about a 16-year-old census billboard in Virgil Village and how far away the mountains are.