A billboard promoting the 2010 Census on a building at Virgil and Santa Monica. (Pablo Goldstein / L.A. Material)
ABOVE A 7-ELEVEN PARKING LOT, an image of a woman breastfeeding her child looks out over a busy corner of Virgil Village.
The image, affixed to the side of a two-story building at 1024 Virgil Avenue, is part of a billboard encouraging Angelenos to fill out the 2010 Census. And it has remained in place well past the tabulation of not just that count, but also the succeeding 2020 Census.
In the intervening years, a period bookended by the opening of Sqirl in 2011 and the 2025 Courage Bagel cameo on HBO’s I Love L.A., the billboard has become one of the only unchanged elements in a rapidly transforming neighborhood. Since the 2010 Census, the counted Hispanic/Latino population in the neighborhood has dropped by about six thousand people, falling under a majority.
Through it all, the billboard has endured. But with its irregular shape and lack of a visible permit number, is it even a legal billboard? Who put it up? And above all, why is it still there?
Land use records revealed that the owner of the building is Ed Santiago, a real estate investor who owns a number of small properties in the city.
Tracked down by phone, Santiago was eager to offer a comprehensive history of the billboard… and an unexpected reason for its continued presence on his building’s wall.
The building’s ground-floor tenant, according to Santiago, was once a framing store called Wild Rose, which received a grant from L.A.’s Department of Cultural Affairs to promote the 2010 Census. (Given that undercounting of undocumented immigrants is a long-standing issue with the decennial headcount, Virgil Village was a logical selection for a promotional push — though the billboard does not contain any Spanish messaging.)
Artist Allen Mure, the owner of Wild Rose Framing since 2004, was tasked with the job and was provided with the canvas, the painting materials, and even a piece of paper with the design.
"Two, three guys from the Census came. They asked me, ‘Are you an artist?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘We have a sum, and maybe you can paint.’ I said, ‘No problem.’ It was really easy. Some woman with a baby. It was very easy, just a few lines.”
“A few months later, they hanged it. I had already moved from there," said Mure, who still owns Wild Rose framing, which now operates out of a different Ed Santiago-owned building nearby. "I don't know why they didn't take it out after the Census. Maybe the Census Bureau forgot."
Once the census was over, neither man ever heard from the government again about the billboard. But Santiago could’ve taken it down at any time over the last 15 years. Why didn’t he?
“Well, it’s a Picasso.”
Santiago explained that the image on the billboard is a reproduction of the artist’s 1963 lithograph Grande Maternité, which itself seems to be a take on Maternité, a 1905 painting from Picasso’s famous Rose Period.
And Santiago has left it up because he wants passersby to see it. “It’s a nice poster. Why wouldn’t people like it?”
“It was unavoidable becoming an art lover,” says Santiago, who moved to Echo Park in 1976, one year after he immigrated from his native Chile to attend college in Iowa. “LA is a nest to breed new artists [more] than anywhere else.”
“Allen is a great artist. Very prolific,” Santiago said of his longtime tenant, a fellow immigrant who was born in Soviet-era Armenia. “He was a professor of art and philosophy in St. Petersburg. He’s a Russki. Last time I saw him at a show, he had 100 paintings.”
When asked if Santiago had ever bought one of his paintings, Mure said no. "But I've helped him frame a few times. He was very surprised about my artwork. I told him all the time that I'm an artist. I'm not some framing designer.”
Santiago said he has never received any advertising revenue for the billboard, but still painstakingly maintains it. Every time the image is tagged or otherwise defaced, he pays $250 to have his maintenance workers clean it up.
Told that the billboard had generated confusion and some indignation online, Santiago was unconcerned. “They have a limited sense of aesthetics,” he said. “It’s a lack of way they perceive the city.”
Santiago also claims that the billboard has city permission to be there.
That means the billboard is likely to still be up in 2030, when the child depicted will be old enough to fill out their Census form in the mail.
Pablo Goldstein grew up in Virgil Village and is named after Pablo Picasso, but did not know anything about this painting prior to speaking to Ed Santiago.
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