Kent twitchell biography

Kent Twitchell is an American muralist who is most active in Los Angeles.
Kent Twitchell (born August 17, 1942, Lansing, Michigan) is an American muralist who is most active in Los Angeles.
Kent Twitchell (born August 17, 1942, Lansing, Michigan) is an American muralist who is most active in Los Angeles.

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Real Life: The Art of Kent Twitchell

His work has been collected by the Smithsonian, the Chicago Art Institute, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Boise Art Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The institutions hold large drawings he creates before embarking on a mural.

“He’s not the first person to do this, but he’s one of the major ones doing museum quality work outside,” says Bjorgum, who is an intellectual property rights attorney. “It’s not spray cans; it’s serious art being done outside.”

Twitchell’s highly visible art has changed the nature of the urban outdoors, imbuing walls with life and meaning. The Los Angeles Times once wrote of Twitchell: “The city shaped him as much as he shaped its urban landscape.”

This reciprocal relationship had its start at Cal State LA. For Twitchell, the University was the perfect incubator—a public university, in the heart of the city, with an art department faculty open to new ways of seeing art.

Back then, the idea of painting museum quality work on the sides of buildings was still unusual.

“This was 1971. This really wasn

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KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives as “death alley.” Another Jesus, forty feet tall, gazes out over traffic along Wilshire Boulevard in the city’s bustling mid-section from the side of the former Otis College of Art and Design, Twitchell’s art school alma mater. A third Jesus, facing a parking lot and a suburban apartment building, wears a carpenter’s belt and a denim work shirt unbuttoned at the chest. The fourth Jesus is thirty feet tall, a bearded, dark-skinned, enigmatic figure clothed in a blood-red robe and holding out before him a leather-bound Bible. That Jesus covers the entire exterior wall of a two-story lecture hall at a Christian liberal arts college in the suburban city of La Mirada. The mural is titled simply, The Word.

PLATE 1. Kent Twitchell. 111th Street Jesus, 1984. South Ce

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The Blog

Kent Twitchell (born August 17, 1942, Lansing, Michigan) is an American muralist who is most active in Los Angeles. He is most famous for his realistic, multi storied mural portraits.

After high school Twitchell joined the United States Air Force and was stationed in London, where he served as an illustrator. Upon his discharge, he studied art at East Los Angeles College (AA, 1968), California State University, Los Angeles (BA, 1972), and the Otis College of Art & Design (MFA, 1977).

In the late 60’s he began doing what became known as Street Art. His ambitious series of murals, “Monuments to American Cultural Heroes,” started in 1971 with “Steve McQueen Monument” near downtown LA and “Strother Martin Monument” in Hollywood.

In 1973 Kent painted a five-story “Bride & Groom” followed by “The Freeway Lady.” He has painted over 100 portraits within some 30 exterior murals including the “Julius Erving Monument”(Dr. J) in Philadelphia; monuments to visual artists including Ed Ruscha, Jim Morphesis, Lita Albuquerque and Gary Lloyd. Also the LA Chamber Orchestra on