Ken Gonzales-Day discusses Surface Tension: Murals, Signs, and Mark-Making in Los Angeles, a photographic journey to map out the city and make visible the larger cultural, socio-economic, and political forces that have shaped the place we have come to call Los Angeles.

In downtown Los Angeles, the history of whitewashing controversial public murals is persistent and oddly echoic. After a half-finished mural by Italian street artist Blu was erased from MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in 2010, Thomas Lawson revisited the troubled saga of América Tropical, David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1932 commission on Olvera Street.