From MacArthur Park, with Love (on view through August 1) celebrates the neighborhood of MacArthur Park—its past, present, and future—through the perspectives of more than 100 students enrolled at Charles White Visual Arts LACMA Magnet.
The Kidz Gone Bad Crew (KGB), established in 1984, is a group of graffiti artists who have been working together since middle school. Several members of the KGB including Gajin Fujita, Harlan Gleeson, Balthasar Adell, Chatree, and Brian Gleeson came together on March 21, 2026, to create a mural for the exhibition. This was a special moment for the group, allowing them to give back to the next generation of artists. Fujita, a fine artist whose work is in LACMA’s collection, noted “the fact that I am a product of the Los Angeles Unified School District, it gives me pride [to make this mural] and it also feels like I am doing something for the community.”
Fujita and Harlan Gleeson recently sat down with us to discuss the importance of this mural project and how the KGB started. The crew met when they were attending Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES) magnet school in the 1980s. The magnet was incredibly diverse, with students attending from all over the city, providing experiences they wouldn’t have had back in their own neighborhoods and impacting their perspective of the world. It was at this formative time that they gravitated towards the hip-hop culture, including the art of graffiti.
“Graffiti is a very pure form of art,” said Harlan. “It was done for the pure love of doing art, mixed with the adrenaline of doing it illegally in the middle of the night. For no money. For pure enjoyment and pure expression. It has appropriately gained its legitimacy as an art.”
Coming back to create a mural for From MacArthur Park, with Love, “brings back a lot of memories for me when I was a student here,” said Fujita, who attended the Otis Art Institute, then the only art school in the area, located at the site of Charles White Elementary School. Fujita chose to attend Otis for his undergraduate degree because he said it was the only art school in the middle of the city (in the MacArthur Park neighborhood) and had so many incredible artists that had been through the program.
Founded in 1918, the Otis Art Institute has made significant contributions to Los Angeles and to the world of art. For roughly 80 years, Otis also stood as an important institution within the local community through all of its changes—the highs and the lows. From renovating MacArthur Park, commissioning art, and creating public programs to working with children in neighboring schools, Otis continued to serve its students, neighborhood, and city with pride, both in and out of its workshop doors, until it finally relocated to the Westchester area of West Los Angeles in 1997.
After its move, the Los Angeles Unified School District purchased the campus and opened it as Charles White Elementary School in 2004, named after one of Otis’s most distinguished faculty members. One of the important structural features preserved from the Otis Art Institute was the climate-controlled gallery space on campus. In order to make use of this specialized setting, Charles White Elementary created a partnership with LACMA in 2007 to establish educational programming in the space.
The KGB mural was painted in one day on three eight-by-four-foot plywood panels. Fujita first blocked out the letters across the surface, then the KGB crew worked in sync to fill in the letters. Fujita and Chatree worked together to outline the letters once everything was filled in and complete the details. The group tagged the back and dedicated it to a close family friend, Ramsay “Bud” Davila. In the video above, you can learn more about the making of the mural and hear from Fujita and Gleeson.
We are excited to welcome you to the gallery this summer! From MacArthur Park, with Love is now on view Saturdays, May 23–August 1, open 12–4 pm with free, drop-in art workshops. (Please note that the exhibition will be closed on July 4.) Art activities will change throughout the summer, so be sure to visit more than once and make something new inspired by the exhibition. The exhibition is free and open to all, with no tickets required. Find out more about From MacArthur Park, with Love, including address and parking validation information.