LOS ANGELES – It's been 35 years since Judy Baca was a young art teacher with this idea: that troubled kids could paint a mural one summer along a concrete river channel in the San Fernando Valley about the history of underrepresented people.

Los Angeles is celebrating the restoration of that mural, a signature artwork dubbed The Great Wall of Los Angeles that earned the city its reputation as the mural capital of the world and helped spawn a public mural movement nationwide.

But for about a decade, not all murals have been welcome since the city banned murals on private property. Now, leaders are reconsidering that ban in a move that could allow existing murals to remain and encourage new ones.

"It's perfect this discussion is happening now," said Baca, who is closely following the Los Angeles City Council's actions.

City officials have begun work on a revised ordinance covering murals on private property. A public hearing is scheduled for Jan. 10, and the city's Planning Commission may consider a new draft in March, said Tanner Blackman, the city planner.

There are 1,614 murals known in the city, about 400 of them on private property. Billboard companies had challenged the city's mural exemption, and the City Council decided in 2002 to regulate murals as commercial signs. The resolution of a billboard company lawsuit about a year ago helped spur the council's decision to revisit the issue, Blackman said.

Even so, officials realize not everyone may support a new ordinance. "People might not want murals across from their single-family home," Blackman said.

Any new ordinance would not affect The Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is on public property.

Standing 13 feet high and about a half mile long, the Great Wall is a visual account of the city's diverse history through the 1950s. Among those depicted are early American Indian settlers, Chinese immigrants building the Transcontinental Railroad and African American women holding up South Los Angeles through volunteer groups and churches. Fundraising is under way to continue The Great Wall by picking up with the story of the 1960s through the 1990s.

The project began in the summer of 1976 with 80 students, all of whom had been arrested at least once. More than 400 youths worked on the wall in the 1970s and 1980s.

"I looked for the stories where people triumphed against great adversity," Baca said. "I wanted another history. I didn't want a Norman Rockwell history."

Damage from exposure to sun, smog and weather over time prompted the restoration.

The $2.1 million project – led by the nonprofit Social and Public Art Resource Center, which Baca founded – also will cover construction of a bridge from which the public can view the mural. Funding came from the city, the California Cultural and Historical Endowment and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

Baca, who is a distinguished professor of world arts and cultures and Chicana and Chicano studies at UCLA, said that murals suit the creative energy of young people.

"In a sense, it's almost an outlaw behavior," she said. "It's very athletic. It's grand scale. It's struggling with your own identity, who I am and what you want to see in the world. It's a meditation on who you want to become."

Muralist Wayne Healy can relate to young artists who want to see a mural renaissance in Los Angeles.

Healy, co-founder of a public art collective called East Los Streetscapers, was inspired to paint murals as a young man in the early 1970s when Mexican Americans marched against the Vietnam War. "It was a combination of fine art and street performance," he said.

Healy said murals combine the passion of political and artistic expression in a public medium. He is concerned about how a new city ordinance would regulate size, which he considers part of a mural's force.

"You put them on the street and the whole world sees it," Healy said.

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Marisa Agha is a journalist based in Southern California.

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