The Art Mar Vista Never Asked Permission For
Walk down Palms Avenue or Marco Place on any given afternoon and you will pass utility poles wearing small welded figures. A tin robot. A rooster made from a hubcap and spoons. A cluster of scrap-metal creatures bolted just above eye level, low enough to read the paint but too high for anyone to reach without a ladder. Longtime residents stopped noticing them the way you stop noticing your own porch light. Then, a couple of years ago, the city tried to take them down, and the neighborhood found out how much it actually cared.
That fight, and the two very different art scenes it exposed, is the real story of public art in Mar Vista. One version is curated, calendared, and printed on a map. The other was welded in a garage by a woman with no permit and no plan beyond seeing what would happen. The second one is the reason people know Mar Vista has an art scene at all.
The sculptures belong to Lori Powers, a Mar Vista resident who has spent more than a decade collecting discarded metal from around the neighborhood and turning it into the whimsical figures locals call the Whimsies. She builds each piece at home, then climbs a ladder with a drill and attaches it to a wooden pole. There was no application, no city sign-off, no committee.
Powers put up the first figure and waited to see if anyone would object. When nobody did, she kept going. In her own words, when they didn't say anything, she added another one, and then another. Eventually there were 29 of them scattered across Palms Avenue and Marco Place, enough that the poles on those two streets became a small, unofficial gallery that nobody had planned.
That is the part worth sitting with. Mar Vista's most talked-about piece of public art was never reviewed by a design committee, never funded by a grant, and never appeared on a beautification plan. It happened because one person kept working and nobody stopped her, and eventually the neighborhood decided the sculptures belonged to it too.
Utility poles are not neutral ground. The California Public Utilities Commission requires poles to stay clear of obstructions so crews can climb them during outages, and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power eventually flagged the Whimsies as exactly that kind of obstruction. Crews arrived to start removing the sculptures.
Residents did not treat this as a paperwork problem. They organized on Nextdoor, packed a community meeting at Windward High School to speak on the artist's behalf, and when apologetic DWP workers showed up to start taking sculptures down, neighbors gathered around the poles and threatened to chain themselves to them. It took Councilmember Traci Park stepping in to pause the removal and broker a conversation between the artist and the utility.
Paul Von Blum, who has taught public art at UCLA, put into words what a lot of residents were already feeling. He called the sculptures something that adds tremendous aesthetic value to the community, the kind of judgment that usually gets reserved for work with a museum wall label, not a piece bolted to a power pole by hand.
Powers never applied for a permit before any of this started. The sculptures survived anyway, because enough people were willing to stand in the street over them. That is a higher bar than most public art in this city ever has to clear.
Mar Vista also has a version of public art that did go through channels, and it lives a short walk from Palms Avenue on the Venice Boulevard commercial stretch between Beethoven Street and Inglewood Boulevard. A neighborhood beautification effort produced a run of murals and streetlight medallions along that corridor, and since 2015 the same stretch has hosted the quarterly Mar Vista Art Walk, curated by Monique Boileau and Mitchelito Orquiola, on the first Thursday of March, June, September, and November. Musicians, working artists, and late-opening shops turn the evening into something closer to a block party than a gallery opening.
The Mar Vista Community Council leans into this identity directly, describing the neighborhood as a hub for art and publishing a self-guided tour map of the Venice Boulevard murals so residents and visitors can walk the corridor on their own schedule. It is organized, promoted, and easy to find.
Both versions are real. Both belong to the neighborhood. But only one of them required a fight to survive, and that difference tells you something the map alone does not.
Put the two side by side and the contrast is hard to miss. The curated art needs a calendar, a set of curators, and a printed map to pull a crowd four times a year. The unauthorized art needed none of that. It accumulated one sculpture at a time over more than a decade until it was simply part of the walk to the mailbox, and when the city moved to erase it, residents showed up in person and stayed on the issue until a councilmember intervened.
If you want to see both in one outing, the geography makes it easy:
What this says about Mar Vista is not that the neighborhood is artsy in the way a press release would put it. It is that the art nobody signed off on is the art people were willing to defend, and that kind of attachment cannot be scheduled. It gets built one welded rooster at a time, over years, until removing it feels like removing something residents made themselves, because in a real sense they did. Powers made the sculptures. The neighborhood made the decision that they stay.
That is worth knowing if you already live here and have walked past the poles a hundred times without stopping to look. It is also worth knowing if you are new enough to Mar Vista that you have not yet picked a favorite figure. Everybody who has lived here more than a year seems to have one.
Terry Ballentine has spent decades working the streets on the Westside, and the small, specific things that make a block worth living on, whether it is a farmers market or a rooster welded from spoons, tend to matter more than any brochure ever captures. If you are curious what a home on these blocks is actually worth in today's market, Terry Ballentine offers a straightforward, no-pressure home valuation whenever you are ready to talk.
With more than 50 years in Westside real estate, Terry Ballentine offers unmatched expertise in Marina del Rey, Venice, and nearby coastal communities. He provides personalized guidance for buyers, sellers, and investors, earning long-term trust and repeat clients. Terry’s hands-on approach and deep local knowledge ensure every transaction is handled with care and precision.
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