A Warsaw Community High School class of 1969 graduate completed a mural at the Los Angeles International (LAX) airport in March.
The mural, called Flora (Flores amplificati), is made up of highly manipulated and layered photographs of different flora, such as the imported South American Jacaranda (Jacaranda mimosifolia) and the native Saint Catherine’s Lace.
The photo mural, printed on vinyl, covers 160 feet of a connector bridge between Terminal 1 (Southwest Airlines) and Terminal 2 (Delta), said artist Laura Hull.
The mural went up in March and Hull said she worked on it for about a year on and off. On one side of the bridge, it is 100 feet long by 12 feet tall; and on the other side, it’s 60 feet by 12 feet. The mural was installed in 12-feet-by-4 feet panels.
Hull said Los Angeles has a certain amount of money set aside for the arts when new buildings go up. A request for proposal (RFP) was put out for four murals in different areas at the airport. About three years ago, Hull put her name in the pool for RFP applicants for one of the murals and she was chosen to do one of the murals.
The only requirement Hull had was the mural could not be political.
Hull, after graduating from Warsaw, went to DePauw University for her undergraduate degree and received a master’s from Claremont Graduate University. She taught ceramics for a while. She later went back to junior college and took a class in photography and started assisting another photographer and started editing for magazines. In 2009, Hull quit the magazine industry and started shooting photography herself.
Hull said Los Angeles is such a melting pot of different cultures and she wanted to bring a lot of that into a mural through flora of the Los Angeles basin, both native and non-native.
Hull said she’s quite pleased with the mural. She’s had pilots and flight attendants tell her they reroute themselves in the airport so they could look at the mural. One of the words that has been used to describe it to her is peaceful, she said.