DTLA in 360° Panorama Series: “Alice in Wonderland” Virtual Tour

In Skid Row, at the corner of Towne Avenue and East 4th Street is a fantastic series of street art that riffs on the “Alice in Wonderland” theme.

In all, there are 12 panels altogether, and I’ve captured 11 of them to view in this virtual tour.  I’m bummed I didn’t get all of them, but one of the vendors was open for business at the time, so it was impossible to get a photo.

It looks like multiple artists contributed to the murals, but only a few took the time to sign their work and of those, one of them was illegible to me. That said, featured predominately are the works of Beginus Maximus and KRS.

Recently Google Maps introduced “digital timeline” which shows street view images dating back up to seven years.  From 2007 to 2012, there were a series of import/export businesses, clothing manufacturers, toy wholesalers and a medical marijuana shop at this location. I’m deducing that this series of street art was created sometime between 2012 and 2014.

Today, in addition to the pot shop, the corner has a proliferation of wholesale smoking supply and glass pipe stores which make the “Alice in Wonderland” theme so apropos. Since Tim Burton’s version of “Alice in Wonderland” came out in 2010, evidently these murals aren’t specifically an advertising tie-in for the movie despite the appearance of some the characters looking like the film’s version.

The music used in this virtual tour, from Australian VJ and remix artist Pogo, was assembled using sampled audio from Disney’s animated version of “Alice In Wonderland”.

At the time, this track became a huge underground success when it was released in 2007 although at first it also resulted in a tenuous relationship between Pogo and the studio. But like most Disney movies having a happy ending, the upshot was that Pogo and Disney partnered up, and Pogo was contracted to professionally produce remixes on behalf of the Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *