Walls

By Jiggs Gallagher

Spring/Summer 2005

What do Diego Rivera and Aaron Hecker
have in common?

They both paint murals.

The Mexican Art Deco artist of the 1930s used such fabled venues as New York’s Rockefeller Center and San Francisco’s Coit Tower. But CSUSB senior Aaron Hecker is getting his start at the Rudy C. Hernandez Community Center near San Bernardino City Hall.

Last year the 23-year-old lent his brush to paint a large indoor mural at the center. Hecker heard about the project from Emanuel Olague, who visited the center and worked in CSUSB’s Santos Manuel Student Union. John Futch, director of the CSUSB Cross-Cultural Center, provided funds for creating the mural.
Hecker coordinated the work of about 25 kids from the area, one as young as 3 and another as old as 16, but most between 6 and 14 years old. Together they drew sketches of Rudy Hernandez, a community activist and San Bernardino city employee murdered in 1997 at the age of 48. The mural’s center panel is a likeness of Hernandez, while other panels depict youth growing up, involved in life and drug-free. At 8-feet-tall and 40-feet-wide, the mural fills an entire wall in the community center’s game room.

“It was a year-long project,” says Hecker, who majors in art at CSUSB and works part-time as a graphic artist in the university’s public affairs office. “I worked on Saturdays with the children, who did the smaller sketches. We finished most of the outlines in June and July 2004 and I finished up the detail work in early fall.”

For his work at the Rudy Hernandez Center, he received a certificate from San Bernardino Mayor Judith Valles thanking him for his volunteer work on the Hernandez Center mural. But credit for the work doesn’t belong to Hecker and the children alone. “Emanuel is really the one responsible for having that mural,” Hecker says. While Hecker created the concepts for the piece, Olague was the original contact with the center and actually helped finish the art with Hecker two months after the kids completed their part.

From any angle, the dedication to the project looked as good to Hecker as the art itself. “It was pretty unexpected to see them give up a Saturday,” he says of his weekend artists. Walking from home, the kids would show up faithfully and on time every week, one of them often beating Hecker to the center. “I could tell that they were really getting something out of it, and enjoying it, really feeling like they were a part of something.”

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