Riding the Rails of History : Art: $10-million program is creating public works for train stations around Los Angeles County over the next 10 years.

THE REGION —  The brass inscription is an unlikely one for a train station platform.

“When the Indians died, the villages ended,” the lettering underfoot says at the Metrolink stop in Baldwin Park.

That quote from early in this century by one of the last fluent speakers of the Gabrielino language was embedded recently in the platform. Commuters now step across tiles, colored concrete and other lettering that spell out words in five different languages, telling the story of Southern California’s missions: its baptisms, deaths, cattle and grapevines.

And to the east, down the rail line in Claremont, train commuters traveling to and from Los Angeles soon will pass unusual sculptures that conjure up images of railroading: a lantern, a rivet, a conductor’s watch.

In somewhat the same way that mural projects of the Works Progress Administration put dramatic artwork in post offices around the land in the 1930s, a $10-million program is creating public art for train stations around Los Angeles County over the next 10 years.

“There is a wonderful, logical tie-in between art and rail,” said Jessica Cusick, director of the county’s Art for Rail Transit program. By building the train stations, she said, “de facto you are creating new landmarks” and prime places to display art.

So far, 65 artists are working on Los Angeles County projects, including ones in the San Gabriel Valley and Glendale. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is providing matching funds, up to $30,000, to communities with stations that want to display public art.

The finalists among competing artists are being selected for the Glendale and Pomona Metrolink commuter rail stations. El Monte and the City of Industry are making their plans. At Cal State L.A., student artists are working on a mural for their station.

Baldwin Park’s project--by Venice artist Judy Baca, a founder of the mural movement in Los Angeles who has overseen hundreds of murals since the late 1960s--is nearing completion. The one in Claremont, by Mt. Washington artist Rod Baer, is expected to be finished by late this year.

Only one San Gabriel Valley city, Covina, chose not to participate because of cost.

For Claremont and Baldwin Park, there was no question about whether to raise matching funds, officials in those cities said. In both Claremont, the classy college town where art abounds, and Baldwin Park, the gritty working-class town where there has been no public art in recent memory, city officials and community leaders sing praises for the program designed to perk up the stations.

Dr. Joseph S. Unis, a radiologist who spearheaded Claremont’s campaign to raise private donations to match the MTA art funding, said the station--restored to its original 1927, Spanish-Colonial Revival grandeur--is an architectural jewel.

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Still, he said, “the station would have been a bit too Spartan without art. It’s nice to have embellishments in life--something that goes beyond the bare necessities.”

From a marketing standpoint, Claremont and Baldwin Park saw opportunities: the stations function as billboards to tout the cities in front of a captive audience. For that reason alone, there was value in spending local transportation funds on the project, Baldwin Park officials said.

“This station might be the only glimpse of Baldwin Park some people will ever see, just passing through on the train,” Baldwin Park City Planner Larry Onaga said. “So we wanted to do something special, instead of just building a generic-looking train station.”

Beyond serving as advertising for outsiders, the station artwork can become “an exhibition that will go on forever,” said Baldwin Park Mayor Fidel Vargas.

“It’s almost a museum within itself,” he said. “Kids can literally take a field trip to the station” and learn what Baldwin Park, the San Gabriel Valley and Southern California were like 200 to 300 years ago.

Vargas said he is talking with Baca about overseeing a program to use the stations to teach students history and art.

For Baca, 46, the project represents a continuation of themes she has explored in other works such as “The Great Wall of Los Angeles.” Billed as the world’s largest mural and located in a San Fernando Valley flood control channel, the mural details Southern California’s textured ethnic history.

That is what Baca, a UC Irvine art professor and board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art, has also addressed in Baldwin Park.

When she first met with city officials, they told her they were interested in the early missions. The artistic problem, she said, was “how do you do that without its being ‘Taco Bell’ ” art?

The more she thought about it, she said, the more she realized that missions were “a terrific way to learn about who we are now. Who are the Mexicanos ? The Spanish? And the native people?”

With those questions, she researched mission history to develop a three-dimensional story line along the 400-foot-long platform and 100-foot-long plaza.

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The mission artwork is incorporated into the platform and the overall design of benches and shelters. The floor plans of the four missions closest to Baldwin Park--San Gabriel, San Fernando, Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano--are laid out on the platform.

Throughout the plans, details appear about the missions, including the number of baptisms and deaths. In a statement on the art, titled “Danza Indigena” (Native Dance), Baca wrote that she wanted to use the numbers to show “the losses suffered by native people through disease and forced labor.”

Phrases in five languages--Spanish, Gabrielino, English, Chumash and Luiseno--attempt to personalize the numbers.

For example, in the platform area dealing with the San Gabriel Mission, brass lettering says in Gabrielino and English: “ Ne Hiin Taxatem = My People” and “ Noman Pipimar = I am Gabrielino.”

In the plaza, a masonry archway and wall stand over a design that depicts the San Gabriel Mission as if it were flattened. A pictograph tells the story of a Gabrielino puberty ritual for young women.

Another pictograph is based on Baca’s interpretation of native prophesies that “all things European will disappear.” The pictograph shows talking heads engaged in war and conflict, moving toward harmony.

Nearby, Baca used opposing quotes from present-day residents of Baldwin Park who talk about the rapid changes that immigration has wrought and how that influences the future.

“It’s about cultural layering, a weaving maybe, of information and design,” she said. “It’s like taking a piece of land where a train comes by and setting it aside for memory and willpower.”

From one end of the platform to the other, there are tiles that trace the steps of tribal dances. “We’re all a part of this dance now,” she said, “not just the native people.”

In the plaza, a rock prayer mound was built as a tribute to Toypurina, who as a 23-year-old led a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission in the 18th Century. Toypurina, Baca said, has been characterized as an unsavory character, an Indian temptress. But instead, Baca sees her as a heroine.

Overall, Baca said, she does not see the artwork as adversarial. “It really speaks to harmony,” she said. “The Mexican people are hungry to see some representation of their own story. The native people are too.”

Already, she said, the response has been enthusiastic. “The Mexican workers pouring the concrete were reading the words in Spanish. The children are already riding their bicycles along the dance of the native people.”

The children’s playfulness is typical of what Rod Baer hopes to inspire with his Claremont sculptures.

He has created art, he said, “to make adults feel a little smaller, like being a kid again.”

His nine sculptures will weigh from 300 to 1,000 pounds. In some cases they will dwarf anyone who approaches them.

The artwork, inspired by the combinations of Claremont’s history with railroads, the citrus industry and collegiate education, ranges from abstract to specific in its representation. Claremont owes its founding to the Santa Fe railroad and Pomona College, both of which came to town in the late 1800s.

Five of the pieces are rivets. One is a hammer. Another is a train lantern. Another is a conductor’s pocket watch.

And one is a conical object that combines elements of an orange juicer and a cowcatcher--the metal device attached to the fronts of trains and designed to scoop up cows that wander onto the tracks.

“I don’t expect everyone to get everything out of the work that I do,” said Baer, 42. “It’s a little bit like poetry. There are layers.”

There will be no explanation to accompany the pieces, including the most enigmatic one, the cowcatcher/juicer, to be made of synthetic colored concrete and copper, he said.

Still, Baer said he realizes that in making public art he has to serve a broad audience. In Claremont, with its half-dozen colleges, he is dealing with people who know a lot about art. But Baer, who received his master of fine arts from the Claremont Graduate School, said he also will have viewers who know nothing about art. “You have to address them all as equal members of the audience. And answer their question of ‘Did I spend my money on this?’ ”

Likewise, he said, he developed the art to be seen by the commuter who never gets off the train and for the Claremont passengers who may sit on benches, waiting, day after day.

The objects generally will be made of synthetic, colored concrete, he said, and will be arranged across the platform to interrupt, but not disrupt, the flow of pedestrian traffic.

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In developing the sculptures, Baer spent considerable time researching Claremont’s history. He studied old photographs of turn-of-the-century trains and trolleys. “I wanted to do something to harken to that period,” he said.

The rivet used to hold train cars together struck him as embodying “the grit of human labor.” “It’s a very, very small, humble element,” he said. “But it holds the whole huge train together.”