Drawing On a Dual Legacy : The Social and Public Art Resource Center marks its 20th year--and the late muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros’ 100th birthday--with an exhibition and a renewed mission.

Two altars, aglow with the light of colorful votives and strewn with flowers and mementos, face each other across a tiny room. The room is one where police used to book prisoners, back when this 1929 Art Deco building housed the Venice jail. These days, however, it is the home of the Social and Public Art Resource Center, also known as SPARC.

On the right as you walk into the altar room, draped platforms are carefully arrayed with the symbols of an artist’s life--paintbrushes, images from his life and works, and a hammer-and-sickle mosaic made of beans. It is a tribute to the 100th anniversary of the birth of master muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who died in 1974 at age 78.

On the left, a similar display bears more contemporary artifacts of the current muralist’s trade: spray guns, paints and photos of longhaired men and women in bell-bottoms hard at work. This display is in honor of the center’s 20th anniversary.

The connection between the facing shrines is obvious to those familiar with the organization, whose many murals are more well-known by Angelenos than its name. But the center has another major project: to protect and preserve Siqueiros’ legacy. As part of the dual anniversary celebration, the center is staging an exhibition and installation dedicated to Siqueiros, which is on view in the center’s gallery through March 23.

Times are not easy for most art organizations, particularly those with political missions. But muralist Judith F. Baca, a founder and artistic director of the center, said SPARC remains on track.

“Our mission in the 1970s was to create a voice for community people through the production of public art at a grass-roots level,” she said. “Our mission is as absolutely on target today as it was then.”

Still, if the mission has not changed, the times clearly have. “In ‘76, there was a consensus that somehow we had to represent the underrepresented, that that was important work to do,” Baca said. This is no longer so, she added.

The center was founded on the ideals of the Mexican social mural movement that Siqueiros represents. Baca, painter Christina Schlesinger and filmmaker Donna Deitch formed the center to foster and preserve public mural art.

Perhaps the organization’s best-known projects are the “Great Wall of Los Angeles,” a half-mile-long narrative of ethnic history that is painted in the Tujunga Wash flood control channel, and the more than 70 murals throughout Los Angeles that have been painted during the last eight years under the auspices of the center’s Neighborhood Pride Program. More recent center ventures include five freeway murals created in conjunction with the 1994 World Cup soccer finals and a youth mural design competition called Project MAT (Murals Against Tobacco).

The center also is the repository for one of the most extensive U.S. collections of photographs of contemporary mural art, including 30,000 slides of murals from throughout the world. As of this year, the center also houses the Mural Digital Lab of the UCLA/Cesar Chavez Center, where Baca is a senior professor of art. The organization recently received a five-year Ford Foundation minority stabilization grant, designed to help the center continue its work.

Its goal of preserving Siqueiros’ legacy is one that is less visible to most Angelenos, though perhaps not for long. The center’s current exhibition includes a smaller black-and-white reproduction of one of Siqueiros’ most famous murals, “America Tropical.” The Getty Conservation Institute is also leading an effort to restore the original 18-by-80-foot work on Olvera Street that was whitewashed shortly after it was unveiled in 1932 because Los Angeles officials were outraged by its subject matter.

The most overtly political of the revered trio of Mexican muralists that also includes Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Siqueiros was a magnet for trouble. A Stalinist, he was responsible for a violent assassination attempt on Leon Trotsky.

In his “America Tropical,” Siqueiros painted as the central image a Native American being crucified while an eagle perched at the top of the cross and two armed revolutionaries took aim at the bird. City fathers thought the mural unpatriotic, in part because of its use of the eagle, a symbol of America.

The image, Baca said, remains provocative. “His painting about the mistreatment of the Mexican worker in 1932 is so current,” she said. “It just brings us right back to the moment, 70 years later, in which we’re bashing immigrants again.” Yet, thanks in part to the efforts to obliterate it, the mural has survived--because the whitewash protected it, she said.

“It has a spirit,” she added. “They painted it over, and as our population grew, it reappeared.”

* Social and Public Art Resource Center, 685 Venice Blvd., Venice. Through March 23. Free. (310) 822-9560.