Artist Kyungmi Shin Taps Into El Cerrito History for New Del Norte BART Murals

Although Kyungmi Shin lived in El Cerrito for several years in the 1990s, she spent most of her time in classes at UC Berkeley or in her Point Richmond studio as she worked to earn her master’s of fine arts in 1995. Living in a small duplex near the El Cerrito Plaza BART station was a convenient place to crash, she said.

More than 20 years later, she returned to El Cerrito and dug deep into the area’s history and culture after being commissioned to create two large murals for the renovated El Cerrito Del Norte BART Station. The murals, which present two perspectives of the city, were installed and unveiled last year (2021).

Artist Kyungmi Shin in her southern California studio. Kyungmi Shin photo

Hanging in the large atrium connecting the fare gates at the ends of the station, each mural is eight feet tall and 28 feet long and consists of thousands of custom made ceramic tiles in shades of green, blue and gray and assembled as mosaics. On the east wall hangs “hillside,” while the opposite wall displays “bayside.” The murals were commissioned through BART’s Arts Program as part of the station modernization effort.

The design for the hillside mural…

and the bayside mural (images courtesy of Kyungmi Shin).

“When I do research for a project, I try to go deep into the history so I can get an understanding of the historical and current contexts,” said Shin from her Los Angeles studio. “I also read some historical society newsletters and there were good in-depth articles in them.”

She said it was nice to visit her old neighborhood, and as she drove around she discovered much more about the area than she knew as a student.

“This time I had the opportunity to really explore El Cerrito, the history, geography and landscape to get different perspectives,” Shin said. “One of the books on El Cerrito history mentioned that there was a big rock in the hills with the best view. I climbed it and when I got to the top there was a big tree blocking my view -- I almost risked my life for that!”

During her research, the artist consulted with leaders of the El Cerrito Historical Society and made use of the society’s research collection and images.

Shin researched books and other materials from the library and people she met. Shin learned about the Native Americans, the Spanish, San Pablo Avenue as both a thoroughfare and a hotbed of nightlife, racing and a large community of Japanese florists.

“In the description by the early Spanish settlers, there was an abundance of nature, so many different kinds of birds and fish in the El Cerrito area,” she said. “It was such a lush landscape.”

Shin also looked through archives of old photos of early houses and other structures, including the first known house built in what became the city and a number of current homes in the area around the station.

“I’m hoping some people might recognize their own houses,” she said.

For “bayside,” she created a design with a large tree and bird nest framing the left side, the bay and beyond in the center, and a Native American hut and a wood-frame house on the right. In the foreground, as a fainter background is an abstract view of the city and shoreline.

 “Hillside” features images of 31 structures laid across the hills of El Cerrito, with the sky above and another lighter map of the city’s streets in the foreground. Shin said she went with the theme of houses to reflect El Cerrito’s motto as the “City of Homes.”

She chose the color palette to complement another mural in the station, a mosaic created years ago by artist Alfonso Pardiñas. “I wanted to reference his work and keep the pieces harmonious,” she explained.

Putting it all together
Once she received the commission to create the murals, she realized that given the scale of the work, she would likely need to hire a fabricator to assemble the panels, each four feet wide and eight feet tall. But with an outside consultant at thebeginning stage of the commissioning, at BART, there was some confusion when a consultant misunderstood the project budget and said that the BART guideline specified that the artist would fabricate the artwork, Shin said.

The murals take shape in Shin’s studio (photo courtesy of Kyungmi Shin).

Although she had done some work in ceramics and had created some murals, Shin did not consider herself a ceramic artist and hadn’t done a mural of this size. However, she decided that this was an opportunity to fabricate an artwork of this scale at her studio, and she made plans to assemble the panels at her studio, bringing in the necessary assistance to help with the complex project. Later she learned that the BART regulation indeed allowed hiring an outside fabricator, but decided to go ahead as planned.

“I decided to trust my abilities to figure things out and to make it work,” Shin said. “It was exciting, intense and challenging and I learned so much about fabrication at this scale. Three years of my life were completely consumed by this project.”

In looking at the “bayside” mural, San Francisco is small and in the distance. The Golden Gate Bridge, often prominent in images of the bay, is a small red-orange ornament low on the horizon in the center of the mural.

“This artwork is El Cerrito-centric, about living in El Cerrito,” she said. “It’s not about San Francisco, which is just part of the view. In this mural, the star is El Cerrito. I wanted to create an artwork with El Cerrito at the center.”

Shin believes the enlarged Del Norte station is a fitting venue for the murals, as it is now probably the largest civic structure in the city.

Shin and the murals ready to be installed at BART’s Del Norte Station (BART photo).

Not her first transit project
As a precursor to her El Cerrito work, Shin was commissioned to create a mural showing the Edgewater neighborhood around the Granville station on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line, which runs north-south through the city. In this piece, she created a collage of brightly colored buildings criss-crossed by arcing bands of color, representing both Chicago’s architecture and nickname as “The Windy City.”

Up next for her is a show that opened Nov. 20, 2021 in Various Small Fires, an art gallery in Hollywood. It grew out of an earlier exhibition at the Orange County Museum for which Shin tapped her interest in history to examine and portray part of her own life story as part of a larger arc, the historical forces behind her father’s history.

“I find that studying history deeply is illuminating in learning about the present conditions, and the historical connections that led to the present moment are often hidden,” Shin said, “I am trying to make these visible by layering those connections on one another in my artwork.”

By Jon Bashor. This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of the Forge.

Note: More information about the project and a photo timeline of the mural design and construction can be found at www.shingraystudio.com/el-cerrito-bart.