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Students assist in painting a mural by artist Eva Struble at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.
Courtesy of San Diego Natural History Museum
Students assist in painting a mural by artist Eva Struble at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.

The Nat's new mural is scientific and surreal

In Balboa Park, the San Diego Natural History Museum (the Nat) set the stage for next year's 150th anniversary celebration with a massive new mural in their vast atrium.

Visible as guests enter the museum's north entrance — and you can catch a glimpse from most of the museum's floors — it's a work called "Frasera" by artist and San Diego State University (SDSU) professor Eva Struble.

Struble's work often explores the intersection of the region's landscapes with the interior or urban spaces her work occupies. Abstract or surreal treatments disrupt, without upending, the natural order and beauty. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library and more, and her public art works can be found at the San Diego County Operations Center, the New Children's Museum, the airport's Admiral Boland Way and more.

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Artist Eva Struble photographs her own mural-in-progress at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.
Michael Field
/
SDNHM
Artist Eva Struble photographs her own mural-in-progress at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.

"Her recent projects have dealt with Southern California botany, ethnobotany and the physical experience of landscape here in San Diego, so we have a very strong philosophical bond with her on the project," said Judy Gradwohl, the Nat's president and CEO.

This new mural is inspired by regional specimens from the Nat's collections, including endangered creatures, pegmatite rock and botanicals — like yucca, and the mural's namesake Frasera parryi, a tiny flower rendered huge in the painting.

Struble worked with artist Jonny Pucci on the project, and also enlisted the help of students from SDSU and San Diego High School. The work is 33 feet tall and 23 feet wide. 

In the background, artist Eva Struble's new giant mural is shown in-progress at the San Diego Natural History Museum, in an Oct. 6, 2023 photo.
Michael Field
/
SDNHM
In the background, artist Eva Struble's new giant mural is shown in-progress at the San Diego Natural History Museum, in an Oct. 6, 2023 photo.
"I wanted it to be an expressive painting that feels loose and doesn't feel like a photograph, like something that was just pasted up on the wall — but that it has our hand in it."
Eva Struble, artist of "Frasera"

"The museum prompted me with the idea of 'bursting with biodiversity' in (the) San Diego and the Baja region, and so I wanted to combine a lot of aspects of the landscape, large and small in this piece," Struble said. "So going from Iron Mountain, a place where I love to go hiking, down to the very small Quino Checkerspot Butterfly, which is a tiny endangered butterfly that we have here and only exists in a few small areas locally."

The design draws the eye to a trail, surrounded by native flora and fauna, which spans off into the distance toward some mountains. A closer look reveals the unexpected: the scale is topsy turvy, the mountains are actually a close-up of pegmatite rock, and the sky is substituted with ocean. The colors are vivid, hyper-saturated hues that make the work pop, but still honor the real deal.

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Artist Eva Struble is shown with her in-progess mural, "Frasera," inspired by the region's biodiversity, at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.
Artist Eva Struble is shown with her in-progess mural, "Frasera," inspired by the region's biodiversity, at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.

It's easy to see Iron Mountain's influence in the work — there's a strong resemblance to the trail's approach to the summit cone — but just as easy to be disoriented by the surreal use of ocean in the sky, evoking peering off a cliff edge along a beach trail.

"I wanted it to be an expressive painting that feels loose and doesn't feel like a photograph, like something that was just pasted up on the wall — but that it has our hand in it," Struble said.

The impact of nature on Struble goes beyond her own artistic practice: She teaches a field drawing class at SDSU that combines hiking, drawing and ethnobotany. Students embark on hikes on local trails to observe and draw the region's botany with an understanding of the history of the land.

Specimens of
Specimens of the Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly (Phoebis sennae) from the San Diego Natural History Museum's collections are shown on Oct. 6, 2023. The specimens inspired some of the details in artist Eva Struble's new 33-foot-tall mural.
Containers of colorful paints are shown at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.
Containers of colorful paints are shown at the San Diego Natural History Museum on Oct. 6, 2023.

Struble says nature instills a "sense knowledge," — something she wants to get across in her teaching and her artistic practice. A single plant may have a different meaning at different times of the day — e.g., the differing fragrances in the heat or in the fresh morning dew — or at different seasons, or across generations. A yucca may mean something different to a human today than it did for the Kumeyaay people hundreds of years ago, she said.

"It's such an amazing risk that (the Nat) took to hire an artist to do something here, because I think obviously they don't want to portray anything that's not factual in the museum," Struble said. "And so this piece is more playful and it's not just about facts per se — I mean it's factual on certain levels, but it's also playing with scale, playing with color. So I was trying to walk that line between showing things that I found in the collection here and that I've talked to the botanist about, while also letting it be loose, open, colorful, surprising. I guess it would be really nice if people can be surprised and see new things in it every time they walk by."

Struble's mural is slated to be complete by Friday, Oct. 13.

With the San Diego Museum Council's Kids Free San Diego coupon, the San Diego Natural History Museum is free for up to two children aged 12 and under with one paying adult, through Oct. 31.

Julia Dixon Evans writes the KPBS Arts newsletter, produces and edits the KPBS/Arts Calendar and works with the KPBS team to cover San Diego's diverse arts scene. Previously, Julia wrote the weekly Culture Report for Voice of San Diego and has reported on arts, culture, books, music, television, dining, the outdoors and more for The A.V. Club, Literary Hub and San Diego CityBeat. She studied literature at UCSD (where she was an oboist in the La Jolla Symphony), and is a published novelist and short fiction writer. She is the founder of Last Exit, a local reading series and literary journal, and she won the 2019 National Magazine Award for Fiction. Julia lives with her family in North Park and loves trail running, vegan tacos and live music.
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