Art Rooted in Los Angeles
Andres Hernandez-Alger is a Los Angeles–born muralist, fine artist, and art educator creating work rooted in culture, place, and community. He is most known for the painting of the Wayside Studio mural, participated in several art exhibitions across Los Angeles, and currently works as a program director delivering quality art instruction to students in the LA area.
What began as a passion project has evolved into something more. As a working artist, it is vital to him that his work reflects community values and social expression. Through his art, he wants to portray something that the community can relate to but also celebrate and evoke a sense of hope and pride on whoever lends their eyes to it.
Meet the Artist/Artist Statement
Andres Hernandez-Alger is a muralist, fine artist, and art educator born and raised in Los Angeles to Honduran and Salvadoran parents. His practice is shaped by a life lived at the intersection of cultures, cities, and creative disciplines. Outside the studio, he finds inspiration in tattooing and soccer—two forms of expression that, like his murals, rely on precision, rhythm, and a deep connection to community and identity.
His earliest influences came from within his own family. Watching his father and uncle create art independently taught him that artistic expression is not reserved for institutions, but something lived, practiced, and passed down. Growing up in Los Angeles expanded that foundation. The city itself became a teacher—its layered cultures, family-owned mercados, street vendors, and the vast landscape of murals painted across neighborhoods all reinforced the idea that art belongs in everyday life, not behind closed doors.
Andres creates public art because he believes in visibility and representation. His work is a response to the ongoing displacement of Latino communities and the gradual fading of Chicano mural traditions across Los Angeles. In a time where gentrification continues to reshape neighborhoods and erase cultural markers, his murals stand as acts of preservation and affirmation. They are meant to ensure that the stories, faces, and histories of his community remain present and visible in the very spaces they helped build.
At the core of his practice is community impact. Andres seeks to honor the resilience, struggle, and progress of the Latino community while celebrating its deep roots in the cultural and historical fabric of Los Angeles and the United States. His murals serve as both reflection and declaration—acknowledging hardship while also highlighting pride, strength, and continuity. Through his work, he aims to reinforce that Chicano muralism is not a fading tradition, but a living, evolving language that continues to speak powerfully to present and future generations.
For Andres, creating public art is not just an artistic choice—it is a responsibility. He sees his practice as a way to contribute to cultural memory, to challenge erasure, and to ensure that the stories of his community are not only told, but permanently embedded in the visual identity of the city itself.
Transforming Shared Spaces
Public Art
For Andres Hernandez-Alger, public art is more than an image placed on a wall. It is an opportunity to give a place a voice.
Being born and raised in such a diverse city like Los Angeles, Andres approaches mural-making with an understanding that public spaces carry history. Every culture has its own character, memories, struggles, celebrations, and cultural languages. His role as an artist is to listen to those stories and translate them into visual experiences that people can recognize themselves in.
His murals and civic-minded work are rooted in place, identity, cultural memory, and accessibility. Andres creates artwork that is visually powerful while remaining connected to the people who encounter it every day. Whatever the subject may be, he considers the architecture, history, surrounding environment, and people who call that space home.
He believes the strongest public artwork is not simply installed in a community—it is developed with an understanding of the community.
Community
Collaboration is at the center of Andres's practice. He sees community engagement not as an additional step in the creative process, but as part of the artwork itself.
Andres approaches each project with curiosity and openness, creating opportunities for residents, students, families, educators, local organizations, and community leaders to contribute their perspectives. Through conversations, research, and real life testimonies and experiences, he works to understand what a community values and how it wants to be represented.
His mural for Wayside Studio, a mobile tattoo studio created around cultural connection and community, reflects this approach to collaborative public art. Rather than treating the bus’s surface as simply a backdrop, Andres considered the studio itself as a moving piece of the Los Angeles landscape. The mural was developed to reflect the spirit of the project, incorporating cultural influences, neighborhood identity, and imagery designed to connect with the people who encounter the studio throughout the city. The process demonstrates his belief that a mural can become an extension of the community it represents—an artwork that travels, creates conversation, and brings its visual language into new spaces.
This approach allows a mural to become more than a finished artwork. It becomes a shared record of identity and belonging.
Art, Education, & Community
Muralism
Andres Hernandez-Alger approaches mural-making as both a visual discipline and a form of cultural documentation. His work on the Wayside Studio mural began with extensive research and careful selection of subjects that reflect the many layers of Los Angeles and Latino culture. Rather than focusing only on well-known figures, Andres intentionally brought together cultural icons and ordinary people living everyday lives—recognizing that each contributes to the identity of a community.
Every subject was thoughtfully chosen and hand-painted, with close attention to expression, proportion, composition, and how each image interacts with the others across the full mural. The result is more than a collection of portraits; it is a cohesive visual narrative connecting history, culture, and everyday life. Through this process, Andres demonstrates his belief that large-scale public art can transform a physical space into a living archive—one that honors the past, reflects the present, and gives communities a deeper sense of identity and belonging.
Studio Work
With 19 years of experience as a painter, Andres has developed his studio practice as the foundation of his artistic career. His years of working with oil paint have given him an extensive understanding of composition, color, value, form, texture, perspective, and visual storytelling, while allowing him to continually experiment with different approaches to image-making. Studio practice provides Andres with the freedom to investigate ideas at a more intimate scale—developing the visual language, techniques, and concepts that later inform his murals and public work. His motivation comes from the lifelong process of learning through making: studying the traditions that influenced him, refining his technical ability, and developing an artistic voice that reflects his experiences as a Los Angeles artist and his Latino heritage.
Art Instruction
For seven years, Andres Hernandez-Alger has worked as both an art educator and program leader, combining hands-on instruction with the administrative responsibilities of running effective arts programs. Across studios throughout Los Angeles, he has taught students of different ages and skill levels, delivering structured fine art instruction while adapting to individual learning needs.
As a Program Director, his responsibilities have also included program coordination, curriculum support, scheduling, student and family communication, staff collaboration, and day-to-day operations. His approach is rooted in making high-quality art education accessible and practical, giving students the technical foundation, creative confidence, and skills to develop their own artistic voice.
A Local Perspective
For Andres Hernandez-Alger, creating art in Los Angeles is deeply personal. Growing up in the city as the child of immigrant parents, he experienced firsthand the way culture, family, neighborhood, and community shape a person’s sense of identity. His motivation comes from wanting to preserve and celebrate those experiences while giving visibility to the people and stories that make Los Angeles what it is. The city has provided Andres with his artistic influences, his community, and the experiences that shaped his creative voice; in return, he sees his work as a way of contributing back to the place that raised him. Whether painting a mural, developing a studio piece, or teaching a student, Andres is driven by the belief that art can honor where people come from, strengthen their connection to place, and ensure that the cultural stories of Los Angeles continue to be seen and remembered.
Selected Collaborations — Bringing Art Into the Community
Andres Hernandez-Alger’s work is shaped by collaboration, cultural engagement, and a commitment to meaningful creative outcomes. His practice spans mural commissions, fine art, education, community initiatives, and partnerships throughout Los Angeles. Each project allows him to respond to its unique people, history, and environment, creating work that is purposeful, accessible, and rooted in place.
The Wayside Studio project expanded Andres Hernandez-Alger’s practice beyond the traditional boundaries of a mural. Following the completion of the mural, the mobile studio was intentionally brought into different neighborhoods, cultural spaces, businesses, and community events throughout Los Angeles, allowing the artwork to travel with the people it was created to represent. This approach transformed the mural from a stationary piece into a living, moving expression of Los Angeles culture. By bringing the studio directly into public spaces, Andres was able to connect with new audiences, collaborate with local businesses and artists, and create opportunities for people to experience art in environments that felt immediate and accessible. The project demonstrated his belief that public art can be more than something people pass by—it can become a catalyst for gathering, conversation, cultural exchange, and community participation.
Selected Wayside Studio Events & Collaborations
A growing record of public engagement, creative collaboration, and community participation.
Bar Flores
Lowboy
De La Playa Records
Melody Lounge
Nativo
Wolf & Crane
Mi Vida
Spring Street Bar
Chicas on the Rocks
Verdugo Bar
Off The Charts
The Oinkster
Garvanza Park