This is part of a series of interviews conducted by students from Occidental College for the Full Dollar project.

Martin Durazo is a Los Angeles native whose multimedia works explore the "aesthetics of the elicit", using found objects like Chinese masks and ordinary household items and putting them in a new context that deviates them from its intended use. We sat down at his studio in Glendale for a conversation about his career, from studying with Paul McCarthy to the artistic spirit that can be found everywhere. See the interview in the video above.

This is part of a series of interviews conducted by students from Occidental College for the Full Dollar project.

Sandow Birk has spent much of his life living and working in the Los Angeles area. Feeling that it is the most exciting place to be an artist, he often simultaneously critiques and celebrates the city in his work. He views his art as a means to communicate his conceptual ideas, which often re-define historical styles of painting and deal with contemporary American life. We met at his studio in Long Beach to talk a bit about his work, which you can see in the video above.

Now that we've learned a bit about the sign painters involved with the Full Dollar project, let us now meet the artists. We sat down with each artist for a video interview which, along with samples of their work, will be posted right here on this blog over the course of next few weeks.

Here are the participating artists, with a brief description about their works:

An e-mail exchange between me and Julie Deamer, the former director at Outpost for Contemporary Art, took place on May 5th, 2011. As it turned out, this dialogue was a key component to define the process of translation from one place to another in order to respond to the different challenges derived from diverse traditions, urban contexts, and power relations between art and sign-painting. New methods needed to be developed for the project to have an echo within the Highland Park community at large. At the same time, my main questions regarding irony and humor as powerful elements for the critique of the art world and collecting practices still seem unsolved by this act of translation:

Originally from Sonsonate, El Salvador, Rodolfo worked as a graphic designer for a newspaper before coming to Los Angeles to pursue work as an artist. Both his acrylic paintings of life in El Salvador and his commercial work for local businesses and public murals often depict colorful, cheerful details. He invited us to his studio/home for an intimate interview about his life and work.

In our interview with artist and sign painter Brad Dutsch, he talked a bit about the process of his work and his desire to teach the values of painting to young children. Now he shares with us examples of his work. Starting this week, we will be presenting the Q&A with each artist in our Photo of the Week posts.

Last week we featured our interview with muralist and sign painter Art Tapia. Now we take a closer look at his works, along with answers to a few questions we asked about his work.

Arden Stern is a Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She has published and presented on 19th-century type design, street graphics in Zambia, and typography in film title sequences.

Designed to explore the intersections between artists, the built environment, and the Highland Park community, the Full Dollar Project has enlisted Los Angeles sign painters to illustrate the collaborative and constantly evolving identity of a neighborhood. While LA's rich history of muralism has helped construct the city's identity on a global scale, the distinctiveness of its painted signs can identify its landscape on an even more local level. Like facial features, signs are a vital part of how businesses distinguish themselves: appearing one after the other, mismatched awnings and stucco facades constitute a cast of community characters in their own right. Painted signs, of which no two are exactly alike, express the history of a place through a unique and often idiosyncratic language of images, symbols, and text. In this way, a street like York Boulevard simultaneously becomes a public art gallery and local history museum.

Last week we featured our interview with sign painter Agbey Hommey, in which he talked about his work as a sign painter, as well as his passion for watercolors. Now it's time to visualize his works.

See Agbey's sign paintings and his watercolors, along with answers to a few questions about his career:

Art Tapia is a young Highland Park artist who has created many murals in the style of graffiti art. He also spends his time on commercial art, painting signs with his own unique style. One of his representative works is the sign at Junior's Discount Party Supplies, which consists of colorful illustrations of cartoon characters on the outside walls.