Artist's Murals Depict Life that Persists in the High Desert

Art is not an individualistic process for muralist Nuri Amanatullah. In fact, his murals, which oftentimes illustrate the area's plant and animal life, serve as centerpieces for the Antelope Valley community — places where residents come together over a piece of art and the experience or place that it represents. Amanatullah works to rid the elitism that surrounds most art, making his murals accessible, community-centered pieces. He brushes sunset-like colors over paintings of Joshua trees, pronghorn antelopes, coyotes and jackrabbits, emphasizing the vivid parts of desert life that are not typically associated with the landscape.

"Murals become sort of like a landmark," Amanatullah says. "They become very tied to the visual memory that I have of this place at a certain time. I like the fact that when I'm working on a wall, people come up to me and ask me about it. I enjoy that people engage with it, and it's not behind a velvet rope."

Amanatullah, who is also a designer, illustrator, teacher and children's book illustrator has always carried art within himself.

Born and raised in Sacramento, Amanatullah says that he drew his whole life. He was also influenced by his father, who was both an architect and artist. In 2000, during Amanatullah's senior year of high school, he moved to San Diego for a year with his parents. Soon after, he went on to pursue his passion for arts at the University of California in Santa Cruz, studying drawing and painting. After graduating, he says it was hard making a sustainable living as an artist and instead, explored different avenues in illustration and digital artwork.

"I just bounced around a bit," Amanatullah says. "It was kind of hard to find footing."

In 2008, he and his wife, Kelsey, moved from Santa Cruz down to the Antelope Valley, his wife's hometown, to be closer to her family. It was in the Valley that Amanatullah found an "anchor point" in the area's flora and fauna. After living on the coast for most of his life, Amanatullah invited the "culture shock" that the new desert environment brought and was able to study the societal subtexts of desert-life, as well as the misconceptions placed on the people that lived there.

"[Antelope Valley] seemed very apparent and devoid of life, but it's not a wasteland," Amanatullah says. "There's plenty of vibrant life and beauty in the desert — these really beautiful, intimate moments of wildlife just happen."

Amantullah has seen a roadrunner looking for food scraps in a Del Taco parking lot and bobcats and coyotes running down suburban roads, where cars would be driving. His murals for the area frequently depict the plant and animal life in Antelope Valley, splashing bright colors across them, combating the barren-ness that others may associate with the desert.

"Everything in the desert is shown to be khaki or tan or sage green, so I wanted to push for something vivid that would give people a sense of excitement when they came across it," he says.

Amanatullah takes a lot of inspiration from 18th and 19th-century illustrations, as well as animal and medical field guides. He also frequents natural history museums, studying the specimens inside and the ways in which they're presented. While he says that those inspirations might not be clear in his work, the history of the Valley and strength of natural life despite the constant — and at times, destructive — presence of people are themes that connect many of Amanatullah's murals.

In "Procession," a mural he did for the 2018 AV Walls Art Festival (formerly called the Pow!Wow! Arts Festival), Amanatullah depicts the area's wildlife, which include pronghorn antelopes and coyotes, interwoven with a boxcar train. The train pays "homage" to Lancaster's railway, which at one point, was the main track through the area before the freeway was built. He says that industrial growth has pushed pronghorn antelopes out of the Antelope Valley and that he rarely sees coyotes around anymore.

"I was thinking about progress, Westward expansion and the trains coming in and then what gets displaced or lost from all this progress," Amanatullah says. "Oftentimes, the natural world suffers the most from our expansion."

Similarly, in a mural he painted in Downtown Lancaster in the fall of 2020, Amanatullah shows a scenery with orange-gold California poppies, Joshua trees, a wild rabbit and a rust red mountain range. Amid the natural life is a parked pastel van, juxtaposing — and disrupting — the natural beauty of the landscape.

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Amanatullah says he enjoys the "democratic" aspect to murals. In fact, when "Procession" got tagged, Amanatullah declined to repaint it, feeling like it was a "natural part of the process."

"To assume that [a mural] is going to stay pristine forever is a little naive," Amanatullah says. "Murals' roots come from the defiant nature of graffiti and street art, so a little bit of tagging just adds to it. It's somebody who's making their mark as well."

Along with the art he does for the city of Lancaster, Amanatullah has been the Art Director of the Housing Corporation of America, a nonprofit that integrates free education and arts programming into affordable housing communities, for over a decade. He has been teaching both in-person and virtual art classes to youth and senior residents, introducing them to different types of art mediums and centering accessibility throughout his various lessons and projects.

"We wanted to eliminate as many barriers to access as possible because what we found is that when it comes to folks getting involved in their community or having accessibility towards creative means, art can be super expensive at times," Amanatullah says. "[Art] is prohibitive in that way, but with these programs, if [the residents] had the time and were able to participate, then they were allowed to join."

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Amanatullah started off with a clay ceramics program at youth properties in East Palmdale and East Lancaster, teaching the kids how to create clay busts. He has since put together a variety of other lessons, having the residents do everything from stop motion animation to molding endangered animals out of papier-mâché.

Corey Heimlich, the Vice President of the Housing Corporation of America (HCA) says that "there are very few human beings in the world" like Amanatullah.

"He's pushing the norms on what is possible within these communities and within these properties, and he has the ability to connect, as well,'' Heimlich continues. "He has really transformed our ability to provide the arts into these properties."

Amanatullah was also able to coordinate with Lancaster's Museum of Art and History (MOAH) and get his HCA students' to work alongside other international contemporary artists.

"[Amanatullah] does so much more here in the Antelope Valley than just teach classes at HCA," Andi Campognone, a curator at MOAH, says. "He's been the leader of many community engagement projects, both within the museum and outside. He's always first to volunteer and make himself available for all kinds of creative endeavors."

When the museum was looking to partner with organizations, they offered up their classroom, making it a space to further integrate the city's residents with the art scene and give them an exhibition.

"For a student from Lancaster or Palmdale to go into a museum and see their work on the wall of this huge gallery, that's just a really cool, unique experience," Amanatullah says. "I found myself in the middle of this nexus of connecting all these worlds and everything just kind of fell into place."

Most recently, Amanatullah finished another mural for the city of Lancaster for a "Future of the City" event in March, during which mayors, businesses owners and entrepreneurs discussed future developments in Lancaster. Amanatullah's mural served as the background of the talk, showing a series of panels that framed paintings of the city's flora and fauna as well as other Lancaster icons. In mid-September, he'll be painting another landscape-inspired piece for the AV Walls Arts Festival.

Amanatullah is determined to take the elitism out of art, continuing to make it a space for the community to share their stories. And above all, Amanatullah is grateful.

"I feel super fortunate that I'm able to do what I love for one, and then to be able to have it relate to so many different parts of my professional and personal life," Amanatullah says. "I just always viewed that as a big boon."