You never know what you might find when you walk into an antique store or a roadside tchotchke shop.
With that in mind, a new mural in La Jolla explores the findings at a large discount store in Brownsville, Texas.
“Southeast Exchange” by oil painter Lizzie Zelter was installed April 8 at 7540 Fay Ave. as part of the Murals of La Jolla program administered by the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library.
The mural contains images reflecting what the artist found at the busy shop in southern Texas.
Zelter, born in New York City in 1996, moved to San Diego in 2022 to run the Two Rooms gallery in Bird Rock, featuring artists from the San Diego-Tijuana region. As part of that move, she had the opportunity to go on a grant-funded road trip from Texas to San Diego to view the American Southwest and the United States’ southern border, which she called “an eye-opening experience.”
During the drive, Zelter came across E&E Trading, a “large, slightly dated” discount shop with rows and rows of everything from camping equipment and volleyballs to wigs and watches.
“It had everything under the sun and there was an unusual setup in the store,” she said. “There were these janky mirrors hanging and they reflected the whole store, almost creating this optical illusion.”
Artist Lizzie Zelter’s mural “Southeast Exchange” was installed April 8 in La Jolla. (Annie Denton)
Though she didn’t immediately create anything based on what she saw, Zelter said the store inspired her because she was already involved in creating paintings centered on stores and homes and how they were arranged.
“The beginning of my work was how people arrange their homes and what it says about them,” she said. “It’s a way to understand someone else to see what they collect and how they live. I expanded that outward to see public spaces, and I got interested in stores and storefronts as a way to show our culture. They are like artifacts of time. They can be seen as mundane, but I think they shed a light on who we are.”
When the opportunity came to create a piece for Murals of La Jolla, the store in Texas immediately came to Zelter’s mind.
“I was trying to think about how people read English from left to right and might ‘read’ the painting the same way,” she said. “But most people come from the right side of the mural [where the sidewalk is] and would read it in reverse, so I liked the idea of ‘entering’ through the exit sign and making your way through the painting that way.
“I thought about how people would engage with it. I wanted to feature a lot of items to give people something to grab onto and have many different reads and see what they would respond to — to produce a certain memory in this vast array of objects and forms.”
Murals of La Jolla Executive Director Taylor Chapin called “Southeast Exchange” a “meaningful addition” to the local collection of public art.
“What I find especially compelling is the way the composition resists a single, fixed reading,” Chapin said. “The image unfolds in vertical segments, producing a concave spatial effect, while its right-to-left orientation subtly disrupts how we expect to move through an image. Lizzie’s distinctive painterly language, evident in her layered surfaces and varied mark-making, adds a richness and immediacy that animates the composition.
“It’s a work that rewards sustained looking and brings a unique dimension to our broader collection. … It’s a compelling contribution that underscores the program’s ongoing evolution.”
Zelter’s commission also represents the launch of the Murals of La Jolla Emerging Artist Program, which Chapin said is “an initiative designed to create space for artists who are early in their careers but already demonstrating a strong and distinctive voice.”
“Public art can be a transformative opportunity, and this program allows us to intentionally support the next generation of artists while continuing to expand the range of perspectives represented in La Jolla,” Chapin said.
Zelter’s work has been featured in several art institutions, including solo shows at Columbia University in New York, Sala de Espera in Tijuana and Encarte Gallery in Mexico City. She also has participated in La Jolla group exhibitions at the Athenaeum and Quint Gallery.
Zelter closed Two Rooms in February, characterizing it as “going on hiatus.” She said in a statement at the time that the gallery “became an external framework for me to learn from, operating as a brick-and-mortar alter ego.” ♦