The City of Manhattan Beach and the Cultural Arts team are pleased to announce that Los Angeles-based artist April Banks has been selected for the Bruce’s Beach Park sculpture commission. The working title for the artwork is Building Paradise. On February 17, the Manhattan Beach City Council voted unanimously to move ahead with Banks’s proposal, which ranked highest across all categories, including historical representation, thematic resonance, site compatibility, scale and proportion, preservation of views and park activities, and durability for permanent outdoor installation.

Banks has proposed an abstracted beach cottage—a literal “open house” that honors the Bruces and the Black homeowners and entrepreneurs who built their lives and dreams along the coast and welcomed visitors to the site. The artwork features an exterior and interior façade connected by an open archway, with carefully considered scale and form designed to be visible from the park terraces above and below while respecting sightlines to the ocean. The walls will depict residents and beachgoers through glass mosaic figures collaged from archival photographs, set against blue and white ceramic tiles created using cyanotypes—sun prints of plants and leaves gathered from present-day Bruce’s Beach Park—which will be transferred and fired onto the ceramic tiles. The construction details were inspired by improvisational domestic traditions of African American communities, such as quilts that preserved storytelling while providing warmth and comfort, and blue bottle trees that provided homes with both decoration and spiritual protection.

Familiar and welcoming in form, and utilizing an aesthetic that bridges past and present, Building Paradise offers a space for cultural legacy, healing, hospitality, and pride, standing as a vision of what might have been and what may still come.

Banks is nationally recognized for her public art and public activations. Her practice sits at the intersection of place and experience, time traveling through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our future identities. She has completed major sculptural commissions for the City of Santa Monica, the City of San Luis Obispo, Washington, D.C. for the Department of Arts and Humanities, and most recently a large-scale mosaic mural for Jackie Robinson Park in Sun Village.