Murals of La Jolla
Southeast Exchange, 2026
7540 Fay Avenue, La Jolla, CA
13 ft. 9 in. x 47 ft. 3 in.
Debby and Hal Jacobs, Larry and Tammy Hershfield – Wall Sponsors
Lizzie Zelter’s mural, Southeast Exchange, is a reimagined retail landscape brimming with visual echoes and shifting perspectives. Exploring the artist’s interest in repetition, boundaries, and illusion, Southeast Exchange depicts E & E Trading, a large discount store in Brownsville, Texas. During a grant-funded trip along the U.S.-Mexico border, Zelter noted the city’s parallels to San Diego. On the southeast-facing wall of 7540 Fay Avenue, she creates an urban collage linking opposite corners of the southern border. Drawing from the diversity and density of objects in E & E Trading, Zelter adeptly incorporates this abundant inventory into her idiosyncratic painterly language.
Southeast Exchange’s composition is based on an architectural detail Zelter noticed in the store: a series of hanging mirrored panels breaking up the store’s reflected interior into choppy segments. Her close cropping of these vertical fragments creates a concave effect, wherein the central zone of the painting portrays the deepest aisles. Stacked on cluttered shelves, recognizable merchandise and unnameable forms are painted using a range of mark-making techniques. Perpendicular to Fay Avenue, the mural reverses the conventional left-to-right read of horizontal painting by positioning an exit sign where viewers first approach the image. Through these strategies, Zelter transforms a commercial interior into an unsettled perceptual maze, inviting the viewer to navigate an environment ripe for deep looking.
Zelter’s mural marks a milestone for Murals of La Jolla, inaugurating the project’s Emerging Artist Program. The site will continue to serve as a dedicated platform for future emerging artists, providing an ongoing space for new voices in public art.
Featured in: The San Diego Union Tribune & lajolla.ca
Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.