An assistant professor in the University of Utah art department, Martinez has led a low-key campaign to invigorate distressed Salt Lake Valley neighborhoods with 100-foot murals and the help of her students.

"The idea is to restore pride in the community and get the business owners to invest in their buildings," Martinez said. Her paintings preserve hidden histories and illustrate the transition from past to present: the appearance of railroads, the rise of an arts community, or the disappearance of a fashionable amusement park under the rolling greens of a golf course.

Funded with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Martinez and her students have created more than 16,000 square feet of public art in 10 projects, mostly in South Salt Lake along the TRAX rail corridor. Businesses that agree to host a mural don't have to pay anything, but they are asked to maintain them for at least five years. Martinez's latest project, on a nondescript building across 500 West from the Rio Grande depot at 300 South, was

designed in collaboration with the Youth City program, whose students created elements of the mural and applied paint under the guidance of U. art students this month.

"Getting the community involved and bringing people together is what interested me," said Brianna Johnston, who recently graduated with a bachelor's in art education and will be teaching art in a Montessori school this fall.

Social statements: Martinez' class spent months developing material from which to build the mural, funded by a Utah Arts Council grant. They worked with teens, who crafted masks of animals to represent themselves, and researched Salt Lake City's historic rail hub that has become an arts hotspot.

"I want to get my students some real-world experience so they can be competitive in these public art projects," Martinez said. "The same people get these commissions because we're not training enough young artists how to do it."

Student Danielle Mariott came up with the mural's title Friday as they applied finishing touches: Urban Masquerade. The composition features 12 animal-like figures, inspired by the teens' masks, framed like billboards along a highway. The animals are engaged in various artistic endeavors in full-body poses: welding, sculpting, photography, even mural painting.

"I asked the kids to find their inner animal. The masks are a away to go out of the everyday and into your spiritual life," said Martinez, a Utah native who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The mural includes a shopping cart in the lower left corner as a nod to the transitory life of the homeless who congregate in the neighborhood. Martinez spent about $2,500 on acrylic paint, which comes in 13 colors in pint jars. Students applied paint at least five times, layering from dark to light to achieve the texture and chiaroscuro, the play of light and shadow, on clothing and skin. The technique, known as glazed painting, was a hallmark of the legendary work of David Alfaro Siquerios, a leader in the Mexican Mural Renaissance of the 1930s. Martinez is a protege of the famed California muralist and social activist Judy Baca, a one-time student of Siquerios.

More and more socially charged murals are appearing in Salt Lake, typically giving voice to the state's growing minority communities.

"Public art is important as we become more diverse and it's important for mainstream Utah to recognize that diversity," said Maria Garciaz, director of NeighborWorks Salt Lake. The nonprofit organization, which pursues a community-building mission, is developing a Utah Arts Council-backed tile mosaic project under the 300 North viaduct.

"How do you engage people in owning their community? Art is becoming one of those tools," Garciaz said.

Social responsibility: More than other forms of public art, murals must have contemporary relevance and be interesting to look at, but without offending people. That can be a tall order in a conservative community. By all accounts, Martinez' South Salt Lake projects enhance the streets and hallways that surround them.

"We're taking bites at a time to make the community a better place to live. Arts are part of the puzzle," said Tim Williams, the city's parks and recreation director. "I'm hoping some day people will come to South Salt Lake and say, 'Let's go on the mural tour.' "

In 2006, Martinez' students painted Wandamere to Nibley on the south wall of Bonwood Bowl at 2500 S. Main, telling the story of Wandamere Park, Salt Lake City's once-elegant amusement park that fell into disrepair in the 1930s and was preserved as a golf course thanks to a gift from the Nibley family.

A dancing couple - a black woman and a partner some say resembles a "Hispanic Ronald Reagan," dressed in the style of the 1930s and surrounded by merry-go-round horses - forms the central image. You can almost hear the big band jazz Martinez' dancers are swinging to.

"She came in one day and said, 'I'm an art professor and these are my students and we would like to put a mural on your wall.' My wall needs painting really bad, so it was fine with me. They just wanted an easel and I gave it to them," Bonwood owner Dean White said. "The north wall needs some work, too, if they ever want to come back. It was such a great job. We fixed the eves and put on gutters to keep the water off it. I would do anything I could do to preserve it."

Once a graffiti magnet, the wall has yet to be tagged since the mural went up.

"It's like the taggers are showing respect for their fellow artists," White said. "You take an old block wall and turn it into something you want to look at. What's wrong with that?"

Martinez' largest mural is along the TRAX corridor at the end of Malvern (2630 South), the street she grew up on. It shows two muscled "gandy dancers" - the men who installed rails in the days before the task was automated - manipulating track with massive bare hands. She modeled the figures after her late grandfather and brother, Joseph and Rick Martinez, both rail workers.

Last week she visited the painting, where she saw something she had never seen before: graffiti defacing one of her murals.

"When they burn down paradise, you can blame it on progress," someone wrote in black spray paint between the twisting tracks. Was the tag, injected onto the very heart of the composition, vandalism or legitimate comment?

"I have mixed feelings," Martinez said. "At least they took the time to look at the whole composition. Someone is making a comment about industry."

bmaffly@sltrib.com