Thursday, October 1, 2026
“The water is the life blood of Mother Earth. The water that I carry is the blood of Mother Earth. The water is the life blood of our bodies.”
Susan Gallo sang the Algonquin water prayer, in its original indigenous version, each time a volunteer applied a handprint to the boardwalk-facing mural on the wall of the vacant Hebrew Academy of Long Beach last week. The song honored the nearby ocean, which is also celebrated in the artwork.
The building-length painting is a collection of handprints of all sizes overlaid on three crashing waves. Vinyl art prints, supplied by Long Beach’s Artists in Partnership and showcasing local artists, adorn plywood planks covering the former school’s broken windows. Around each corner, on the sides of the building, which has been shuttered for nearly a decade, mural artists were invited to create their own water-themed works.
Susan Gallo, a Long Beach resident and a home-school teacher, explained that her daughters — Avellina, 13, Fiora, 11, and Toni, 6 — first took interest in the environment after a snowstorm three years ago.
“I’m a home-school mom, so I have the liberty to take our lessons into life,” Gallo said. “We were driving down the road and the snow is melting, and all that trash that was there — they said, ‘Mom, where does that go?’” That sparked an ongoing interest in community cleanup.
At the March 18 City Council meeting, Gallo, along with her daughters and other students, made a request to install a 400-square-foot bioswale — a natural water-filtration system that uses native plants to trap microplastics and pollutants — along a section of Grand Boulevard.
Council members were optimistic about the project, though it would require significant planning and coordination input from engineers and designers at the state Department of Environmental Conservation as well as the city Department of Public Works. In the meantime, Gallo and her students created the mural project as a fundraiser for the bioswale. Her husband, Darren Gallo, owns the property management company currently in charge of the old Hebrew Academy grounds, making it a serendipitous location for environmentally focused artistic expression.
“It’s amazing,” Johanna Mathieson-Ellmer, director of Artists in Partnership, said of the project. “It just shows the power of art, community, purpose — all of the things that people get excited about and want to get behind. It makes you feel that you’re connected to something bigger than yourself.”
For three hours a day from April 6 to 10, residents passing by, artists, Gallo and her daughters completed the series of murals across the building’s facade. The Gallos solicited donations from anyone walking along the boardwalk, whether they left a handprint or not. “It’s fantastic,” resident Alison Orgonas said after applying her handprint. “I love when kids are aware of the planet and doing the right thing.”
With the building covered in artwork perfectly suited to a City by the Sea, Gallo will hold a final “blessing of the water” on Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The event will kick off an Earth Week Art Trail throughout Long Beach, with artistic workshops and displays at a number of locations starting next Wednesday — Earth Day — and continuing until the following Sunday.
After adding his handprint to the exterior of the Hebrew Academy, Oceanside resident Dan Rinaldi reflected on its meaning. “I’m a psychologist, and I rotated through this building in the early 2000s,” he recalled. “Every time I’d walk by, it was just kind of sad to see it become increasingly dilapidated. To see this come back and beautify the area, it’s wonderful proof of what a dedicated community can do to bring life back to something that was gone.”
