Lizzie Zelter

Southeast Exchange, 2026
7540 Fay Avenue

13' 9" x 47' 3"
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.

Zelter’s practice examines how human-made environments are constructed and perceived. Engaging scale and perspective, she reimagines the outside world through experiments in pattern, form, and surface. Zelter draws attention to the peculiarities of domestic, commercial, and bureaucratic spaces to investigate their social functions. Born in New York City in 1996, she received her BA in literature from Duke University in 2018 and went on to receive her MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2022.

Zelter is the founder and curator of Two Rooms, an artist-run gallery and project space dedicated to fostering experimentation and critical engagement across the San Diego–Tijuana binational region. Her work has been featured in fine art institutions, including solo shows at Columbia University; Sala de Espera, Tijuana BC, Mexico; and Encarte Gallery, Mexico City. Additionally, she has participated in group exhibitions at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, California; Quint Gallery, San Diego, California; and Jane Lombard Gallery at Untitled Art Fair, Miami, Florida. Zelter has been the recipient of grants and fellowships, including Creative Communities San Diego, Columbia University Dean’s Project Grant, and the Duke Engage Independent Grant. Zelter lives and works in San Diego and New York