A new national project has selected the Zozobra mural on the side of a Cerrillos Road builders-supply store as its 10th mural in the United States in need of restoration.

Multi-Cultural Progression, featuring an image of the effigy that burned Thursday night, was painted on Empire Builders in 1981 by a team led by artist Zara Kriegstein.

Kriegstein repainted part of the work in 1986 for Henry Culver, who owns the building at 1802 Cerrillos Road where his father, Frank Culver, started a block plant in 1945.

But the 15-by-80-foot mural's colors have faded again, and it has become cracked by expansion of the stuccoed wall 6 feet from the busy street.

Rescue Public Murals, a project sponsored by Heritage Preservation, recently announced that Multi-Cultural Progression was chosen on the recommendation of a local committee made up of muralists.

"Because of its condition, the mural has been threatened twice with removal, but the meaningful imagery and importance of the artist to the Santa Fe community have been powerful arguments to save it," says a news release. "However, the time has come to address the mural's deterioration before it is irretrievably lost."

Rescue Public Murals director Kristine Laise said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where she was inspecting a mural that could become the project's 11th endangered mural, that no restorations have begun on any of the murals. The list of the 10 endangered murals around the country is available at www.heritagepreservation.org/RPM.

Four years ago, the Santa Fe City Council passed a resolution seeking restoration of Multi-Cultural Progression after the sponsor, Councilor Matthew Ortiz, said the mural, for him, represents the entrance to the city.

On Thursday, Santa Fe art conservator Steven Prins and Kriegstein inspected the mural to determine how to proceed.

"In all likelihood, it's a re-creation project. It's not a very likely restoration project," Prins said. "One of the problems is that the paint is badly faded, so even if there were not all the cracks, there's not a way to regenerate the original painting. So in these cases, since the artist is still alive, we would call on the artist to just repaint the paintings. ... We'll probably just have to tear the whole wall off and start from scratch."

Kriegstein agreed, saying she thought the mural needed to be sandblasted and started afresh, following the original sketch. "We have to go up there and really look at it and suggest how the wall should be treated so that the mural won't crack off again," she said. "It was really the five layers of paint underneath. ...

"I would like to restore the mural in the spirit it originally was done in," Kriegstein continued. "When I mentioned the possibility (of repainting it) in my etching group, there was a young artist who said, 'Ooh, if that comes to happen, I want to participate. I always loved this mural when I was a kid.' "

Kriegstein has been known for her art around Santa Fe for more than 30 years and has worked on several prominent mural projects, including the one on the side of the Halpin Building off Guadalupe Street and another inside the Municipal Court building off Camino Entrada.

The Berlin native once was married to Felipe Cabeza de Vaca, a plumber who ran a private UFO museum and several times unsuccessfully sought municipal office. Both have been living elsewhere in recent years, but Kriegstein said she recently moved into a place south of Santa Fe "because this is where my work is, where my friends are."

Although Multi-Cultural Progression's most prominent figure is Zozobra, it also includes other symbols of New Mexico's cultures throughout history — a 15-foot-high eagle dancer, cliff dwellings, Spanish conquistadors with spears, a church, the arrival of U.S. troops in 1845, scientific advancements, oil wells and the graves of New Mexicans who have died in war.

Prins, who previously worked on the restoration of William Penhallow Henderson's paintings in the U.S. District Court in Santa Fe and Peter Hurd's murals in an old post office in Alamogordo, said the restoration of Kriegstein's work will probably require local volunteers and sponsors. Henry Culver already has agreed to kick in $1,000.

"In the bigger picture of this whole national project, that's certainly part of the goal, to get the local community more invested in these paintings, and one of the ways they do this is to have artists in the community work on the restoration," Prins said. "The whole thing is to have the community have a stake in the project when it's finished and ... if they have some money invested in it, they're going to be more respectful of it and more concerned about it."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.