Art in Los Angeles

Working between the 1960s and early 1990s, the artists profiled in this compendium represent a broad cross section of L.A.'s art scene. With nearly 400 illustrations and ten essays, this volume presents histories of artistic experimentation and reveals networks of collaboration and exchange that resulted in some of the most intriguing art of late 20th-century America. From "mail art" to the rise of Chicano, gay, and feminist print media; the formation of alternative spaces to punk music and performance; fashion culture to the AIDS crisis-the artists and works featured here comprise a boundary-pushing network of voices and talents.

The volume covers the entire history of California art from the early mapmakers and explorers to the landscapists of the early twentieth century, the post-World War II modernists, and the late twentieth-century "idea" artists who champion personal, social and political issues.

For almost a decade Peter Quezada, a prolific self-taught artist, painted murals and lettering on buildings and retaining walls in neighborhoods northeast of downtown Los Angeles. He refers to his work as a "graffiti deterrent" or a "substitute for graffiti", and he targets sites that are favorites of taggers and gang graffiti writers. Often he enlists their assistance and designs his murals to appeal to these youths as well as to discourage them from participating in antisocial behavior. Drawing upon an eclectic visual repertoire of images and graphics, his murals reflect his affinity for the neighborhoods in which he has lived. Much of his work is taken from images he encounters in his daily life. Highlighting the interplay of contemporary life, mass-media images that confront the public, and the use of physical space in the city landscape, this fascinating book shows how such art as Quezada's has become the signature of modern urban culture.

Between 1963 and 1978, Ed Ruscha produced 18 small artists' books. Usually self-published in small print-runs, these publications have become seminal works in the history of Conceptual art and the photography book. Then & Now is the first artist's book that Ruscha has made since 1978. One of the most famous of Ruscha's books from that early period is Every Building on the Sunset Strip--a famous stretch of real estate along Sunset Boulevard--published in 1966. In July, 1973 he followed the same procedure when he photographed on Hollywood Boulevard. Loading a continuous strip of 30 feet of Ilford FP-4 black & white film into his Nikon F2 and then mounting it on a tripod in the bed of a pickup truck, he drove back and forth across the 12 miles of street shooting both the north and south sides of its entire length. The negatives were developed, contact sheets were made, and the materials placed in storage. 30 years later, in 2003, a digital record of Hollywood Boulevard was created and it served as a reference guide for the traditional film/still documentary of 2004. For this shoot, the same type of camera equipment was used to re-photograph the street on 35mm color-negative film. The resulting material of both shoots--4,500 black & white and 13,000 color images--have been scanned and digitally composed into four panoramics of the complete 12 miles. In Then & Now, the original 1973 northside view is shown along the top of the page and juxtaposed with its 2004 version. The panoramics face each other and they are aligned. The result is what Ruscha refers to as "a piece of history... a very democratic, unemotional look at the world." Whilst it is a significant historical document which succinctly conflates and renders the passage of time, it is also a project which spans the career of one of the truly original artists of our time and brings his work full circle.

Chicanismo, the idea of what it means to be Chicano, was born in the 1970s, when grassroots activists, academics, and artists joined forces in the civil rights movimiento that spread new ideas about Mexican American history and identity. The community murals those artists painted in the barrios of East Los Angeles were a powerful part of that cultural vitality, and these artworks have been an important feature of LA culture ever since. This book offers detailed analyses of individual East LA murals, sets them in social context, and explains how they were produced. The authors, leading experts on mural art, use a distinctive methodology, analyzing the art from aesthetic, political, and cultural perspectives to show how murals and graffiti reflected and influenced the Chicano civil rights movement.

Long before graffiti was adopted as the visual expression of hip-hop culture in the 1980s, Chicano gang members in East Los Angeles had been developing stylized calligraphy and writing on walls. Cholo (gangster) scripts became the first distinctive letter forms to evolve in the modern vernacular tradition of graffiti writing. Today Los Angeles writers of diverse backgrounds draw from a unique confluence of cultures that has led to regionally distinctive styles.Graffiti L.A. provides a comprehensive and visual history of graffiti in Los Angeles, as well as an in-depth examination of the myriad styles and techniques used by writers today. Complementing the main text, interviews with L.A.'s most prolific and infamous writers provide insight into the lives of these fugitive artists.

A fully illustrated evocation of the rich architectural history that has given Los Angeles its unique character. A loving, provocative appeal to the rising pride and design consciousness of Angelenos, and anyone who has ever been entranced by the City of Angels

Galka Scheyer, Walter and Louise Arensberg, Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, Will Connell, Lloyd Wright, Norman Bel Geddes, Edward Weston, John Cage, Anais Nin, Jake Zeitlin, Merle Armitage, Harriet and Sam Freeman, and several dozen other artists and designers--this was a circle, not just a loose network of acquaintances. The modernist pioneers of Los Angeles art and architecture made statements in their work and legacies, but they were every bit as much a community as they were individual satellites of expression. These people gathered in solidarity, they met as friends and lovers, and they shared excitement over their important breaks with tradition. In modest but lasting ways, they changed Los Angeles forever. There is history in that, and there is inspiration as well. This book is about a secret Los Angeles, a Los Angeles filled with optimism about a different kind of "city of the future."

LA Artland is a survey of one of the most vibrant and influential art scenes of recent decades. Having produced world renowned artists, Los Angeles since the 90s has rivalled New York as the US contemporary art capital. The focus of this publication is on extensive visual documentation of contemporary artists working in Los Angeles now.

This opulent and expansive volume, published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's monumental exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity,1900-2000, charts the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California. Displaying a dazzling array of fine art and material culture, Made in California challenges us to reexamine the ways in which the state has been portrayed and imagined. Unusually inclusive, visually intriguing, and beautifully produced, this volume is a delight throughout--both in image and in text--and will appeal to anyone who has lived in, visited, or imagined California.

MEX/LA: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930-1985 focuses on the construction of different notions of "Mexicanidad" within modernist and contemporary art created in Los Angeles. From the Olvera Street mural by Siqueiros, to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the Disney silver-screen productions, to the revitalization of the street mural, up to the performance art of Guillermo G mez-Pe a, MEX/LA explores the bi-national and hybrid forms of artistic practices, popular culture and mass-media arts that have so uniquely shaped Los Angeles' cultural panorama.

The history of modern art typically begins in Paris and ends in New York. Los Angeles was out of sight and out of mind, viewed as the apotheosis of popular culture, not a centre for serious art. A book about the city as much as it is about the art, Out of Sight is a social and cultural history that illuminates the ways mid-century Los Angeles shaped its emerging art scene - and how that art scene helped remake the city.

This comprehensive, richly illustrated book explores postwar American art from a new perspective: Southern California. The analysis of the L.A. art scene from the end of World War II until the beginning of the 1980s--the first in-depth scholarly survey of the region's art--demonstrates the major role Southern California artists played in the twentieth century's most influential art movements.

" ... introduces readers to the lives and works of sixteen African Americans prominent in the Los Angeles art world of the late 20th century. While the artists discussed here include many of the brightest stars of the African American art community, their selection was not intended to reflect any critical judgment in the sense of a top ten list. Serendipitously, the author became acquainted with each of these artists during the course of his work as a professor of African American Studies at UCLA. Therefore, it should be added that this book is not intended to provide a comprehensive critical appreciation of these artists in the context of the American art scene, though again it moves in that direction.

If California is a state of mind, Barbara Isenberg's interviews with more than fifty of California's prominent painters, writers, composers, architects, directors, and performers help explain why.

A landmark study of California's visual arts and poetry, 1925 to 1975, Utopia and Dissent demonstrates the profound influence this regional culture had on American art and thought. Combining intellectual and cultural history, it traces the spread of ideas developed in California's pre-World War II bohemian enclaves to mainstream America, where they became a major current of 1950s and 1960s counterculturism.