Art and the City

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SARAH SCHRANK

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

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All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10987654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schrank, Sarah. Art and the city : civic imagination and cultural authority in Los Angeles / Sarah Schrank. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4117-4 (alk. paper) 1. Public art—Political aspects—California—Los Angeles. 2. Art and society— California—Los Angeles. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Cultural policy. I. Title. N8845.L67S37 2008 701Ј.030979494—dc22 2008012685

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Introduction 1

1. Boosters, Early Moderns, and the Artful Civic Imaginary 12

2. Modernism in Public Spaces 43

3. Painting the Town Red 64

4. Bohemia in Vogue 97

5. Imagining the Watts Towers 135

Conclusion 165

Notes 171

Index 203

Acknowledgments 213

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One year before millions of people took to the streets to protest new federal policies mandating the criminalization of undocumented work- ers in the United States, Los Angeles hosted its own demonstration of anti-immigrant sentiment. In the spring of 2005 the group Save Our State called on the city of Baldwin Park, a largely Latino municipality within Los Angeles, to remove offending language from Judith Baca’s public artwork Danzas Indigenas. Installed at the Baldwin Park Metrolink station in 1993, the piece, which resembles eroding Spanish mission archways, is inscribed with passages from Chicano literature and Native American folklore. Danzas Indigenas had been commissioned by the city of Baldwin Park, which asked Baca, a University of California at Los Angeles professor, nationally acclaimed public artist, and youth activist, to create a monument that reflected the different voices of its community. According to Save Our State spokesman Joseph Turner, the offending passages included ‘‘It was better before they came’’ and a quotation from author Gloria Anzalduá, ‘‘This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is, and will be again.’’ On May 14, 2005, members of Save Our State showed up at the Metro- link station waving American flags, carrying signs protesting ‘‘hate speech’’ and the ‘‘reconquista,’’ and loudly proclaiming their support for the vigilante border patrollers known as the Minutemen. The protesters numbering around forty shouted at the largely Latino counter- protesters to ‘‘go home.’’ Over the course of the day the protests became more heated, with more than six hundred people showing up, the vast majority in opposition to the Save Our State demonstration. Though as a precaution Baldwin Park spent $250,000 on helicopters and police overtime to protect Save Our State, no violence occurred. By the end of June, Baca and the residents of Baldwin Park had claimed victory when the city presented the artist with a written proclamation promising to keep Danzas Indigenas intact and protect it in the future.1 It is both meaningful and ironic that Save Our State, a group that had previously received national attention when it attacked a Spanish-language radio station for its billboard reading ‘‘Los Angeles, CA Mexico,’’ would choose as its next protest site a public sculpture that had been

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Figure 1. Judith F. Baca, Danzas Indigenas, 1993, shown here with riot police, Baldwin Park, California, May 14, 2005. ᭧ SPARC www.sparcmurals.org.

displayed in a well-traveled transportation hub for twelve years without comment or controversy. In many ways it was a poor choice. At a Metro- link art installation in Los Angeles County, where, more than any other social group, people of color, immigrants (documented or otherwise), working people, and the poor ride public transportation, Save Our State was protesting in front of passing trains ﬁlled with the most unsupport- ive of audiences. Save Our State organizers also clearly overlooked the fact that the city of Baldwin Park had commissioned an artwork popular with residents and taxpayers who resented the incursion of an outside group attempting to rile up anti-immigrant hysteria in their own neigh- borhood. Though the Danzas Indigenas controversy is important for how it reveals the ongoing problem of xenophobia in U.S. society, it is also sig- niﬁcant for what it tells us about the complicated relationship between art, public space, and cultural authority, the subject of this book. Public artwork and the visual arts, more generally, were part of a complex cultural and political discourse in the Los Angeles metropolitan area for the better part of the twentieth century. Daunting social issues such as

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Figure 2. Detail from Great Wall of Los Angeles (begun in 1976) by Judith F. Baca. California’s San Fernando Valley Tujunga Wash, ᭧ SPARC www.sparcmurals.org. Photograph by the author, 2003. racism, poverty, urban renewal, and claims to public space played out in the realm of the arts, from the 1903 Municipal Art Commission’s policies of urban aesthetics to Baca’s ‘‘at risk’’ teen painters of the 1976 Great Wall of Los Angeles. For the commission, led by businesspeople and Holly- wood elites, deploying aesthetics as a political tool was a means to pre- serve its members’ social status in the face of urban growth and articulate a civic vision of the city as exclusively white and well heeled. For Baca, 1970s murals in Los Angeles challenged the civic and political invisibility of different cultural groups who, while demographically signiﬁcant, lacked socioeconomic power. When Save Our State chose Danzas Indigenas to make a political statement using a modern art installation, it entered into a historic discourse with deep roots in the city. That it failed in its agenda in the face of an even larger counterprotest is not surprising, given the fraught political nature of art in Los Angeles. Art and the City chronicles this story of public art and municipal politics. In doing so, it examines the lesser-known history of visual culture

...... 16960$ INTR 06-03-08 15:57:25 PS PAGE 3 4 Introduction in Los Angeles prior to the era of protest art in 1970s southern Califor- nia. That period, characterized by Judith Baca’s Great Wall project, Los Four, the Compton Communicative Arts Academy, Judy Chicago’s Wom- anhouse, and others, represented a sea change in civic art discourse, a change that, as this book demonstrates, built over the course of the twentieth century. Moreover, in its focus on Los Angeles, Art and the City demonstrates the centrality of public art in shaping the contours of urban culture. Indeed, this same story could be told in other cities, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. In Los Angeles, however, artists such as Judson Powell or Judith Baca not only had to fight against racial and gender prejudice, but they also created art in a city with an enor- mous historical investment in controlling its visual imagery. In Los Angeles, because art played such a significant role in how civic leaders imagined their city, public art controversies, especially those focused on questions of modernism, galvanized civic debate and municipal and county politics for the better part of fifty years. Art and the City tells how art became a tool of elite boosters and other social groups competing for space and representation in an emergent metropolis. Carved out of the desert to function as an irrigated urban paradise, Los Angeles was expensive to build, and investors wanted assurance that they had not misplaced their money. With no useful natural harbor and with commercially lucrative crops still in the future, the Mexican ranch- ing town was in need of a hard sell, and boosterism became the local export. Thus, the first civic art of Los Angeles was found in the promo- tional imagery painted on trains, printed on Chamber of Commerce propaganda, and slapped on produce crates to eventually become color- ful, collectible ephemera. The promise of these images proved inade- quate to attract enough middle-class residents, however, and early civic leaders felt that the city’s landscape needed to look more like the pic- tures for their city to grow. Thus the Municipal Art Commission, one of the first government bodies of its kind in the United States dedicated solely to urban aesthetics, was born in 1903. With its purpose to make reality match the civic imagination, literally to create an ‘‘official’’ urban aesthetic, a snug relationship between visual culture and capital investment developed. This relationship profoundly affected how civic identity evolved in Los Angeles and how artists formed creative communities in which to practice and promote their craft. Over the next century, art would serve as both booster tool and booster foil as control over the civic culture of Los Angeles was never certain.2 As obsessed with civic identity as Los Angeles may be, it is a city whose popular notoriety lies in its dark tales of corruption, false promises, smoggy sun, and relished artifice. In contemporary urban scholarship, Los Angeles is both celebrated for its postmodern eclecticism and criti-

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Figure 3. Crate label, ca. 1920s. Collection of the author. cized for a historical amnesia that stands to erase legacies of social strug- gle and community building.3 It is a city that has lost a river, misplaced a mass transit system, and razed, removed, and rebuilt entire neighbor- hoods. A native Mexican population has been recast as a foreign inter- loper. A history of colonialism, bloody conquest, and land appropriation has been reincarnated as whitewashed Spanish revival architecture, visi- ble in the omnipresent red tile roof.4 The visual vocabulary of Los Angeles also stands out from that of other cities because of the significant influence of the film industry. Due to these filmic versions of the city, people often feel they know Los Angeles in a way that they do not other cities, even if they have never been there. In Los Angeles, as the historian Dolores Hayden has so aptly put it, ‘‘the sense of civic identity that shared history can convey is missing.’’5

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