Oral history interview with Gronk, 1997 Jan. 20-23 The digital preservation of this interview received Federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Gronk on January 20 & 23, 1997. The interview took place in Los Angeles, California, and was conducted by Jeffrey Rangel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview G: Gronk JR: Jeffrey Rangel [Session 1] JR: Okay, this is an interview for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, with Gronk. Today is January 20, 1997, at the artist’s studio in downtown Los Angeles. The interviewer is Jeff Rangel and we’re ready to get started. G: Okay, good. JR: Welcome. G: Thank you. JR: Like I said, normally we like to start out with any recollections about family and kind of where you grew up, where your family was from, things of that nature. G: Okay. My parents were both born here in Los Angeles, and my grandparents came from Mexico. I grew up, basically, with a single parent, my mother. I grew up in East Los Angeles. Early on—at five years old—I can remember that the things that I did best was to make things. And those were the most exciting times, I believe —when somebody gave me a pencil and a sheet of paper—was to create a world for myself, basically. It sort of made everything fall to the wayside. The environment where I was growing up, the poverty—all of that just sort of fell to the wayside, and I was able to create these worlds and enter into it. And I think that sort of isolated me a lot from other kids in the neighborhood, even isolated me while I was going to school. And my earliest recollections of entering school was the times when it was art time, and they had easels and they had paint and they had brushes. And I remember that they used to have a competition every single year at the school, and the best drawings were usually picked and they would give awards to the students who did the best artwork. The school I went to was this school called Rowan Avenue Street School, and I was never picked for any of those awards—or even to be included in those exhibitions of art. And I always wondered why. [laughs] What is it about my stuff that is just not quite right? And early on I was just fascinated by television. Because TV was sort of my babysitter. Growing up with a single parent, the TV set was on constantly. I was bombarded with cartoons on Saturdays, and also the rest of the week I was watching things early in the morning. And I think a lot of my early sensibilities sprang from the sense of a TV monitor in close proximity to me. Now, in the household where I grew up, it sort of had a very conservative atmosphere, a small house in this neighborhood—Gage Avenue was the street that I grew up on— relatively small house. But the thing I remember the most about the living room was the day that what was brought into it was a boomerang coffee table. Now, for me that was "Space age has just entered into my living room!" In the fifties, you know, that is the time of kind of space-age sensibility. I remember sitting on top of it and I would be watching on television War of the Worlds or Devil Girl from Mars. But in War of the Worlds, in particular, the shape of the flying saucer in that movie was also the shape of the boomerang coffee table. And I would sit on top of the coffee table and just pretend that that was my flying saucer or my spaceship. I think I’ve been intrigued from my earliest recollections with the sense of TV, and I can see it as something that directed me in my direction as an artist, even later on in life looking back now and see[ing] what a big influence TV or even film have had on my early beginnings. Just thinking about the fact that I could make something. When I saw something as silly or stupid as a film like Devil Girl from Mars, inside my head clicked the fact that, "Somebody actually made this. That’s what I want to do. I want to make things." There’s nothing else really that important to me at this point in my life—five, six years old. It’s to make things. It finally clicked in my head that somebody had to put a costume on that person. Somebody had to make those people do those certain things that they were doing. I want to do those kinds of things. But it was easy for me to see that, "Well, I don’t have access to Hollywood, so I can’t be like, at five years old, making movies, but perhaps I can create those images on a sheet of paper." I could create that ship floating in the ocean with a boomerang coffee table floating above it—shooting down rays and destroying the whole sheet of paper—by creating this image of this War of the Worlds kind of sensibility early on. JR: Was this something that your mother encouraged you to do? G: Actually, no. I had an uncle and he, allegedly—it’s like I never really found out the truth about this—was going to work for Walt Disney in the forties, but the war interrupted his career. He went into the army. But he was always somebody that was around that drew, and he would do drawings and stuff. And I always thought that was the coolest thing, that there’s someone that knows how to draw cartoons. I didn’t know how to draw quite like him. It was like he was good at what he did. What I was doing was like really very primitive. So I would always be so envious of the way he could draw actual cartoon kind of imagery. So I think that had an influence on me. My mother sort of, I think, saw it as an activity that occupied my time—that kept me away from outside influences, basically. So I think for her it was good that I had concentrated on something other than hanging out on the streets or anything along those lines, that I could occupy my time by getting a sheet of paper and just spending the whole day drawing. JR: What about friends or brothers and sisters? G: Well, my father populated other places, and I have brothers and sisters who I run into and they say they’re my brother or sister. And I say, "Oh, really?" [laughter] JR: I have cousins like that. G: But I think friends that were in the neighborhood and people that I met when I was going to school always called me an artist, for one thing. It was because I was constantly drawing. So I was always referred to that idea. It’s like being called that already: "You’re an artist." JR: It’s like your [calling]. [laughter] G: "You’re an artist, this is what you do." I didn’t have any ideas as to, "Well, how does an artist make a living?" Or, "How does an artist become an artist? Or become someone that people see their work?" I had no notion of that. I knew that when people saw what I did, [they—Ed.] would not necessarily say, "Oh, that’s good." They would always say, "Oh, that’s interesting." [laughs] So I think even that kind of a response was, I think, calling attention to myself, basically, by showing, "This is what I could do." And I thought I could do it better than the person next to me or the other kid. The other kids had, I guess, a more . like, they would do a circle that was green and then the red dots and that was the tree. And two sticks for a trunk, and that was brown. And for me it was always so simple, and I would look at that and say, "Well, he’s doing it, he’s doing it, she’s doing it." It’s like, "I don’t want mine to be like that. So maybe I’ll do a triangle tree or maybe I’ll do an imaginary tree." And I think it was early becoming aware that I had an imagination. I think that was an important thing, that I was able to play with things. Early on I was an avid reader, and I think that’s one of the saving graces for me as a kid as well. Books. I could hardly wait when I was learning how to read the Dick and Jane books. "I can hardly wait till I grasp this and I can go into a library and I can read the big books that the adults carry with them." They could go out and they would check out a stack of thick books and it had all these words in it. And I’m struggling to learn how to read these Dick and Jane books. I can hardly wait till I’m able to grasp the larger subjects.