America's Second Art City: Sun, Pop Culture, and Inequality: Advisor: C

Priest, Katherine M. 2018 Art History Thesis Title: America's Second Art City: Sun, Pop Culture, and Inequality: Advisor: C. Ondine Chavoya Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Release: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No America’s Second Art City: Sun, Pop Culture, and Inequality by Katherine M. Priest Professor C. Ondine Chavoya, Advisor A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Art History WILLIAMS COLLEGE Williamstown, Massachusetts April 20, 2018 1 Introduction: Two Archetypes within America’s “Second Art City” The April 1963 issue of Art in America named Los Angeles “America’s Second Art City.”1 Although Manhattan would maintain its grip on the national art scene throughout the 1960s and beyond, Los Angeles was, for the first time, receiving international recognition as a center of art and culture. In retrospect, the rise of the Los Angeles art scene is far from surprising. The U.S. economy was booming after World War II, meaning middle-class citizens could expect to achieve a higher standard of living than ever before. As a result, U.S. society became increasingly consumer-driven.2 This public was enticed by the media-driven perception of Los Angeles as a city of leisure, sun, and glamour. The artists who embodied and even propagated this conception of Los Angeles through their public personas, works, and lifestyles attained celebrity status, and put the city’s art scene on the map. Consequently, their works, largely grounded within the boundaries of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, established the basis for the foundational narrative of the city’s artistic culture. As successful as this narrative has been in popularizing the Los Angeles art scene, it is far from complete. Moreover, it excludes the countless artists and contributions that were marginalized from the mainstream but were nonetheless significant in shaping the artistic character of the city. The gallery row on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood marked the commercial center of the art scene in the 1960s. On the strip, the artists associated with the Ferus Gallery were the most successful in capitalizing on the popular stereotypes of life and art in Southern California.3 Each of the artists in the “Ferus Gang” played with the popular images of Los Angeles, but none were able to do so to the extent of John Altoon. Altoon’s artistic career spanned the 1950s and 60s, when his drawings and paintings generated widespread critical and commercial interest. Given his success and legendary status, Altoon stands as an archetype of the popular conception of the late twentieth-century Los Angeles art scene. His role is substantiated by the manner in which he was regarded by other leading figures, such as Ferus Gallery co-owner Irving Blum, who recounted: “If 2 the gallery was closest in spirit to a single person, that person was John Altoon—dearly loved, defiant, romantic, highly ambitious—and slightly mad.”4 Accounts such as Blum’s make clear that Altoon had a defining role in shaping the popular conception of the Ferus Gallery, but also more broadly the post-World II art scene in Los Angeles. However, accepting these narratives about the primary influences on the Los Angeles art scene would neglect the various civil rights movements that materialized across the country in the late twentieth century, such as the Black Rights Movement and the Chicano Movement5, and their effects on the artistic production and visual culture of Los Angeles. Within these broader sociopolitical movements, minority artists, such as Carlos Almaraz, worked to assert their identities and claim their rights within the context of the city. Almaraz, like many other Chicanx artists in the 1970s and 1980s, produced politically charged works that called for the acknowledgment and rights of Chicanx citizens. In fact, throughout the 1970s, Almaraz’s critics and peers credited him with popularizing the Chicano art movement, citing his overtly political murals and association with the United Farm Worker’s causa.6 Thus, as John Altoon stands as an archetype of the dominant, popular narrative of the late twentieth-century Los Angeles art scene, Almaraz is generally recognized as representative of the minority artists whose contributions to the city’s visual culture are repeatedly overlooked.7 Given Carlos Almaraz and John Altoon’s positions as archetypes for the alternative, yet coexisting streams of artistic production in post-World War II Los Angeles, an exploration of the disparities between their careers holds the potential to elucidate the forces that shaped both the public image of the city as a mecca of art and popular culture and the legacies of the artists working within it. While Carlos Almaraz and John Altoon followed similar paths in their artistic careers, the public and critical reception of their works are at odds. As mentioned, numerous critics credited Almaraz with popularizing the Chicano art movement in the 1970s. Despite his active involvement 3 in the movement early in his career, a number of these same figures publicly questioned the extent of his personal commitment by the turn of the decade. Their criticism was based primarily on his withdrawal from an artists group, his focus on studio-based art making, and the increasingly personal nature of the works he produced after 1980.8 The critique that Almaraz faced as a result of his stylistic shift stands in stark contrast to the reception of John Altoon, who critics and art scholars cite as one of the most prominent bohemian and countercultural figures in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. Like Almaraz, Altoon undertook a major stylistic shift in the second decade of his career. Altoon’s works from the early 1950s closely resembled those of other popular artists, who were working within the parameters of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. These early paintings are remarkably tame compared to the daring works he produced after 1960, when he moved toward an independent style characterized by biomorphic and psychosexual forms. Nonetheless, the personal works Altoon produced after 1960, and his coinciding association with other artists who worked at the Ferus Gallery served as the foundation for his reputation as an innovator and a “bad boy.”9 The contradictory responses toward these artists’ respective stylistic changes beg the question: what factors influenced the reception and ensuing legacies of California artists in the late twentieth century? This paper explores the contexts in which Almaraz and Altoon lived and worked, subsequently exposing the prominent role cultural identity, participation in artists groups, and the commercial art scene had in shaping their legacies. What’s more, the impact of these factors is corroborated by the varied reception and successes of other contemporary Los Angeles artists. Such inconsistencies highlight a system of inequality regarding the expectations and responses that late twentieth-century California artists faced, which was largely dependent on demographics, background, and identity, rather than skill alone. Carlos Almaraz: Life and Career 4 Carlos Almaraz was born in Mexico City on October 5, 1941. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Chicago, where his father worked a number of temporary jobs. In Chicago, Almaraz was exposed to a deeply multicultural environment, which he would find to be a blatant contrast to the almost exclusively Mexican population of East Los Angeles, where his family permanently settled in 1950. This contrast would continue to surface throughout his life and artistic production.10 At Garfield High School,11 he discovered that art could be used as a creative pursuit to engage with the world around him. The potential for art to be used in a meaningful way prompted him to continue his studies, first at Cal State University, Los Angeles and later at Otis College of Art and Design, where he earned a Masters in Fine Arts in 1974. Between degrees, Almaraz moved to New York City, where he lived and worked as an artist for five years before returning to Los Angeles in 1970. Upon his return to the West Coast, Almaraz became active in the Chicano movement, feeling that he needed to become more engaged with social issues. In particular, he cited his personal interest in the struggle for political and social equality of Chicanx and Latinx peoples living in America.12 In 1973, he co-founded Los Four, a Los Angeles-based art collective that eventually consisted of five Chicanx artists: Carlos Almaraz, Judithe Hernández, Gilbert Luján, Beto de la Rocha, and Frank Romero. The artists were unified in their desire to bring Chicanx street art into the mainstream Los Angeles consciousness, primarily through public mural projects. Their murals were collaborative in design and implementation; however, each artist provided their own ideas and artistic style. Almaraz’s contributions to group projects were the most overtly political in idea and form. In addition to his politicized presence in Los Four’s collaborative projects, Almaraz created murals, banners, and other works for the farmworkers’ causa, led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. Throughout this period, he staunchly rejected private art,13 choosing instead to share his work and beliefs with a broader audience. Almaraz’s condemnation of private art is most explicit in 5 his 1976 manifesto, “The Artist as a Revolutionary,” in which he discusses the stifling control of private collectors and institutions over artistic production: “Since the artist can only preserve his own image through them, he must support them: the gallery, the collector, the museum and the economical and political system that exist. He remains at the mercy of this system to tell him, the artist, what he should paint and shouldn’t paint.”14 Objectively, this early rejection of commercial art stands as a contradiction to his focus on personal art and studio-based practice later in his career.

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