The untold history of the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,” this hefty tome, L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, countered with an alternate view of the city’s art, showing it as tough, profound, and not the least bit dated. This compelling book about the city’s Black Arts Movement fills an astounding gap. The nine separate but overlapping essays and excerpts from oral histories —by artists, art historians, curators, and moonlighting artists like Dale and Alonzo Davis (who founded the multicultural Brockman Gallery in 1967) and Greg Pitts (a.k.a. Angaza Het-Heru), who offers a linguistic taste of the 1960s and ’70s—plus wonderful photographic documentation, add up to a revision of a time and place we thought we knew. Edited by Connie Rogers Tilton and Lindsay Charlwood, the texts reveal stunning evidence of unknown or forgotten African American artists in Los Angeles at the time, who were doing groundbreaking assemblage work that shifted the course of history, and not only in L.A.
Duchamp and Schwitters had their first U.S. museum retrospectives in L.A., thanks to Walter Hopps; so did Joseph Cornell. Warhol had his first-ever solo there. These shows obviously influenced emerging black artists. As John Outterbridge points out, “We just had a network of spies that were on staff” doing security and installation work. Together, these essays provide a context for David Hammons’s early body prints and “Spade” series (1971-79) as well as for Outterbridge’s “Rag Man” series (1970), Mel Edwards’s “Lynch Fragments,” Betye Saar’s rebel “Jemimas,” and Senga Nengudi’s pantyhose-and-sand sculpture—all strategies for the re-representation of blackness.