Archive L.A. Stories: Engaging the City

Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles | Harry Adams Nancy Buchanan | Collage Ensemble | Mallory Cremin Don Normark | Public Works Administration | May Sun Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst and Rubén Ortiz Torres L.A. Stories: Engaging the City Home Page | Archive - Fall 1998 Home

Getting to Know Los Angeles

In the spring of 1997, I visited photographer Don Normark’s exhibition "Chavez Ravine" at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles. Normark’s images of a "lost" neighborhood, recalling the nearly forgotten history of the site upon which Dodger Stadium now stands, marked the beginning of the exploration that has resulted in this exhibition.

What intrigued me most about Normark's photographs was a sense of incomplete erasure--the notion that Los Angeles is a place of hidden histories and cultures that have, over time, been overlaid by other, newer ones. I started thinking about those "forgotten," virtually invisible, aspects of the city's culture, shadowy remnants that exist behind the stereotypical images of Los Angeles as a utopian, Hollywood-enhanced land of dreams; and its opposite: Los Angeles as a dystopian, nightmarish "Hell-Town." I began rethinking the myths, stereotypes, and general assumptions I had about L.A.

As Norman Klein points out in The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory,"...we must realize that the myths, whether of tinsel town, of the sunny village, or of the downtown Babylon, have never represented the city accurately. They have always systematically ignored the life of the communities in the city; as if the smaller stores, fragile rituals, mix of classes together in a neighborhood could not exist in our imagination when we think of Los Angeles." This exhibition addresses some of these issues. Who represents Los Angeles? Whose L.A. is it? Who tells the city’s stories? Whose voices dominate our consciousness? I wanted to go beyond the "official" stories--those normally told by voices of authority in the media, schools, and cultural institutions--to present personal alternatives, populist histories of everyday life, and to look at the life of "communities in the city."

At the start of my research, I drove around the city (driving is the primary method of knowing Los Angeles) and re-read books about it: fiction--Carolyn See’s Golden Days; Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays; Sandra Tsing-Loh’s If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now--and non-fiction--Mike Davis' City of Quartz, compilations by Michael Dear and Edward Soja, as well as Norman Klein’s book. Reading these sources made me realize how complex and endlessly fascinating this city is and further fueled my exploration. I began to focus on a visual portrait of Los Angeles, but, more than beautiful or haunting images, I wanted to see how and why artists have dealt with it, to experience their process of engaging with the city and its inhabitants, and to understand how that echoed or contrasted my own experiences.

This effort--to get to know the city and its cultures--is at the heart of the exhibition, which is, as a result, highly personal, reflecting my point of view as much as it does those of the artists. As I conducted my research, made phone calls, and visited artists’ studios, my own vision emerged. I sought others who shared my desire to savor the many facets of Los Angeles overlooked by the mainstream. In addition to seeking artists who had lived and worked in Los Angeles for some time and whose art demonstrated a commitment to its culture, history and life, I became particularly interested in those artists and projects that were deeply and personally engaged with the city's inhabitants. All of the artists presented here have come to know Los Angeles in its complexity and diversity; many also participate actively in raising awareness about the city's pressing social issues. These artists work toward goals of transforming how we perceive Los Angeles and its inhabitants, envisioning new stories that subvert the paradigm of official historical discourse, and presenting alternative models for life in the city. "L.A. Stories" is a selective collection of images and histories--not, by any means, the only ones, just those that resonate with me.

The artists in the exhibition employ a variety of strategies in exploring Los Angeles. Harry Adams and Don Normark take a relatively traditional, documentary approach, photographing neighborhoods and communities frequently overlooked or ignored. Others, like Kim Abeles, Nancy Buchanan, Collage Ensemble, Mallory Cremin, and May Sun, present their impressions and stories in a conceptual and intimate manner. Still others deal with L.A. in a hands-on fashion, working directly with specific downtown communities; Public Works Administration, Collage Ensemble, and the collaborative work by Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst, and Rubén Ortiz Torres represent this approach. In the exhibition, the artists are grouped into two loose categories: those who examine L.A. in a broader geographic sense, who tell stories, both personal and public, that cover a range of neighborhoods (Kim Abeles, Nancy Buchanan, Mallory Cremin, and May Sun); and projects by artists focusing on a specific community or geographic neighborhood (Harry Adams, Collage Ensemble, Don Normark, Public Works Administration, and the collaborative work by Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst, and Rubén Ortiz Torres).

Photographer Mallory Cremin's work echoes my own process of preparing for this exhibition. After moving to a warehouse space in the heart of downtown, she decided to question the mostly negative stories she had heard about the city. Her project, entitled "My L.A. Neighborhood," documents her efforts to learn about and connect with her new neighborhood and its residents. Placed on an inviting couch, hand-made pillows with photo-transfer images beg to be picked up and read, each image corresponding to a specific location on the map quilt. Combining the domestic with the public, Cremin locates us geographically and invites us to share very personal stories about her downtown community.

Nancy Buchanan created the interactive CD-ROM Developing: The Idea of Home out of a similar desire to explore the city she calls home. Buchanan examines the politics of space. Using different ways of conceptualizing both public and private spaces, she suggests new definitions of "home." Buchanan considers "home" the core from which the issues of neighborhood, economics, safety, and environment radiate. Her CD presents interviews, video clips, photographs, and text that examine the role of social services, environmental concerns, development policies, and other historical issues that have shaped Los Angeles. Through a variety of voices and stories, she presents innovative ways in which local residents have addressed housing and development problems.

Kim Abeles explores yet another way of understanding L.A.'s culture and history. In the large-scale installation "Legend for a Mapping (Los Angeles Architecture)," Abeles creates a "portrait" of the city. Focusing on key buildings and their architects, patrons, and clients, she aims to recover an alternative history; this is a personal exploration that reflects her long-standing interest in Los Angeles. Abeles has described her earlier mixed-media assemblages as "worlds constructed from lost parts: researched, unearthed, and fabricated." In this installation, she combines a welded steel cityscape, historical photographs of architects, drawings, written texts, and found and fabricated objects. The result is a multi-layered story of L.A.'s past and present.

As noted above, photographer Don Normark relates an historical story about a "lost" neighborhood. In 1948, while trying to find a vantage point from which to document downtown L.A., Normark accidentally discovered the "hidden" village of La Loma in Chavez Ravine. Several years later, all of the primarily low-income Mexican immigrant residents had been evicted. Initial plans for low-cost housing had been dropped, victims of development interests and local McCarthyism’s conservative campaign that public housing was a "communist plot," plans for Dodger Stadium had been approved. By focusing intimately on a specific community, Normark's eloquent photographs capture this village and its setting before they were erased. Years after photographing the area, the artist met Father Juan Santillan, priest of Our Lady of Help Church, who led him to "Los Desterrados," a group of former Chavez Ravine residents. Now engaged in interviewing them, Normark is recording new voices and stories about life in La Loma.

In contrast to Normark's focus on a specific neighborhood, Harry Adams spent the years 1955 to 1985 chronicling the life of South Los Angeles. A professional photographer involved in documenting the African-American communities of L.A., the late Adams worked for churches, social organizations, and private clients, as well as for the Los Angeles Sentinel and the California Eagle. Adams eloquently recorded decisive moments in the history of Black Los Angeles; his scenes of voter registration, civil rights protests, and strikes document the political activism of the Black community. It is to Adams' credit that his images of everyday life are equally eloquent.

The collective Public Works Administration, or PWA, works directly with one community in East L.A. to protest evictions planned to make way for new development. These artists and activists (Elizabeth Blaney, Karina Combs, Dont Rhine, Valerie Tevere, Leonardo Vilchis and Cecilia Wendt) are collaborating with residents and the Union de Vecinos de Pico Aliso to address the impact of urban planning decisions on the Pico Aliso public housing project. Created specifically for this exhibition, their multi-media installation contrasts the role of development in the history of the L.A. Housing Authority with the current struggle of public housing residents to save their community from demolition. Combining original video, archival footage, audio collage, and photography, PWA offers a different perspective on affordable housing in Los Angeles.

Like PWA, Collage Ensemble Inc. (Brandy Maya Healy, Steven M. Irvin, Alessandra Moctezuma, and Alan Nakagawa) uses a range of media, including video, audio, installation, and performance, to address the urban experience in Los Angeles. Founded in 1984, Collage Ensemble creates art works that explore the relationship of the artists' ethnic and personal histories to broader issues of spirituality, class segregation, discrimination, and assimilation. In 1996, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency commissioned Collage to create a work about the produce district. The resulting video consists of interviews with produce industry workers, footage of regional orchards, and information about the district's history. Newly created for this exhibition, the installation "Lo Cal Frozen Blues" further calls attention to this complex community and its history, exploring its role as a social common denominator in the city.

Stephen Callis, Leslie Ernst, and Rubén Ortiz Torres draw attention to another downtown community in their collaborative project "Murder in My Suite: Bienvenidos al Hotel California." Using the comic format of a Mexican fotonovella, the three photographers worked together to address issues facing the hotel workers' unions--human rights abuses, class struggles, and a living wage. In 1993, workers at the New Otani Hotel in Little Tokyo organized a union to protest deteriorating working conditions. By presenting these issues within the context of pop culture, Callis, Ernst, and Ortiz Torres slyly inject social consciousness into our everyday lives. Linking a humorous pop format with serious local issues, the story of a veteran housekeeper who is unjustly accused in the workplace and who struggles to clear her name, resonates on both personal and political levels.

Combining assemblage and photography, May Sun's photo light-boxes present her visions and memory fragments of Los Angeles after the 1992 civil rebellion. Recording concrete events of everyday life, she enriches them by placing individual I Ching (from the ancient Chinese Book of Changes) hexagrams beneath each image. Even though all of the images were taken in Los Angeles, they have a universal quality, and their enigmatic nature enhances their power. Through these somewhat abstract references, Sun addresses the transitory character of time and the nature of history, and invites multi-layered readings of a place and the events that have shaped it. In the triptych "L.A. River," for example, the artist combines three images associated with the river: a scene of the river channel, a view of a now-extinct local fish, and graffiti along the river's concrete edge. While these impressions all refer to the same location, their conflation, along with the resonances suggested by the I Ching, evokes the merging of the conscious and unconscious, capturing random impressions and memories that, together, reflect Sun's view of Los Angeles.

For me, Los Angeles is also a blurring of impressions, multi-layered memories, and fragments of stories and ideas. I selected these artists because of the range of their voices, the diversity of their stories, and the models for the future presented through their work. By including artists who explore their personal responses to the city and others who work actively in particular communities, I wanted to show the enormous range of cultures, histories, and ways of living that Los Angeles offers. The stories these artists tell provide a framework within which to revisit, reexamine, and reconstruct traditional understandings of our past. Whether their approaches are subtle and poetic or direct and engaging, these artists all link innovative formal explorations with new media to push the boundaries of what art can be, thereby expanding our individual and collective awareness. Together, they provide a key to understanding the cultural, political, and social landscapes of Los Angeles, of which we are all a part.