Author: Natania Reed
The Getty Center-sponsored Pacific Standard Time initiative, a collaboration between more than 60 art institutions across Southern California, celebrates the growth of Los Angeles’ art scene and its establishment as a center of artistic innovation between 1945 and 1980.
“Now Dig This!: Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980,” chronicles the expansion of African American art in the United States during the tumultuous era of the civil rights movement. The exhibit, which includes a variety of artistic mediums from sculpture to short films, is on display at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, Los Angeles. “Now Dig This!” opened its doors on Oct. 2 and will run until Jan. 8, 2012.
The restructuring of African American identity in the United States through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements propelled a previously unknown group of artists into an important and widely respected art phenomenon. In Los Angeles, African American artists like Charles White, Noah Purifoy and Betye Saar formed a tight-knit artistic community. In a push for national recognition, they initially found themselves limited to art exhibits in somewhat unorthodox spaces, like an artist’s house or a local bar, but eventually prominent art galleries and museums began displaying their work.
“[The artists’] influence goes beyond their immediate creative circles and their legacy is something we are only now beginning to fully understand,” writes the curator Kellie Jones in a formal introduction to the exhibit. An appropriate sentiment, as collections from these artists have come out of the woodwork and are now being housed at the nationally renowned Hammer Museum.
The exhibit is rife with political commentary and reflections upon social injustices and racial tension. Charles White’s “Love Letter #1” (1971) consists of a lithograph image of Angela Davis, political activist and Black Panther member, accompanied by a letter addressed to the government in response to her arrest. Other works in the collection employ ubiquitous and seemingly benign brand names and pop culture references to examine racial tensions. Joe Overstreet’s “The New Jemima, 1964″ (1970), for example, addresses racial stereotypes by turning the lovable icon of Aunt Jemima into an empowered figure, wielding a machine gun that produces pancakes instead of bullets.
Many art pieces in the exhibition allude to specific events of that era. Charles White’s “Birmingham Totem” (1964), an ink and charcoal piece, shows a young African American boy shrouded in a large blanket, searching through what appears to be debris. This image captures the emotion just after the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, an attack which killed four young girls and helped further catalyze support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The “Now Dig This!” exhibit repeatedly pays homage to the 1965 Watts Riots. That year in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles, mounting racial tensions eventually erupted in a large-scale civil disturbance, which resulted in more than 30 deaths and almost 3,500 arrests. John T. Riddle created his sculpture “Ghetto Merchant” (1966) with the remnants of a cash register that the artist discovered in a burned-out storefront after the Watts rebellion was subdued. Sculptor Noah Purifoy also took rubble from the neighborhoods damaged during the Watts Riots and used the remains to create a series of art projects called the “66 Signs Neon.” One piece is aptly titled “Watts Uprising Remains” (1965-1966) and consists of objects found specifically in Charcoal Alley, a street razed during the riots.
For those interested in art and race issues during the mid to late-20th century, “Now Dig This!” serves as both a lesson of black history in the United States and as an illustration of the relationship between art and social justice.
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