A giant bulb atop the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood. A letter denying a Mexican citizen a visa plastered across the facade of the Geffen Contemporary. The words “leave the land alone” scrawled by plane across the sky.
There’s been a striking upswing in public art in Los Angeles in recent years, but it may not look like what you’ve come to expect from the murals that have long predominated. Indeed, if you happened upon any of these recent projects, you may have had little idea that you were looking at artwork at all.
The shift reflects the emergence of a relatively new institutional player: the independent public art nonprofit. Unencumbered by the obligations of a city agency, the commercial demands of a gallery or the institutional identity of a museum, these organizations have managed to mount projects — mostly temporary — of an exceedingly varied nature, including billboards, sculpture and guerrilla performances.
West of Rome, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), LAXART, Outpost for Contemporary Art and the Watts House Project — all of which emerged or received their nonprofit status within the last five years — are dedicated in large part to the production of art in public spaces.
These are small, administratively nimble institutions, funded, for the most part, through grants and individual contributions. (Both West of Rome and LAND have their first major benefits scheduled for July.)
The difficulties plaguing public art in Los Angeles are myriad in even the best of circumstances. A geographically vast region encompassing multiple municipalities and enormous cultural diversity, with little to no pedestrian presence and a visual sphere dominated by commercial messaging, the city is a complicated slate, one that upends traditional notions of what “public” even means.
Bureaucratic conditions are no more favorable. Muralists have been hamstrung for years by a pending moratorium on new billboards, waiting for city attorneys to get around to crafting a legal distinction between art and advertising. L.A. ranks well below other major U.S. cities in arts spending.
The recession has done as much to help as to challenge the nonprofits’ emergence. It freed up real estate and billboard space, making it much easier for the nonprofit MAK Center, for instance, to mount a 21-billboard “exhibition” across the city earlier this year. It has also tempered the hegemony of the gallery system, loosening its hold on both the time and, with luck, the imagination of its artists.
“I really feel that the professional structures of the art world are collapsing on themselves,” says West of Rome founder Emi Fontana. “They were very fragile, coming together with the last economic bubble, and now the money is gone — boom, collapsed.”
Fontana ran a commercial gallery for 20 years in Milan, Italy, before coming to Los Angeles but grew frustrated with what she describes as “the tyranny of the space, the constriction.”
She launched West of Rome in 2005 with a site-specific installation, and she’s become best known since for large-scale projects by big-name artists: a video installation by T. Kelly Mason and Diana Thater in a former bridal shop in Westwood; billboards by Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger; and a viral poster and sticker campaign by Jenny Holzer.
Outpost founder Julie Deamer came from a gallery background as well, in San Francisco. She launched Outpost in 2004 as an itinerant endeavor, intending to open an exhibition space when she’d raised a sufficient operating budget. Over time, however, she came to feel that she was better off without one.
“I realized that I had grown tired of the exhibition format,” she says. “There’s something sort of static about it, getting people to come in and always working within the same sort of space.”
Outpost does operate a space now, Outpost HQ in Highland Park, but it’s a meeting place rather than a gallery, with room for events and a library that’s open to the public.
LAXART, the most established and prolific of the nonprofits, has paired public and exhibition programming since its emergence five years ago — it mounts 12 shows a year in its La Cienega gallery — but has greatly expanded its public activities in response to the number of proposals from artists.
In all of these discussions, the city itself emerges as a pivotal factor: a sprawling, difficult, ever-changing entity that allows for — indeed, demands — a nontraditional approach.
LAND founder Shamim Momin spent 12 years at the Whitney Museum in New York before moving to L.A. When she and LAND co-founder Christine Y. Kim (now at LACMA) began to envision an organization flexible enough to reflect these shifts, “the only place that really made sense was L.A. Partly because of the artists, but also because of the structure of the city, the openness of the possibilities here.”
What’s at stake in all of these endeavors is not only an increase in public projects but also a reevaluation of what public art can be. Nothing embodies this state
of flux more than the Watts House Project. Billing itself as “a collaborative artwork in the shape of a neighborhood development,” it pairs artists and architects with residents along a single city block in Watts, adjacent to the Towers. They’ve planted vegetables, repaired roofs, laid driveways, painted a mural across one of the houses, hosted readings and put numerous residents to work. In the future they hope to open a cafe.
“We’re constantly trying to push that the houses are not the end result,” says Edgar Arceneaux, the project’s director and a respected artist in his own right.
In moving beyond the public art model mired in bureaucracy, Watts House Project and the others are poised to help L.A. live up to its cultural potential by creating a channel between the city’s artists and its public realm.
–Holly Meyers
9:19 AM PT, July 6, 2010
