Peter Voulkos, Can I Have Your Autograph?
Superheroes of L.A. art and the young artists who idolize them
Voulkos trained as a traditional potter in the early 1950s, but over time his pots and bowls become more and more amorphous and impractical.
"It's hard working with clay because you just don't know how it's going to turn out," Morris explains. "Voulkos embraced that. It's funny, when I first saw the photograph of Little Big Horn" — a 1959 stoneware vessel — "it looked like it could have been one of the bronze sculptures he started making later."
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The Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1657
Category: Art Galleries
Region: West L.A.
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Watts Towers Art Center
1727 E. 107th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90002
Category: Community Venues
Region: USC to South L.A.
California African American Museum
600 State Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90037
Category: Museums
Region: USC to South L.A.
American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA)
399 N. Garey Ave.
Pomona, CA 91767
Category: Art Galleries
Region: Pomona and beyond
Museum of Contemporary Art (The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA)
152 N. Central Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Category: Museums
Region: Downtown
Pacific Asia Museum
46 N. Los Robles Ave.
Pasadena, CA 91101
Category: Museums
Region: Pasadena and vicinity
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It can be hard to identify the sculptor's materials because he switched things up often, trying different kinds of kilns or dramatically shifting the scale of his objects. This constant flux resonates with Morris, whose own work has an organic unsteadiness to it, as if the confluence of shapes, textures and colors on her canvases was a happy accident. "The older you get, the more you know about what you're doing. But Voulkos was always trying to undo himself. His aesthetic is rough, never perfect. My own aesthetic dovetails with his slop."
Peter Voulkos' Little Big Horn (1959) is featured in "Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950–1970," at the Getty Museum, Oct. 1-Jan. 5. His work also will appear at the American Museum of Ceramic Art and other museums.
Northwest Rock Buddies
Driving between Malibu Canyon and his studio recently, Noah Davis noticed how intensely the rock formations along the road resembled the textured landscapes by artist Llyn Foulkes. "He paints L.A. the way it actually feels," says Davis, also a painter, and it's Foulkes' work that compelled Davis to begin a series of large-scale rock paintings he has yet to exhibit.
Davis grew up in 1980s Seattle, just a few hours north of Yakima, where Foulkes grew up in the 1930s and '40s. "I understand where he comes from, and maybe that's why I feel he captures the specific feel of geography so well," says the young painter. "He's one of those artists who are a little less predictable, but it looks like he's finally getting his due." In addition to Foulkes' dense, mixed-media landscapes, Davis admires the way he embeds actual wooden frames into his paintings, so that his subjects, like the disfigured man at the center of Money in the Bank, are boxed in by an extra set of walls. "At first, his portraiture seems like it's straight on, but it never really is. He makes it seem like there's still room to do something original."
Llyn Foulkes' Money in the Bank (1977) is featured in "Under the Big Black Sun: California Art, 1974–1981," at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, Oct. 2-Jan. 13. His work also will appear in exhibitions at the L.A. Municipal Gallery, Pacific Asia Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art and other museums.
Feminist Performance Art, Now Inspired by Facebook
Dawn Kasper on Womanhouse
"It's so difficult doing things alone," says Dawn Kasper, a performance artist who co-directs the Chinatown alternative-space Human Resources L.A. Her collaborative performances spurred her interest in Womanhouse, a live-in, monthlong performance project spearheaded by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in 1972. Chicago, Schapiro and their students transformed an abandoned Hollywood mansion into a labyrinthine artwork that explored gender politics, individuality and friendship and reclaimed domestic space. "It was all women, they fixed up the house themselves, and a lot of them had not even used power tools before," Kasper says.
For PST, Kasper is creating a virtual Womanhouse, collaborating with artist/curator/writer Carole Ann Klonarides to build a social network that will be a forum for artists' conversations, updating gender-identity issues for 2011. "What does it mean that the computer has become a kind of home?" she asks. Human Resources will host some events, but most interaction will occur online.
As with the original Womanhouse, heady ideas will be tossed around, but community is ultimately the point. "There were lots of meetings, deliberation and talk about what the work would become," Kasper says of the original. "I found that process to be very inspiring."
Womanhouse (1972) is featured in "Greetings From L.A.: Artists and Publics, 1945–1980," at the Getty Research Institute, Oct. 1-Jan. 5. Performances for Kasper's virtual Womanhouse will occur during the PST Performance and Public Art Festival, Jan. 19-29.
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