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ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

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ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

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Copyright 2022 Lauren Guilford

ALT LA:
Alternative Art Spaces That Shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

by

Lauren Guilford

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART & DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(CURATORIAL PRACTICES & THE PUBLIC SPHERE)

May, 2022

ii
Acknowledgments

Amelia Jones
Karen Moss
Suzanne Lacy
Andrew Campbell
Geena Brown
Karl & Hazel Haendel
Leah Perez
Jessica Bellamy
Leslie Fritz
Carol Paul & Robert Williams
My family & friends

iii
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................ii
List of Figures.........................................................................................................................iv
Abstract...................................................................................................................................v
Introduction.............................................................................................................................1
Defining “Alternative” ...............................................................................................3
Perils & Possibilities....................................................................................................5
Emerging Practices......................................................................................................10
(Re)mapping Postmodern Los Angeles.......................................................................13
Main Questions & Critical Anchors............................................................................15
Case Study 1: Watts Towers Arts Center................................................................................19
Case Study 2 : The Woman’s Building...................................................................................32
Case Study 3 : Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.........................................................46
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................56
Bibliography............................................................................................................................60

iv
List of Figures

Figure 1: David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967.

Figure 2 : Betye Saar outside Watts Towers, date unknown.

Figure 3 : Watts, Los Angeles, August 1965.

Figure 4 : Judson Powell and Noah Purifoy, Barrel and Plow, 66 Signs of Neon exhibition,1966.

Figure 5 : Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window, 1969.

Figure 6 : Senga Nengudi, image from Ceremony for Freeway Fets performance, 1978.

Figure 7 : Detail of Ceremony for Freeway Fets performance, 1978.

Figure 8 : Karen LeCocq, Womanhouse Doily Invitation, 1972.

Figure 9 : Deformity/Perfection Performance Workshop led by Suzanne Lacy, 1976.

Figure 10 : The Waitresses, All City Waitress Marching Band performance, 1979

Figure 11 : Suzanne Lacy, In Mourning and In Rage performance, 1977.

Figure 12 : Asco, Patssi Valdez in Spray Paint LACMA, 1972.

Figure 13 : Harry Gamboa Jr., Roberto Gil de Montes, image from LACE No Movie show, 1978.

Figure 14 : Asco, First Supper (After A Major Riot), 1974.

v
Abstract

This thesis focuses on the histories of creative practices bridging the rights movements and the
visual arts in Los Angeles between 1964 and 1978. My research will foreground key social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Los Angeles: the Black Arts Movement, the feminist
movement, and the Chicano/a Movement. Situated within these historical movements, I will
present three primary case studies of major alternative spaces founded by members of each of
these rights movement communities: The Watts Towers Arts Center, The Woman’s Building,
and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). The artists and ideas that permeated
alternative spaces in Los Angeles challenge conventional art history attached to the 1960s and
1970s. Alternative sites played a formative role in the development of performance, multimedia,
body-oriented, and socially engaged practices, and were important sites of protest where artists
advocated for the specific needs and demands of communities in Los Angeles. Largely dismissed
by the mainstream art world, Black, female, and/or Chicanx artists during this period established
necessary counter-institutions that reclaimed social and public spaces.

1
Introduction

The urban decay of Los Angeles is not measured on the Richter scale nor on the
scales of blind injustice. The city is a sprawling mass of concrete, asphalt, lawn
chairs, palm trees, television antennas, and segregated neighborhoods that are
defined by obvious streets of gold or graffiti/blood-stained sidewalks. Los
Angeles is the breeder reactor of its own myth. Images of affluence and violent
crime are imprinted into the collective consciousness with each night’s televised
broadcast of the news and reruns of drive-by shootings, celebrity testimonials, or
countless situation maladies. The foundation of this major metropolis is gift
wrapped with ribbons of freeways, on-ramps, and off-ramps that lead to cultural
isolation. The intensity of multiculturalism is fragmentary and momentary,
usually experienced on the fast lanes of the freeway when one can safely gaze at
blurred faces from other cultures, where the interaction is mutually distancing in
effect and fact. Los Angeles is a puzzle of influences where pieces are lost, stolen,
altered, or forged with every measurable social quake.
1

—Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile

Histories of art have tended to distance artworks from politics, the social realm, and
broader cultural discourses, missing the most exciting connections between art and life. This
thesis focuses on the histories of creative practices bridging the rights movements and the arts in
Los Angeles between 1964 and 1978. During this period, experimental and socially minded art
practices flourished and advocated for the specific needs and demands of marginalized
communities in Los Angeles. Largely dismissed by the mainstream art world, Black, female, and
Chicanx artists established necessary counter-institutions that interrogated and reclaimed (or
claimed) social and public spaces. Many alternative organizations oriented themselves around
particular emerging art practices, predominantly performance, multimedia, and socially engaged
art, addressing social, political, and geographic conditions. Mapping the history of alternative art
spaces and practices in Los Angeles exposes the limitations of mainstream art institutions and

1
Harry Gamboa, Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1998): 64.

2
their lack of critical discourse. The artists who built and sustained these alternative sites
fundamentally challenged ideas about art’s place and purpose, uniquely attuned to art’s social
function and capacity for change. These historical alternative sites interrogated fundamental
ideas about where art belongs, what it can do, and who it is for.
The proliferation of alternative spaces in Los Angeles speaks to the tumultuous social and
political dynamics of the 1960s and 1970s. My research will foreground the fundamental social
movements that shaped the 1960s and 1970s: the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement,
and the Chicano Movement. Situated within these historical movements, I will present three
primary case studies: The Watts Towers Arts Center, The Woman’s Building, and Los Angeles
Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), examining their particular goals, ideologies, and practices.
While the three alternative spaces included in this thesis are distinguished by their different
communities and art practices, there is commonality in their experimental and activist ideals.
Examining where these spaces overlap and diverge provokes questions about alternative sites
and their historical contributions and legacies. Still, it is also important to acknowledge their
nuanced differences and the multitude of identities and practices within these spaces—site-
specific, community-driven art is at risk of being essentialized if it can only be discussed in
collective terms.
This research is an initial investigation into a complex subject, one that I hope offers an
alternative history of art in Los Angeles concerning pressing political and social concerns in the
1960s and 1970s, a pivotal moment leading into the burgeoning of the art world across the city.
While this thesis focuses on the founding moments of only three case studies, there are many
other, related, historically significant alternative spaces in Los Angeles that must be
acknowledged: Self-Help Graphics, Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), Beyond

3
Baroque, Astro Arts/ High Performance, Espace DBD, Astro Artz / High Performance, Highland
Art Agents, Idea Workshop, CARP, Some Serious Business (SSB) and Los Angeles Institute of
Contemporary Art (LAICA), among many others. My decision to focus on these three cases, in
particular, was based on their shared determination, experimental spirit, and explicit intention to
create and sustain community.

Defining “Alternative”

The term “alternative art space” resists simple categorization and definition. Generally
speaking, alternative spaces are defined as counter-institutional and experimental spaces linked
to cultural undergrounds. They are often grassroots in their organizational style, artist-run, and
community-oriented. The application of the word “alternative” signifies a system of hierarchy,
which complicates the disruptive agenda of alternative spaces by implicating their
marginalization or subordination. The term “alternative” is used in this thesis to push against the
hierarchical systems that excluded women, Chicanx, Black, and other BIPOC artists. Alternative
spaces fundamentally exist in relation to larger public institutions, a dynamic that seems to be in
a constant state of flux (resisting, conforming, informing, and so on). For example, in 2018, the
Getty Research Institute acquired the LACE archives, which document 40 plus years of
performances, exhibitions, happenings, and publications created at LACE. What was once
categorized as “alternative” is now part of a major cultural institution.
The emergence of new materials, methods, and practices required the emergence of new-
alternative spaces to support them. In addition to their relationship to mainstream institutions,
alternative spaces are also defined by their creative energies and activities. This thesis will

4
address their role as creative incubators for emerging and experimental practices and their
dedication to forming and expanding community. Artists working with new materials and
methods needed alternative spaces to develop and support their ideas and practices typically
devalued by dominant culture. Artist Noah Purifoy emphasizes this challenge:
Art's been crammed down our throats by the elite for all of our lives, for centuries
on end. For what reason, I'm not clear on yet, except that art was so mysterious
that they wanted to set it aside only for the elite. I wanted to tell the world that
this is untrue; that we are blinded by this concept and that therefore no one would
try to analyze the creative process - note the word analyze - the creative process in
terms of its applicability to something else.
2

Mainstream cultural institutions in Los Angeles were not structured to accommodate emerging
practices in the 1960s and 1970s, and did not value (alternative) points of view that were not
white or male—perceiving them as a threat to their canon of white-male artists.
Museums have since shifted and are significantly more diverse in terms of representation
and audience (yet, still exclusionary in many ways). In the early 1960s art museums were still
thought of as austere vaults for the rich to showcase their possessions.
3
The Pasadena Museum of
Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were the only public museums of
modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles in the 1960s—a formational period for a number of
important alternative spaces across the city.
Alternative spaces’ fraught relationship with prevailing institutions is summed up in Lucy
Lippard’s statement that, for artists “the museum remains both the hand that feeds and the citadel
to be stormed.”
4
Lippard presents some of the challenges alternative spaces face in terms of their
capacity to fundraise and publicize, making the point that “display and interpretation are a

2
Richard Cándida Smith, “Learning from Watts Towers: Assemblage and Community-Based Art in California,” in
Oral History (UK), 37 no. 2 (2009), 55.
3
Lucy Lippard, “Biting the Hand” in Alternative Art New York (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002):
91.
4
Lippard, “Biting the Hand”, 79.

5
museum’s strong points. These can be accomplished only with limited resonance in artist-run
alternative spaces, which can mount shows but lack the resources for elaborate catalogs; as a
result, they depend on indifferent mainstream reviewers for publicity and interpretation.”
5
The
case studies addressed in the following research had to generate alternative financial resources
and alternative strategies of communication for their survival, especially for object and
installation art.

Perils & Possibilities

In the mythic version of the United States, California is cast in the role of golden
child. Golden because of the sunset over the Pacific; golden because of the
fortunes at play in Hollywood; golden because of the way the long clear light
lends halos to hills. The golden aspect of the mythic claim is also perpetuated by
the dulcet notes of The Beach Boys; California’s endless skyway, ribbons of
highways, and redwood forests have all been serenaded by the sing-song world of
folk and light rock. The myth renders California child in the global reach of
Disney, ET, and Star Wars, while its decades-long fugue state regarding financial
matters encourages politicians to ignore the gap between its income and its
expenses. Like a child, the state tends to hope its astonishing beauty will persuade
adults to soften their scolding reproach.
6

—Peggy Phelan, Live Art in LA

Situated between the ocean, the mountains, and the desert, Los Angeles is known as a
city of dreams, a city of diversity, a city of (post)industry, a city of freeways, a city of sunshine
and smog, a city of perils and possibilities. Los Angeles is a city that is impossible to define. It
contains a multitude of mythologies, from sunshine to noir—performing, as Mike Davis
describes in City of Quartz (1990), the dualistic role of utopia and dystopia for advanced

5
Lippard, “Biting the Hand,” 100.
6
Peggy Phelan, Live Art in LA: Performance in Southern California, 1970 - 1983 (Florence: Routledge, 2012): 1.

6
capitalism.
7
Popular culture presents a tinsel town fantasy of LA, with swimming pools that
glitter with possibility. In Postmodern Geographies (1989), urban theorist Edward Soja describes
this polarity:
Seemingly paradoxical but functionally interdependent juxtapositions are the
epitomizing features of contemporary Los Angeles. One can find in Los Angeles
not only the high technology industrial complexes of the Silicon Valley and the
erratic sunbelt economy of Houston, but also the far-reaching industrial decline
and bankrupt urban neighborhoods of rust-belt Detroit or Cleveland. There may
be no other comparable urban region which presents so vividly such a composite
assemblage and articulation of urban restructuring processes.
8

Los Angeles exemplifies how development functioned as a tool to colonize and displace
marginalized communities in the name of capitalism.
9
Systems of power are embedded in the
geography and urban fabric of Los Angeles. The Fordist development of major highways and
roads in the 1920s is reflected in Los Angeles’s car culture and in its decentralized and
fragmented morphology. The capitalist urbanization of Los Angeles resulted in one of the most
severe employment divides based on race and class, and some of the worst segregation
(especially in the public LA Unified School District) ever recorded in US history.
10

In City of Quartz (1990), historian Mike Davis describes Los Angeles as more than a
mere city, “On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be
advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth
wash.”
11
Lifestyle images of chic and leisurely Angelenos were popularized by popular culture
and pop art such as David Hockney's A Bigger Splash from 1967, depicting someone diving into
a pool set against a sleek midcentury home secluded from the traffic and noise of the city (Figure

7
Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 2006): 15.
8
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: the Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso,
1989): 193.
9
Judy Baca, “Whose Monument Where?” in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press,
1995): 132.
10
Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 197.
11
Davis, City of Quartz, 13.

7
1). Hockney was visiting Los Angeles from London when he made the painting, which accounts
for the image’s utopic blissed-out feeling. Davis reminds us that “Los Angeles may be planned
or designed in a very fragmentary sense (primarily at the level of its infrastructure) but it is
infinitely envisioned.”
12
Beyond the city’s surging freeways and superficial facades, one will find
an abundance of diverse urban subjects that permeate Los Angeles. This cultural entanglement is
what makes LA a truly unique metropolis. In the 1960s and 1970s, artists envisioned
a different Los Angeles and different cultural spaces that reflected different urban identities (not
white-hetero-male).

Figure 1. David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967.

Between 1940 and the early 1960s, the population of Los Angeles more than doubled.
During this period of rapid growth, artists began to reimagine the city’s expanding urban
identities, communities, cultural histories.

The 1960s marked a significant period of burgeoning
art education and the development of numerous overlapping art communities across Los Angeles.

12
Davis, City of Quartz, 20.

8
The city’s growing population and cultural diversity created a hotbed of creativity, and
alternative spaces were prime channels for new art-making practices, predominantly related to
performance, multimedia, and socially engaged art.
Los Angeles has historically been considered somewhat removed from the self-
proclaimed epicenters of the art world (New York and major cities in Europe). While artists in
Los Angeles were certainly influenced by the ideas that developed out of New York and Europe,
the city had a less tethered relationship to the art world and its markets. Additionally, Lucy
Lippard writes about the emergence of conceptual dematerialized art that blossomed throughout
the 1960s and 1970s, disrupting the financial-power structure of New York as artists traveled and
relied on alternative information networks.
13
I would argue that Los Angeles’s degree of
separation from modern art epicenters and the burgeoning of dematerialized practices allowed
West Coast artists more creative freedom, unrestricted by the presence and weight of the art
establishment. The Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s had fewer institutional and practical
infrastructures than New York, which meant they were more open and fluid.
14
As Karen Moss
describes, “Far from New York City’s critical and commercial hegemony, traditions were not as
ingrained in Los Angeles; however, because of a smaller artistic community in California, artists
had to turn to one another for both audience and space.”
15
The need to form new support systems
was especially true for BIPOC, female, and queer artists who were not recognized by the few
cultural institutions in Los Angeles, which propelled their activism. Artist Lynn Hershman
Leeson acknowledges the important relationship between Los Angeles and the feminist art

13
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997): 8-9.
14
Ken Allan, Lucy Bradnock and Lisa Turvery “For People Who Know The Difference” in Pacific Standard Time:
Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011): 126-128.
15
Karen Moss “Beyond the White Cell” in State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011): 129.

9
movement, stating “there’s no way the feminist movement could have started on the east coast. It
could only have started on the west coast because there was a tradition on the west coast of
inventing yourself, and one could only do that outside the shadow of the European art
tradition.”
16

By the late sixties, there were nearly 300,000 MFA graduates in the US, many of which
were “avant-garde painters, sculptors, and performers who returned as instructors to the schools
that spawned them.”
17
There was significant growth in art education programs in Los Angeles in
the 1960s as universities expanded their fine art and art history departments, stimulated in part by
GI Bill funding.
18
In addition, the National Endowment for the Arts offered Individual Artist
Fellowships. Universities including the California Institute of Art and Design (Cal Arts),
Chouinard Art Institute, and Otis College of Art and Design, Fresno State College, the Art
Center College of Art and Design in Pasadena, University of Southern California, UC Irvine, and
UC Los Angeles were important environments for the development of new art practices.
19
In
1972, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) instituted grants for community-oriented art.
As Karen Moss points out, the NEA’s community-focused grants were possible because of the
lobbying from political activist groups like the Congressional Black Caucus, resulting in “several
new grants, including the workshops category for artists’ organizations that had a strong
commitment to new art forms and placed artists in key policy-making positions.”
20
The ecology
of the Los Angeles art world is informed by a dynamic set of demographics, geographic,
economic, and social factors exclusive to the city’s locale that inherently affects the

16
Phelan, Live LA, 5.
17
Peter Plagens, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945-1970 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999):
158.
18
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999): 128-130.
19
Phelan, Live LA, 69-70.
20
Moss, “Beyond the White Cell” in State of Mind, 147.

10
representation, production, and organization of culture. All of these components come together
to create fertile ground for alternative sites and experimental practices. Institutional alternatives
nurtured the city’s sprawling art communities. Examining the history of alternative spaces from
this period reveals connections among communities and the locale of Los Angeles.

Emerging Practices

The 1960s and 1970s marked a pivotal moment in art, characterized by experimental
approaches to material, media, performance, and audience. Alternative spaces provided
collaborative environments that allowed artists to develop new ideas and methods in
performance art, body-oriented art, multimedia art, and socially engaged art. Examining how the
Watts Towers Arts Center, the Woman’s Building, and LACE contributed to the growth of these
emerging practices will illuminate critical connections and variations. This thesis argues that the
legacies of these spaces have not been properly acknowledged in critical discourse or art history.
Peter Plagens’ book Sunshine Muse (1974) attempts to survey California art from 1945-1970 but
largely excludes women artists and artists of color, missing critical developments in West Coast
art. More recent literature on West Coast art that attempts to present a comprehensive and
diverse picture of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and 1970s is lacks nuance and attention
to the particularities that motivated historically marginalized artists. This thesis foregrounds
some of the artists and histories that have been ignored or misrepresented in academia and is an
initial approach to alternative spaces' complex and situational history. The following research
will reveal how attending to these artists and alternative spaces expands and decenters dominant
art histories and theories.

11
Artists in the 1960s and 1970s became increasingly interested in body-oriented practices
that interrogated the politics of visuality and representation. In Body Art/Performing the
Subject (1998), Amelia Jones describes how the emergence of body-oriented practices furthered
notions of embodiment, “enacting the activist, particularized body of the rights movements—the
intersubjective, performative self of phenomenology—within the structures of art making and
reception.”
21
Many African American artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s began using
the body in strategic ways that resisted fixed definitions of identity. Feminist artists also turned
toward the body as sites to disrupt and subvert representations of women—enacting the personal
as political. Body art was embraced as an activist strategy for many marginalized artists that
sought to challenge representation and the production of meaning and culture.
Developments in performance art in the 1960s and 1970s were closely related to the
socio-political urban landscape in Los Angeles and the emergence of body art practices and
experimental coalitions. Artist-activists embraced collaborative performance as a vehicle for
urban interventions that publicly addressed broad issues like women’s rights or the Vietnam
War. The Los Angeles-based magazine High Performance, founded in 1978, was solely
dedicated to performance art (local and international) and helped develop critical discourse about
performance and west coast art. Most major art publications were headquartered in New York
and Europe, besides ArtForum’s brief period in Los Angeles from 1965 to 1967. High
Performance provided critical context and documentation that would help legitimize
performance art nationally.
22
In Live Art LA (2012), Amelia Jones considers the narrow scope of
mainstream discourse about performance art that overlooks the value of performance connected
to the feminist, Black, and Chicano movements. This thesis is a continuation of Jones’s question:

21
Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 31.
22
Phelan, Live LA, 8.

12
“whose bodies, whose performances, and thus whose memories and whose narratives get written
into history and whose do not.”
23

New developments in material practices and assemblage art emerged in the 1960s when
artists began exploring unconventional and found materials that articulated particular histories
and experiences, such as those of African American artists in Watts. Artist Noah Purifoy
considered assemblage as a conduit for transformation and connection. He argues: “Here ART
becomes something other than—other than as many options as there are people. Art can become
a new thing when and it is virtually and willfully used as a symbol through which someone
becomes better.”
24
Senga Nengudi also activated everyday materials such as nylon pantyhose to
evoke ideas about the exhaustion and resilience of the Black female body. Motivated by the
women’s liberation movement, feminist artists also used conventional “feminine” materials to
challenge narratives about women’s roles in society. For instance, in 1971, artist Faith Wilding
used crochet as a medium in her Womanhouse installation, Womb Room, to explore ideas about
domestic and communal roles, elevating mediums traditionally prescribed to women and labeled
folk or kitsch.
Artists who prioritized the social function of art aligned themselves with like-minded
activist communities in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, developing socially conscious art
practices that addressed issues surrounding identity, race, gender, class, and sexuality. Activist
artists were concerned with the relational and situational aspects of their work. Public
interventions and media campaigns became effective ways to engage with a broad public
audience to call attention to localized issues and voice concrete demands. The explicit political

23
Jones “Lost Bodies,” in Phelan, Live LA, 115.
24
Kellie Jones, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2017): 71.

13
agenda of activist artists required them to operate outside of the mainstream in order to
interrogate institutional systems of power and signification.
Many coalitional groups developed during this period valued process and
experimentation over the isolated production of individual art objects detached from the social.
Coalitions of artists engaged in performance and public intervention to expose the conceptual
and social limitations of the commercial art world and challenge cultural representation,
production, and consumption. Some art coalitions such as Asco were explicitly anti-capitalist and
produced artwork that resisted commodification and commercialization. Alternative spaces
functioned as alternatives to the institutional and commercial spaces that operated under systems
of capitalism that depended on oppression and exploitation and epitomized the core struggles for
most of the artists covered in this thesis.

(Re)mapping Postmodern Los Angeles

Mapping the history of alternative art spaces in Los Angeles presents a different city and
different postmodern subjects that decenter dominant conceptions of postmodern Los Angeles.
As Amelia Jones has outlined in Self/Image (2006), hegemonic notions of postmodern Los
Angeles were perspectival in their construction, abstracting and oppressing (or ignoring) certain
urban subjects (marginalized bodies). She points out that postmodern theorists often projected
their particular (European-white-male) desires and fears onto the city, and Mike Davis as well
points out that Edward Soja and Fredric Jameson’s “postmodern mappings” describe Los
Angeles as a kind of spectacular myth, “a place where everything is possible, nothing is safe and

14
durable enough to believe in, constant synchronicity prevails, and the automatic ingenuity of
capital ceaselessly throws up new forms and spectacles.”
25

Fredric Jameson gazed upon Los Angeles from the Bonaventure Hotel downtown,
struggling to comprehend the city beyond its entangled freeways and prescribed infrastructure:
“Everything imaginable appears to be available in the micro-urb but real places are difficult to
find, its spaces confuse an effective cognitive mapping, its pastiche of superficial reflections
bewilder co-ordination and encourage submission instead.”
26
Jameson’s confusion and obscured
vision was also felt by the architectural historian Rayner Banham in his 1971 book Los Angeles:
The Architecture of Four Ecologies:
The city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently
through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented
life. So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves
Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los
Angeles in the original. But whereas knowledge of Dante’s tongue could serve in
reading other Italian texts, full command of Angeleno dynamics qualifies one
only to read Los Angeles, the uniquely mobile metropolis.
27

Banham implies that the legibility of Los Angeles is dependent on cars and highways. But, while
Banham was busy learning how to read Los Angeles in the original, arguably he bypassed the
“diffuse urban texture” that makes Los Angeles a truly “unique metropolis,” buzzing with
millions of diverse urban subjects. Examining the alternative art spaces and artists outlined in
this thesis requires a re-privileging of different perspectives and bodies that embraces the

25
Davis, Quartz, 84-85.
26
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press,
1991): 243-244.
27
Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009): 5.

15
complexity of urban subjects, lived experiences, and histories in Los Angeles.
28
This alternative-
cultural mapping of Los Angeles aims to, as Jones describes, “de-abstract postmodern theory.”
29

Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” (1984) points out some of the ways in
which postmodern theory operates to separate and confuse. Here, Lorde addresses the distortions
inherent in systematized oppression:
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit
economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an
economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences
between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three
ways: ignore it, and if that’s not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or
destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across
our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been
misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
30

The artists addressed throughout this thesis present opportunities to examine the obscurities that
hinder possibilities for recognition and connection.

Main Questions & Critical Anchors

If space is a social product, and the "organization and meaning of space is a product of
social translation, transformation, and experience," can we consider alternative art communities
as sites of place-making?
31
Henri Lefebvre claims that (social) space is a (social) product as well
as a means of production and control, and hence of domination, of power. Lefebvre continues,

28
This call for de-abstraction and the re-privileging of different perspectives is exemplified in collective-
performance oriented groups such as Asco and Studio Z, with members who performed alternative modes of
embodiment in site-specific public spaces to make themselves known.
29
Amelia Jones, Self/image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge,
2006): 87 – 119.
30
Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Trumansburg,
1984): 115.
31
Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 79-80.

16
"the social and political (state) forces which engendered this space now seek, but fail, to master it
completely."
32
The production of space is a fluid process, not determined by a master narrative
but shaped and infinitely transformed by social, historical, and geographic relations. Edward
Soja considers a kind of critical postmodern geography that attempts to free space from
categorical and historical privileging, what he calls "postmodern geography of consciousness."
He describes Los Angeles as a place where "it all comes together." Alternative art spaces
embody revolutionary spatial practices that challenge overdetermined histories and narratives.
Relating to Soja's postmodern critical geography, cultural theorist Michel De Certeau
subverts the false totalizing scope of a city by navigating the networks of alternative spaces that
underline and punctuate the city. De Certeau describes the operational concept of the "city" as
defined, in part, by a rational organization that operates to "repress all the physical, mental, and
political pollutions that would compromise it."
33
This rationalization and notion of the "modern
concept city" is no longer viable as they fail to consider diverse populations. The alternative
spaces presented in this thesis exemplify De Certeau's ideas about urban spatial practices that
allow for the complexity of nonnormative-nonconforming urban subjects:
On can try another path, one can analyze the microbe-like, singular and plural
practices which an urbanistic system was supposed to administer or suppress, but
which have outlived its decay; one can follow the swarming activity of these
procedures that, far from being regulated or eliminated, by panoptic
administration, have reinforced themselves in a proliferating illegitimacy,
developed and insinuated themselves into the networks of surveillance, and
combined in accord with unreadable but stable tactics to the point of consulting
everyday regulations and surreptitious creativities that are merely concealed by
the frantic mechanisms and discourses of the observational organization.
34

32
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): 26.
33
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 94.
34
De Certeau, Practice, 96.

17
Mapping the alternative networks of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and 1970s, one will
find the Watts Towers Arts Center, the Woman’s Building, and LACE at the cultural nexuses of
the city. I hope this (re)mapping of historical alternative art spaces will lead to the expansion or
re-articulation of postmodern Los Angeles.
Alternative spaces arise out of coalitional energy but are also troubled by inevitable
tensions within groups. Can alternative spaces represent commonality and community while
acknowledging nuances and differences within their communities? Art historian Miwon Kwon
addresses the dangers of essentializing community-based art and the challenges surrounding
“community” as a concept. In One Place After Another (2002), Kwon addresses the “the
impossibility of total consolidation, wholeness, and unity—in an individual, a collective social
body like the “community,” or an institution or discipline”
35
Michelle Moravec and Sondra Hale
take issue with the feminist movement’s unitary notion of community:
The problem was (and still is, to a large extent) the totalizing of the concept of
“community,” as if it were monolithic (or should be), and the cultural hegemony
that held sway. Who had the authority to decide what a community was, to name
the community, to categorize it, and to decide how it should be structured and
who was part of it? Within the context of Los Angeles feminists, the Woman’s
Building itself was often referred to as a “community.” Yet “community” as a
concept was only partially defined, and beyond the idealistic expressions the early
years, was under-theorized.
36

With these challenges and warning signs in mind, this thesis is sensitive to each case study's
fragmented and complex identity and does not intend to provide any definitive or totalizing
representations of community.
37

35
Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another : Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press, 2002): 154.
36
Sondra Hale and Michelle Moravec, “At Home” at the Woman’s Building (But Who Gets a Room of Her Own?)”
in Fromsite Tovision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture (Los Angeles: Otis College, 2011): 166-167.
37
This thesis also considers the ways in which individual artists such as Judy Chicago and Noah Purifoy shaped
their respective groups and how their leadership played an operational role in defining the activities and energies of
alternative spaces. For instance, Chicago’s departure from the Woman’s Building the space struggled with the lack
of leadership, eventually closing in 1991.

18
Suzanne Lacy asks, “can art change consciousness and affect actions? Can artists excite
such persuasive—and enduring—dynamics in public life and local communities?”
38
I argue that
the alternative networks and grassroots organizations of the 1960s and 1970s had a formative
impact on ideas about art’s social responsibility and potential for change. This thesis will also
emphasize how alternative spaces present changing ideas about art audiences. The following
research is my humble response to Harry Gamboa’s call for critical support:
With the artist in exile, how is the work made accessible to the public? Is it
inevitably the artists responsibility to promote his or her own work regardless of
the initial lack of popular support. The support must be generated from among
others who feel an affinity to the artist’s perceptions of self and society. The artist
has access to a loosely knit constituency, a group that is similarly attracted and
appalled by the glitter and gangrene of urban reality.
39

38
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain : New Genre Public Art. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995): 67.
39
Gamboa, Urban Exile, 54.

19
Case Study 1: The Watts Towers Arts Center

(I never had the stroke for ‘mainstream’
it went against my flow)
From the past
the essence
of accumulative
consciousness
the remnants of
lost ceremonies
the loosening and
unwrapping of mystery
the emergence
from shadows
to face the
unknown.
Purification.
(These works are what I leave behind)
40

—Betye Saar, “Ritual”

Art played a crucial role in advancing Black liberation and the goals of the civil rights
movement. Within the larger context of the Black Arts Movement, African American artists in
Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s sought out counterhegemonic sites that could transform the
social and political environment. Black artists formed networks of support that allowed them to
develop their creative practices and address shared struggles. These counter-public spaces were
also important sites of self-actualization that challenged dominant notions of representation. In
South of Pico (2017), art historian Kellie Jones writes about the African American artists and

40
Betye Saar poem titled “Ritual” written in 1977 for the exhibition Rituals and Remembrance at the Tacoma Art
Museum, Washington. “Betye Saar,” Roberts Projects, https://www.robertsprojectsla.com/editorial/betye-saar.

20
communities that shaped Los Angeles. Jones considers how spatial theory relates to the history
of Black Los Angeles:
Spatial theory—in the writings of geographers, philosophers, architects,
historians, and art historians—helps us see migration and segregation not just as
arenas of social and historical movement and juridical challenge but as the
articulation of spatial structure, what Henri Lefebvre has called (social) space.
Through it, we can see and understand how people shape their worlds through
creative force.
41

The spatial theory outlined by Jones supports the idea that alternative organizations were vital
sites of place-making and community building—an idea suggested in the earlier introduction and
presented throughout this thesis.
The evolution of Watts towers tells a complex history of cultural identity in Los Angeles.
The Italian immigrant Simon Rodia designed and constructed the Watts Towers between 1921
and 1954. He constructed the towers entirely by hand with cement, sand, and material scraps
collected from the surrounding neighborhood. As a child, artist Betye Saar recalls her
enchantment with Rodia’s spires; “it triggered my imagination—they were like fairy castles or
something very mysterious. (Figure 2).”
42
Rodia created a new kind of architecture that was
specific to Los Angeles, an architecture that did not abide by modern (Western) historical
ideals.
43
His improvisational process of collaging found materials evokes the assemblage
practices that would stem out of the art center. Rodia’s creative determination is also echoed in
Noah Purifoy's dedication to the Watts community, serving as the Watts Towers Art Center’s
founding director from 1964 to 1966. As art historian Cécile Whiting points out, Watts Towers

41
Jones, Pico, 15.
42
Betye Saar, “Interview of Betye Saar,” by Karen Anne Mason, UCLA Center for Oral History Research (1990):
27.
43
While visiting Los Angeles, the British architecture critic Reyner Banham described Rodia’s towers as “unlike
anything else in the world,” stating that “their presence is testimony to a genuinely original creative spirit.”
See Reyner Banham, Four Ecologies, 111.

21
“acquired a split identity: on the one hand, emblem of the local African American community’s
efforts to heal through a cultural renaissance, and on the other, a symbol of the city’s artistic
achievement in the realm of modern art.”
44

Figure 2. Betye Saar outside Watts Towers, unknown date.

By the mid 1960s, the towers would come to symbolize Black pride and resilience. Artist
and educator Noah Purifoy co-founded the Watts Towers Art Center (WTAC) in 1964, along
with Judson Powell and Sue Welsh, as a site of creative freedom where Black artists could
exhibit their work and develop their practices.
45
With a background in social work and education,
Purifoy was dedicated to serving the Watts neighborhood. He established a range of visual and
performance art classes, including workshops, collaborative community projects, and concerts,
all of which formed a vibrant cultural network that was constantly buzzing with activity. For the
Watts Summer Festival, Purifoy engaged with Chicano art students in the nearby public schools
and collaborated with their teachers to display their artwork in the show. The Watts Towers Art

44
Ćécile Whiting, Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006): 143.
45
Jones, Pico, 75-76.

22
Center was also a place of employment for several artists who would teach classes and lead
workshops, including Senga Nengudi, Suzanne Jackson, Judson Powell, and John Outterbridge.
46

Purifoy's values shaped the art center's focus on building and expanding community—as he has
expressed, "we got to stimulate quite a number of people in our community; thus making us
really community."
47
Purifoy aimed to develop the Watts neighborhood through self-
development and believed that “through the creative endeavor that the self is arrived and
affirmed.”
48

Curator Cecile Fergerson grew up in Watts and has expressed the critical role the art
center played for the Black community in Los Angeles, stating, "the Watts Towers Art Center
had to "act as a cultural institution because of the void left by the majority culture institutions not
to include the contributions of the African American. So these centers also become museum-type
centers because of the eradication of Black contributions."
49
The Watts Towers Art Center was
an important site that provided social access and fostered self and community actualization
through creativity and support. John Outterbridge recalls the impact the Watts Towers Art Center
had on his art practice in the early sixties, stating:
I believe that that period for me is one that I can thank the artists' community for
teaching me and helping me to nurture language, protest attitudes, how to make
comments about what I felt, because before that time I never really talked about
how strong the feeling was inside to make music-and when I say to make music, I
am simply saying to make art. You know, to make art. The dialogue that we
shared with each other opened up a channel for me, because up until that time I
had been one who worked a lot in so many ways without ever making too much
comment about how important that whole process was to me.
50

46
Jones, Pico, 75.
47
Noah Purifoy, “Interview of Noah Purifoy,” by Karen Anne Mason, UCLA Center for Oral History Research
(1990): 222.
48
Jones, Pico, 77.
49
Cecil Fergerson, “Interview of Cecil Fergerson,” UCLA Center for Oral History Research (August 26, 1992).
50
John Outterbridge, “Interview of John Outterbridge,” by Richard Candida Smith, UCLA Center for Oral History
Research (January 22, 1990).

23
Situated within the larger context of the Black Arts Movement, the Watts Towers Arts
Center proved to be an important incubator for Black artists of the 1960s and 1970s such as
David Hammonds, Betye Saar, John Outerbridge, Maren Hassinger, Houston Conwill, Senga
Nengudi, Melvin Edwards, John Riddle, Judson Powell, Noah Purifoy and countless others—
within the visual arts as well as, music, literature, and film. During this period, the practices of
African American artists working in Los Angeles varied conceptually and materially but they
were strongly aligned in terms of their social-political agenda rooted in Black liberation. The
Black Arts Movement ultimately strived to empower Black artists and champion a Black
aesthetic for Black audiences.
The Watts Uprising erupted in August 1965, marking a pivotal social-political moment in
Los Angeles and across the country, and artists responded. Just three blocks from the uprising,
The Watts Towers Arts Center was site of resurgence that understood art as a source of
transformation and inspiration. Jones describes the creative impact of the Watts Uprising:
The rebellion in Watts during August 1965 changed things; changed people’s
expectations and the way they looked at the world; changed artists’ approach to
their craft, and their materials, and led them to question what art might be and do.
The Watts rebellions galvanized people to write about these experiences, sing and
play about them, create objects about them; to take what had happened and turn it
into something else called art.
51

As Jones points out, The Watts Uprising inspired a number of artists to experiment with
unconventional found materials. Artist Senga Nengudi recalls the transformative effect of the
uprising and the different ways in which artists responded:
After the Watts Rebellion in 1965, the tower was one of the ways we were able to
look at life and art differently. Up until then, many artists were academically
trained and used traditional materials. This concept of art is blown away when the
place you live in is being burned to the ground. You have to think of another way.

51
Kellie Jones, “Black West, Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement.
(Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2006): 46.

24
It makes perfect sense that you take what is left and form it into something that
gives you strength and personal power, like a phoenix rising from the ashes.
52

The Watts Uprising resulted in strategic approaches to assemblage that reflected black identities
and histories—traumas and possibilities. Artists like Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge created
sculptural collages with found materials that signified a specific locale (Los Angeles/Watts), and
a specific political moment (1960s). Artist John Outterbridge writes, “I have always felt that
assemblage was a way of life, in that you assemble your own directives. Assemblage, for me,
means more than the manipulation of objects. It has a great deal to do with the piecing together
of possibilities.”
53
The fragmented and layered compositions in assemblage sculpture also
suggest notions of survival and the ceaseless historical violence against Black bodies.
54

Assemblage deals in abstraction, and assemblage created by artists such as Purifoy or
Outterbridge relate to a particular place (Los Angeles / Watts) and a particular experience
(African American). This kind of abstraction offered new possibilities for Black art for Black
audiences—as Historian Daniel Widener has noted, “assemblage art suggests the possibility of a
non-essentialized form of Black creativity whose racial coding might be deciphered by Black
audiences whether or not white artists or audiences sought to replicate, extend, or consume the
end result.”
55

Noah Purifoy was a critical figure in the development of assemblage practices. Working
with found materials from the surrounding Watts neighborhood—often collected from the ashes
of the uprising—Purifoy created sculptural collages composed of found objects that signified the

52
Senga Nengudi, “I Believe Deeply that the Best Kind of Art is Public: An Interview with Senga Nengudi,” Frieze.
September 22, 2018. https://www.frieze.com/article/i-believe-deeply-best-kind-art-public-interview-senga-nengudi.
53
John Outterbridge cited by Kellie Jones in New Thoughts, 91.
54
Jones, Pico, 227.
55
Daniel Widener, Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Durham N.C: Duke University
Press, 2010): 165.

25
spirit of the Watts community and the fragmented experience of Black life in America and
postmodern Los Angeles (Figure 3). The aftermath of the uprising resulted in Purifoy’s pivotal
work from 1966 titled 66 Signs of Neon. Purifoy collaborated with Judson Powell to create the
first six sculptures made from found neon signs and scraps. The project eventually grew into an
installation of sixty-six artworks that were initially made to be shown at the Watts Festival at
Markham Junior High School (Figure 4).
56
The materials used to create 66 Signs “reflected
communities ravaged by a social system that cared little for them.”
57
Six other artists would also
help Purifoy collect material from the rubble of the uprising for the assemblage installation.
Purifoy believed that artists in Watts could communicate through debris, observing that in large
cities like Los Angeles, garbage often ended up in poor communities, “wherever there are poor
people, there are piles of junk.”
58

Figure 3. Watts, Los Angeles, August 1965. Figure 4. Judson Powell and Noah Purifoy, Barrel and
Plow from 66 Signs of Neon exhibition,1966.

56
66 Signs of Neon was also exhibited at the University of Southern California in 1966.
57
Jones, New Thoughts, 48.
58
Noah Purifoy, “Interview of Noah Purifoy,” by Karen Anne Mason, UCLA Center for Oral History Research
(1990): 77.

26
In 1968, Los Angeles curator Walter Hopps arranged the traveling exhibition of 66 Signs
of Neon which started at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art—the first time the work was
exhibited outside of California.
59
Despite gaining international recognition, Purifoy’s historical
and critical contributions to assemblage were, and continue to be, underacknowledged by the
mainstream art world. Also, Purifoy is often mislabeled an “outsider” artist. Peter Plagens claims
that assemblage was the first home-grown modern art in California, crediting artists Wallace
Berman, Bruce Conner, and Edward Keinholz—telling a counter-narrative of white California
assemblage. Plagens references Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers but fails to mention the art center,
Purifoy, or the other, numerous Black assemblage artists of the period. While Purifoy dedicated
his attention to Watts and the advancement of Black art, he was also engaged in the larger critical
art world—he attended the Chouinard Art Institute, and his work was exhibited internationally.
Purifoy was just as critically engaged (if not more so) in comparison to other white artists of his
generation. However, Purifoy was not making art for the Western canon; he was making art for
and about Black people—which undoubtedly accounts for his marginalized position in art
history. For Purify, the Watts neighborhood was the audience that mattered, not that of the
commercial art world. In a conversation about the social and collaborative nature of his practice,
Purifoy claims that “it’s an elitist concept to feel that art is in and of itself art. It is not in and of
itself, because it interrelates with the world at large.”
60

As a child, Betye Saar was enchanted by the otherworldly presence of Rodia’s towers and
inspired by the idea of making art out of nothing. Saar states that “the Watts Towers were where

59
Franklin Sirmans, “Find the Cave, Hold the Torch” in Now Dig This!: Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Los
Angeles: The Hammer Museum, 2011): 63-64.
60
Noah Purifoy, “Interview of Noah Purifoy,” by Karen Anne Mason, UCLA Center for Oral History Research
(1990): 226.

27
I learned how to be an artist.”
61
Like Purifoy and other assemblage artists, Saar found meaning in
everyday materials and honored them as spiritual objects full of personal and political
significations. In 1972, Saar created one of her most iconic works, The Liberation of Aunt
Jemima, which turned a racially charged image into a powerful revolutionary figure. Angela
Davis has said that the Black women's movement started with this powerful assemblage work by
Saar.
62
Saar’s identity as a Black woman informed her practice and set her apart from the men
that dominate the critical discourse of assemblage. Her art was concerned with ideas about
family, domesticity, motherhood, spirituality, and her personal experience as an African
American feminist artist situated in Watts. Saar’s feminist perspective expands assemblage
discourse and challenges expectations of women’s art.
As African American artists experimented with unconventional materials, they also
began to engage with the body as a subject through specific strategies of signification and
performance. As a volunteer and educator at the Watts Towers Arts Center in the mid-1960s,
Senga Nengudi was exposed to assemblage artists and methods that would impact her material
and conceptual practice informed by her experience as an African American woman.
63
Saar also
emphasizes the female body in work such as Black Girl’s Window (1969), addressing ideas about
representation, memory, and spirituality (Figure 5). David Hammons’s practice is also grounded
in assemblage, but with particular attention toward the body. Made from impressions of his body
covered in grease, Hammons's "body print" collages of the late 1960s to the late 1970s are
performative renderings that evoke absence and presence and resist fixed identifications. Body-

61
Betye Saar, “Influences: Betye Saar,” interview by Jonathan Griffin, Frieze, (September 27, 2016)
https://www.frieze.com/article/influences-betye-saar
62
Saar, “Influences”.
63
Jones, Pico, 192.

28
oriented practices complicated ideas about representation and insisted on recognizing unfixed
identities that are constantly evolving.

Figure 5. Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window, 1969.

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists with material-based practices activated their work in
new ways by engaging the body in performance that prompted participation. In 1978, Senga
Nengudi collaborated with David Hammonds, Houston Conwill, and Maren Hassinger to create
the epic assemblage performance, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, which took place under the
overpass of the 110 freeway in downtown Los Angeles (Figure 6). The multidimensional
performance included dance, music, ritual, and visual art. Nengudi created objects with various
found materials and everyday objects such as pantyhose that the performers activated throughout

29
the event (Figure 7).
64
Ceremony for Freeway Fets was shaped by the site-specificity of Los
Angeles while simultaneously evoking diasporic rituals (specifically from West Africa),
connecting cultural and familial identity with diasporic heritage. Ceremony for Freeway
Fets culminated in a remarkable assemblage of identities, materials, sound, and
movement. Nengudi and Hassinger embraced non-Western approaches to art that activated
performance through multiple modes and cultures. Speaking about her interest in the African
Diaspora and ritual, Hassinger states, “in African culture, there was not this business of separate
arts. There wasn’t the opera, and then the theater with drama performances, and then dance with
choreography. There was a conglomeration of all of those things.”
65

Figure 6. Senga Nengudi Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978. Figure 7. Detail, Ceremony for Freeway Fets, 1978.

The Watts Towers Arts Center and other counter-institutions protested the museums and
commercial spaces that rejected and repressed Black artists, lobbying for their inclusion and
participation. Alternative commercial art galleries were organized by and for African American
artists. Most notably, Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32 played a critical developmental role in

64
Jones, Pico, 197-201.
65
Suzanne Lacy & Flores Sternad, “Voices, Variations, and Deviations” in Live Art LA, 74.

30
the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles, championing Black artists and insisting on their value
and futurity.
66
This is just a small glimpse into the robust network of Black creatives and
activists that pushed the Black Art Movement forward.
One of the only Black curatorial staff members at LACMA in the 1960s, Cecil Fergerson
was initially hired as a janitor and gradually advanced to the position of assistant curator. Forged
by his relentless determination to hold the museum accountable for its structural racism,
Fergerson must be credited for pushing LACMA to recognize Black artists and culture.
Fergerson helped realize LACMA’s group exhibition of 51 African American artists, Los
Angeles 1972: Panorama of Black Artists, which included work by Purifoy, Hammonds, Saar,
and others—sponsored by the Black Arts Council (also co-founded by Fergerson).
67
The artist
and educator Samella Lewis also worked at LACMA and was an influential advocate for Black
art in museums. In 1969, Lewis was appointed Director of Education. She recalls, “at the time,
LACMA’s curatorial staff had no interest in African American Artists—they had a very narrow,
very racist outlook. I started protesting and picketing, and picketing was part of a group of
people campaigning for change.”
68

After Fergerson’s departure from LACMA in 1985, he began curating exhibitions at
Watts Towers under John Outterbridge’s directorship. Having grown up in Watts, Fergerson was
compelled to organize a show about nurturing and sustaining community in Watts. He describes
his inspiration and intention for the exhibition:
I lived there since 1939, so I knew something about the history of that
community, and I knew certain people, women there, who played an important

66
Between 1965 and 1973, numerous community-based Black arts organizations formed across South Los Angeles
in addition to Watts Towers, including Studio Watts, the Ebony Showcase Theater, the Performing Arts Society of
Los Angeles, the Inner City Cultural Center, the Mafundi Institute, and the R’Wanda Lewis Dance Company.
See Widener, Black Arts West, 176.
67
Roberto Tejada “Los Angeles Snapshots” in Now Dig This, 76.
68
Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley “Recollections” in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (London: Tate
Publishing, 2017): 228.

31
part in my life growing up, like some of the doctors and other people like Mrs.
Ewing and other people who lived there, and I decided to do an exhibit. A real
fine lady who came at the turn of the century and had created a whole yard full of
exotic plants-you know, orchids and everything-right down in Watts near the
projects—She planted some trees in her yard, and by the time I did that show,
these trees, they grew from little bitty plants to over fifty feet high. So in my
exhibit in Watts, I built a greenhouse inside the gallery and brought some of those
plants to the community rather than the community having to go to her house. I
just built a greenhouse. Me and John Outterbridge built a greenhouse inside of the
Watts Towers, getting no money from the city. We hustled the wood and just did
it.
69

Like Fergerson’s greenhouse, alternative spaces were incubators that kept Black creative
energies alive. As Nengudi recalls, “we were keeping each other alive, because we were the only
ones who could keep our energies alive creatively.”
70

69
Cecil Fergerson, “Interview of Cecil Fergerson,” interviewed by Karen Anne Mason, UCLA Center for Oral
History Research, (August 28, 1999).
70
Senga Nengudi. interviewed by Vera Brunner-Sung and Elana Mann in In The Canyon, Revise The Canon
(Belgium: Shelter Press, 2015): 159.

32
Case Study 2: The Woman’s Building

Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern
precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the
family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement
which most radically addresses the person—the personal—citing the need for
transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a
revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the
world outside the self. Strategically, feminist movement should be a central
component of all other liberation struggles because it challenges each of us to
alter our person, our personal engagement in a system of domination.
71

—bell hooks, Talking Back

It was a house large enough for everyone, all women, we claimed. It was female
space, safe space, sacred space, contested space, occupied space, appropriated
space, and transformed space. It was revolution and revelation. We were squatters
and proprietors, renegades and healers; we dichotomized and fused. We had one
commonality: we were convinced that we were transforming culture by offering
alternatives, as women, not only in the arts and culture, but also in the way we
used space and conducted politics in that space.
72

—Sondra Hale, From Site to Vision

In the context of the women's liberation movement, feminist artists situated in Los
Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s were dedicated to creating a more equitable society, developing
practices and modes of engagement centered around women's experiences and challenged
systems of oppression. Feminist artists in Los Angeles explicitly called out hegemonic cultural
institutions that excluded women artists. They organized alternative institutions to address the
needs of female artists and redefine women's relationships to systems of power. Art historian
Laura Meyer claims that “Los Angeles, more than any other city, played a defining role in the

71
bell hooks. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Taylor and Francis (2014): 22.
72
Sondra Hale “Power and Space” in Fromsite Tovision : the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture (Los
Angeles, CA: Otis College of Art and Design, 2011): 39.

33
evolution of the feminist art movement in the seventies.”
73
Within this context, alternative spaces
were profound sites that pushed the feminist movement and feminist art practices forward.
Artist and educator Judy Chicago remember Los Angeles in the mid to late sixties as a
period in which women artists were not taken seriously. Male artists “sat around Barney’s and
talked about cars, motorcycles, and their joints,” she recalls, “I knew nothing about cars, less
about motorcycles, and certainly didn’t have a joint. A lot of the women artists I’ve talked to
since had little conception that their isolation had anything to do with the fact that they were
women.”
74
In 1970, a group of women artists joined forces to protest LACMA's "Art and
Technology" exhibition, which did not include work by a single female artist.
75
That same year,
Chicago founded the Feminist Art Program at the California State University, Fresno, leading a
class of fifteen female students and forming the foundation of her feminist pedagogy. Chicago
and her students created an environment that sought to empower women through art,
interpersonal engagement, and community support.
76
Artist Faith Wilding, one of Chicago's
Fresno students, describes her experience participating in an early consciousness-raising group:
As each woman spoke it became apparent that what had seemed to be purely
“personal” experiences were actually shared by all the other women: we were
discovering a common oppression based on our gender, which was defining our
roles and identities as women. In subsequent group discussions, we analyzed the
social and political mechanisms of this oppression, thus placing our personal
histories into a larger cultural perspective. This was a direct application of the
slogan of 1970s feminism: The personal is political.
77

73
Laura Meyer “The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the Feminist Art Community, 1973–1991” in Sons And
Daughters Of Los: Culture And Community In L.A. Temple University Press (2009): 39.
74
Lucy R. Lippard “Judy Chicago, Talking to Lucy R. Lippard.” Art Forum 13, no. 1 (September, 1974):
https://www.artforum.com/print/197407/judy-chicago-talking-to-lucy-r-lippard-37354.
75
Jennie Klein, “Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building.” in Frontiers (Boulder) 33, no. 2
(2012): 20.
76
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 20.
77
Ibid, 89.

34
These consciousness-raising exercises encouraged women to share and acknowledge their
personal experiences and feelings to raise awareness of the social and political mechanisms that
oppress women. This foregrounding of the female experience is conveyed in a conversation
between Chicago and Lucy Lippard in 1974. Chicago relays her approach to feminist art and
belief in the importance of creating new feminist imagery separate from patriarchal systems of
representation. Chicago explains:
What subject matter and what forms are important, and what the nature of art is
and who defines it and who makes it, and how much it costs, are simply
projections of the male value structure. If we as women challenge those values in
our art, then we are challenging the whole structure of male dominance. That
means you have to move outside of the structure of the art world, because you
don’t get brownie points for telling men to fuck off.
78

In 1971 Chicago left Cal State Fresno and, with Miriam Schapiro, established the
Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), where she would continue to
develop her experimental feminist pedagogy. During their first year at CalArts, in 1972, the
Feminist Art Program would produce the pivotal and dynamic exhibition, Womanhouse.
Installed in an abandoned mansion in Hollywood, the monumental feminist exhibition was
produced by Chicago, Schapiro, and twenty-five students enrolled in the Feminist Art Program
(Figure 8). In an interview, art historian Arlene Raven described the experimental and
unconventional experience at CalArts in 1972:
Women who had little art training were encouraged to use materials right at hand.
You didn’t need to learn painting or sculpture or architecture, but you could put
pieces together with what was at hand. This resulted in a lot of performance art,
photographs, videotapes, and making art with everyday feminine materials—
lipsticks, shoe polish, nail polish. Performance art was like playing dress up in a
lot of ways, because we did it not only for an audience but also in terms of role-
playing inside of the educational experience. There was a total rethinking of what
is an appropriate art material. Some used eggs, and others drew pictures with their
menstrual blood.
79

78
Lippard, “Chicago,” https://www.artforum.com/print/197407/judy-chicago-talking-to-lucy-r-lippard-37354.
79
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 130.

35

Figure 8. Karen LeCocq, Womanhouse Doily Invitation, 1972.

Artists in the Feminist Art Program experimented with nontraditional materials to validate
notions of feminine “craft.”
80
For example, student Faith Wilding’s immersive crocheted
installation, Womb Room, subverted knitting practices—commonly associated with feminine
domesticity—to address questions about hierarchies of art, women’s practices, and their critical
value. The Feminist Art Program and the activities and ideas that germinated in Fresno and
CalArts were formative to the subsequent foundation of the Woman’s Building in 1973.
81

Chicago cofounded The Woman's Building with the designer Sheila de Bretteville and
Raven in 1973. Originally located at 743 S. Grand View Street in the former Chouinard building
near MacArthur Park, The Woman's Building was a hub for collaborative and politically
engaged feminist artists that cultivated a series of workshops, consciousness-raising groups,
media campaigns, happenings, public interventions, publications, projects, and performances.
82

80
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 90.
81
Laura Meyer, “The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the Feminist Art Community” in Sons and Daughters Of
Los: Culture And Community In L.A (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009): 43.
82
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 147.

36
The name "Woman's Building" refers to the historical Woman's Building from the 1893 Chicago
World's Fair, both of which use “woman” in the singular rather than the plural. As Nancy Angelo
has noted, the singular use of woman in the name was an effort to "appreciate each individual as
part of contributing to what we all share collectively, so it's that you've got your eye on both.
You're holding yourself, and you're a part of something much bigger."
83
This individualism is
somewhat ironic considering the many artists, collectives, organizations, and programs that
collaboratively shaped the Woman's Building, including The Associated Woman's Press, the
Center for Feminist Art Historical Studies, Gallery 707, Grandview Gallery I and II, Los Angeles
Feminist Theater, Sisterhood Bookstore, Womanspace Gallery, Women's Improvisational
Theater, the Lesbian Art Project (LAP), and Women's Graphics Center.
84
The Woman’s Building
was a hive constantly buzzing with collaborative energy.
The Woman’s Building sought to transform culture through feminist pedagogy.
According to Sondra Hale, “some have referred to “feminist process” as the practice of women’s
studies.”
85
The Feminist Studio Workshop was an educational program at the center of the
overall organization of the Woman’s Building. Chicago, Bretteville, and Raven conceived of the
following principles for the Feminist Studio Workshop:
The Feminist Studio Workshop is an experimental program in female education in
the arts. Our purpose is to develop a new concept of art, a new kind of artist and a
new art community built from the lives, feelings, and needs of women.

The Feminist Studio Workshop is committed to the development of an integrated
female support community in which art making, art historical and critical
analysis, public, design arts and feminist consciousness merge into a new frame of
reference.

83
Nancy Angelo, “Interview of Nancy Angelo,” interviewed by Andrey Gordienko, UCLA Center for Oral History
Research (March 15, 2011): 44.
84
Jennie Kline, “Feminist at the Woman’s Building” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 33, no. 2 (2012):
130.
85
Hale, Site to Vision, 51.

37
In the Feminist Studio Workshop women will be free to explore alternative ways
of introducing their female perspectives into society.
86

Foregrounding the relational exchange between women helped develop communities of care and
support. In 1977, Faith Wilding shared her own set of feminist principles that prioritized
consciousness-raising:
1. Consciousness-raising
2. Building a female context and environment
3. Female role models
4. Permission to be themselves and encouragement to make art out of their
own experience as women
87

This notion of female-kinship shaped the activities and environment of the Women’s Building.
Artist Nancy Angelo describes how consciousness raising exercises transformed and reclaimed
culture around women’s experiences: “It was from the personal to the political, looking really at
personal experiences of women and seeing how is that shared with other women, how is it
political, how is it played out in the world.
88

As women became more conscious of their personal experiences and needs, they turned
to their bodies as sites of resistance, claiming the personal as political. Body art was a central
strategy for feminist artists that aimed to expose and subvert the sexist-exploitative
representations of women’s bodies.
89
Aligned with feminist practices that center personal
experience, body art reveals the exchange of interpretive and projected interests, biases, and
desires. As Amelia Jones points out, “the recognition of the body/self as dispersed, multiple, and
particularized has dramatically progressive potentialities, especially for women and other

86
Cited by Faith Wilding, By Our Own Hands: the Woman Artist’s Movement, Southern California, 1970-1976 (Los
Angeles: Double X, 1977): 83.
87
Wilding, Our Hands, 10-11.
88
Angelo, “Interview,” 42.
89
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 63 – 64.

38
subjects historically excluded from the privileged category of ‘individual’.”
90
Performing the self
(via the body) was an important strategy embraced by feminist artists, allowing women to
reclaim their bodies from patriarchal construction (Figure 9). As Peggy Phelan suggests,
performance uses the body to “frame the lack of Being promised by and through the body—that
which cannot appear without a supplement…Performance marks the body itself as loss…For the
spectator the performance spectacle is itself a projection of the scenario in which her own desire
takes place.”
91

Figure 9. Deformity/ Perfection Performance
Workshop led by Suzanne Lacy, 1976.

Feminist performance strategies were central to the artists and activities at the Woman's
Building. Engaging directly with the female body through performance helped women articulate
their lived experiences. As Chicago emphasizes, performance “provided a release for
debilitating, unexpressed anger, thereby opening up the whole range of emotions for creative

90
Jones, Body Art, 204.
91
Peggy Phelan cited in Jones, Body Art, 107.

39
work.”
92
Chicago also believed performance stimulated other areas of artmaking in terms of
form, material, and medium. The Woman’s Building supported several performance art groups
that led workshops and performed public interventions, including Mother Art, Feminist Art
Workers, The Waitresses (Figure 10), and Sisters Of Survival.
93

Figure 10. The Waitresses, All City Waitress Marching Band
performance in Pasadena, 1979.

Feminist artists in the 1970s understood the power of art as an effective vehicle to
interrogate the social structures that oppress women. Art was a catalyst for revolutionary change.
The Woman’s Building was an explicitly political space with an explicitly political agenda.
Suzanne Lacy reminds us that “from the beginning, the Woman’s Building was framed as a
political and pedagogical initiative—not just for us, but for everyone.”
94
Lacy understood the
transformative potential of public art unlike any feminist artist of her time, and her legacy is felt
in the political art practices that followed. In her book Mapping the Terrain (1995), Lacy
considers the social responsibility of art as it relates to the public, and the evolution of
collaborative artist-activist practices (what she calls “new genre art”). Lacy elaborates:

92
Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975): 126.
93
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 28.
94
Suzanne Lacy, “Between Radical Art and Critical Pedagogy,” cited in Kraus, In the Canyon, 37.

40
In seeking to become catalysts for change, artists reposition themselves as citizen-
activist. Diametrically opposed to the aesthetic practices of the isolated artist,
consensus building inevitably entails developing a set of skills not commonly
associated with art making. To take a position with respect to the public agenda,
the artist must act in collaboration with people, and with an understanding of
social systems and institutions. Entirely new strategies must be learned: how to
collaborate, how to cross over with other disciplines, how to choose sites that
resonate with public meaning, and how to clarify visual and process symbolism
for people who are not educated in art. In other words, artist-activists question the
primacy of separation as an artistic stance and undertake the consensual
production of meaning with the public.
95

Lacy’s ideas about site-specific public performance can be traced back to her 1977 work In
Mourning and In Rage, organized in collaboration with artist Leslie Labowitz and writer Bia
Lowe (Figure 11). The performance intended to publicly confront the sensationalized press
coverage of the rapes and murders committed by the “Hillside Strangler” and perpetual violence
against women. They strategically situated themselves on the steps just outside city hall near the
site where a young woman was found naked on the ground after being brutally murdered. The
performance was designed as a press and media event, but in this case, women spoke and
controlled the narrative. In Mourning and In Rage resulted in concrete policy changes that
included government resources for women.
96

Figure 11. Suzanne Lacy, In Mourning and In Rage performance, 1977.

95
Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press (1995): 177.
96
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 96.

41

In 1977 Lacy also installed Three Weeks in May, a public demonstration that intended to
bring awareness to the rape crisis in Los Angeles. The project consisted of two large maps
installed in city hall that traced where instances of sexual violence occurred, indicating their
locations with the word “RAPE” written in bright red font.
97
The site-specificity of the
intervention was a strategic attempt to connect with the immediate public on a more urgent and
personal level. Lacy recalls the performance:
Why talk about rape only inside an art gallery when you might be raped when you
walk home that night? It sounds simple, but we have two interests: one in making
art, and one in making social change. In the mid-1970s rape was not talked about
publicly and we meant to use art to make the issue and its consequences broadly
known, as well as organize communities of resistance in Los Angeles.
98

These public performances and media interventions operated in an instrumental way that blurred
the lines between art and activism—the art is the intervention. Lacy describes her practice as
focused on “aspects of interaction and relationship rather than on art objects,” which “calls for a
radical rearrangement in our expectations of what an artist does.”
99
For Lacy, the relationship
between the artist and the audience constitutes the “artwork”—expanding notions of audience
and public art. Furthering her ideas on art in the public sphere, Lacy writes, “[p]otential
audiences are real people found in real places. Bearing witness to an identifiable person or group
challenges the monolithic image of the audience that has been enshrined in the value systems and
criticism of late modern art.”
100
Lacy played a key role in the development of what we now call
“social practice art”, which can be traced back to the activism and performances that grew out of

97
Wolverton, Site to Vision, 210.
98
Phelan, Live LA, 90.
99
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 83.
100
Ibid, 37.

42
the Woman’s Building in the 1970s.
101
Lacy continues to challenge ideas about audience and the
social responsibilities of art.
In 1977, the Los Angeles Times published a review of the Woman’s Building show that
asked, “What is Feminist Art?”, presenting a range of personal responses by women artists.
Critic William Wilson titled his review “The Feminine Mistake,” a bad play on words referring
to Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystic. Wilson calls the women’s responses “florid
statements” and “intelligent-sounding admissions that the question is unanswerable,” claiming to
have learned absolutely nothing from the show.
102
A few years, later in 1979, critic Suzanne
Muchnich wrote a review in the LA Times that promoted “Offbeat Exhibitions Downtown” at
the Woman’s Building and LACE. She begins by stating, “you’ve visited museums and made
rounds of Westside galleries, but you haven’t covered the art scene until you’ve explored Los
Angeles’ back-street, behind-the-counter, upper-floor, store-front, and downtown activities. The
city usually harbors exhibitions in out-of-the was places,” and tells viewers to expect a “strong
dose of ethnicity.” I cite these two examples to show how mainstream media covered alternative
spaces. Munchin’s review was at least positive, but it still lacked an understanding of the
activities happening at these “back-street” venues. These examples speak to why alternative
spaces were forced to create their own critical and informational networks to advance their
work.
103
Founded by the Woman’s Building, Chrysalis was a self-produced “magazine of
women’s culture” that grew out of this very need in 1977. The journal’s first editorial statement
reads:

101
Amelia Jones, “Suzanne Lacy Between Kaprow and Chicago: Pedagogy and Performance,” in TDR: Drama
review 65, no. 4, 2021):106.
102
Woman’s Building records 1970-1992, box 15, folder 21: Gallery Reviews, 1976-1979, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution Washington, D.C. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/womans-building-records-6347.
103
Woman’s Building records, box 15, folder 2, Smithsonian Institute. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/womans-
building-records-6347.

43
Chrysalis, like The New Woman’s Survival Catalog and the New Woman’s
Survival Sourcebook from which it grew, takes its form and content from the
women’s movement itself. Feminism is not a monolithic movement, but rather
includes the experiences, values, priorities, agendas of women of all lifestyles,
ages, and cultural and economic backgrounds. Women building alternatives to
patriarchal institutions, women developing new theories and feminist perspectives
on events and ideas, women expressing their visions in verbal art forms—
women’s culture includes all of this, and Chrysalis exists to give expression to the
spectrum of opinion and creativity that originates in this diversity.
104

Despite Chrysalis inclusive intentions, the demographic that engaged with and organized
the Woman’s Building was predominantly white, middle-class, and educated women.
Accordingly, the Woman’s Building has been criticized for its lack of consideration for and
outreach to women of color. While it is incorrect to apply this characterization to all of the artists
who engaged with Woman’s Building, there was an underlying discomfort for women of color.
In an interview with Amelia Jones, Senga Nengudi expressed that, “[w]e were included in as a
necessity. I hardly felt like an equal partner. Although I did sit on a couple of Women’s Building
committees, it never felt quite like home in the early days. Black women and Latina women are
about family and children. My experience was children seemed to be an unwanted presence at
the building.”
105
However, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville collaborated extensively with African
American artist Betye Saar. In 1973 Saar curated the earliest known exhibition dedicated to
women of color at Womanspace.
106
Saar’s work was also featured on the cover of Chrysalis in
1977.
The racist undercurrents at the Woman’s Building were made visible when they started
receiving financial support from the Woman Comprehensive Education and Training Act

104
Angelina Grimke note from the editor in Chrysalis No. 1: A Magazine of Women's Culture, Los Angeles: Chrysalis;
1977. https://jstor.org/stable/community.28034949.
105
Senga Nengudi interviewed by Amelia Jones, October 2009.
106
Jones, Now Dig This, 25.

44
(CETA). Michelle Moravec and Sondra Hale point to concrete evidence of the racial inequities
that occurred at the Woman’s Building:
Many of the women eligible for employment under this program (CETA) in Los
Angeles were women of color. Although CETA funds provided the Woman’s
Building with the ability to hire support staff, many of the women of color who
were hired were not in positions of authority. This situation ultimately led to
charges of racism against one white staff member in particular. Ironically,
members of the Woman’s Building had sought CETA funding not only to
increase their budget, but also because they wanted to draw more women of color
to the Woman’s Building.
107

Lucy Lippard has argued that “it was also obvious that just as there were different kinds of
feminism, there were different kinds of communities, and most women belonged to several
simultaneously.”
108
Examining these exclusionary fractures of the Woman’s Building (and the
feminist movement as a whole) in the context of bell hooks’s work helps call attention to
paradigms of domination (with, in this situation, white women as both the oppressed and the
oppressor). In Talking Back (1989), hooks writes:
Contemporary feminist thinkers often cite sexual politics as the origin of this
crisis. They point to the insistence on difference as that factor which becomes the
occasion for separation and domination and suggest that differentiation of status
between females and males globally is an indication that patriarchal domination
of the planet is the root of the problem. Such an assumption has fostered the
notion that elimination of sexist oppression would necessarily lead to the
eradication of all forms of domination. It is an argument that has led influential
Western white women to feel that feminist movement should be the central
political agenda for females globally. Ideologically, thinking in this direction
enables Western women, especially privileged white women, to suggest that
racism and class exploitation are merely the offspring of the parent system:
patriarchy. Within feminist movement in the West, this has led to the assumption
that resisting patriarchal domination is a more legitimate feminist action than
resisting racism and other forms of domination.
109

107
Michelle Moravec and Sondra Hale in Site to Vision, 168.
108
Lucy Lippard in Site to Vision, 12.
109
bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (UK: Taylor and Francis, 2014): 19.

45
hooks stresses the need for feminist struggles to exist apart from as well as within the larger
struggle against forms of domination and oppression. For hooks, women’s liberation is
dependent on the liberation of all women.
Despite these clear shortcomings, the Woman’s Building was a site of transformation that
encouraged women to examine their inner selves, experiences, and traumas and break down the
oppressive limitations embedded in everyday life. The activists and artists that shaped the
Woman’s Building fundamentally questioned the social role of the artist and art audiences. What
would the feminist movement in Los Angeles look like without alternative sites of engagement
like the Woman’s Building?
110

110
The Women’s Building closed in 1991. They struggled financially throughout the 1980s and faced other
organizational challenges due to the leadership after Judy Chicago left, programming became limited when they
were forced to make staff cuts, and board was unstable. See Wolverton, Insurgent Muse, 197-232.

46
Case Study 3: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)

These are borders we never cross
Barriers stretch beyond the horizon
Our individual trajectory is separated
We are segregated Behind the safety glass
We stare at the inequality
That approaches at lethal speeds
Someone from the other side
Dares Breaches the wall Slams head-on
Disintegrates Beneath relentlessly spinning wheels
Crushed beyond recognition
No better for the wear and tear
Life moves on at 70 mph
I glance out to the unknown
Faces
That whiz by

They
On their fast lane
Going backwards to continue
Their Story
The brief encounters with each face
Highlight the dangers of
Cultural Collision
I fail to merge into obscurity
Eye contact!
My reflection blinds me
I spin wildly out of control
Skidding violently against the wall
At that moment I’m conscious that

47
Those faces
Don’t give a damn
111

—Harry Gamboa Jr., Urban Exile

In the poem, Opposing Fast Lanes, artist Harry Gamboa describes his experience driving
in Los Angeles. In another personal account of Los Angeles traffic, Rayner Banham describes
his jaunt down the 101 freeway, treating the whole experience as a spectacle: “it all seemed so
natural—as the car in front turned down the off-ramp of the San Diego freeway, the girl beside
the driver pulled down the sun-visor and used the mirror on the back of it to tidy her hair.”
112
In a
series of fleeting encounters, Banham projects his inner fantasies onto the passing faces. Jean
Baudrillard also uses the word “spectacle” to describe his experience driving in Los Angeles:
The only tissue of the city is that of the freeways, a vehicular, or rather an
incessant trans-urbanistic, tissue, the extraordinary spectacle of these thousands of
cars moving at the same speed, in both directions, headlights full on in broad
daylight, on the Ventura Freeway, coming from nowhere, going nowhere: an
immense collective act, rolling along, ceaselessly unrolling, without aggression,
without objectives—transferential sociality, doubtless the only kind in a
hyperreal, technological, soft—mobile era, exhausting itself in surfaces, networks
and soft technologies. No elevator or subway in Los Angeles. No verticality or
underground, no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or facades, no centre or
monuments: a fantastic space, a spectral and discontinuous succession of all the
various functions, of all signs with no hierarchical ordering—an extravaganza of
indifference, extravaganza of undifferentiated surfaces.
113

Are Banham, Baudrillard, and Gamboa headed for a cultural collision? Gamboa and Chicano/a
artists are the unknown faces that meet Banham and Baudrillard’s gaze, resisting postmodern
obfuscation as their stories collide. Chon A. Noriega writes, “[f]or Gamboa, the freeway—where
obscurity is the fastest way home (“A Rival Departure”)—becomes his map for writing outside

111
Harry Gamboa poem titled “Opposing Fast Lanes” cited in Urban Exile, 534-535.
112
Banham, Four Ecologies, 195.
113
Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1989): 126.

48
the mainstream.”
114
Gamboa is caught between the flânerie and the freeway, intervening “within
a social space constituted as dreams (Hollywood and Chicano movement discourses) and
nightmares (an urban environment defined by social-cum-geographic inequities, state
surveillance, and police violence).”
115

The Chicano/a movement began in the late 1960s, motivated by issues relating to
Chicano/a civil rights, labor, education, and the Vietnam War. Art, activist, and community
driven organizations played a critical role in the Chicano/a movement. Chicano/a artists created a
visual and conceptual language to address the complexity of Mexican American cultural identity
and struggle for self-determination. The early stages of the movement are marked by the
emergence of community-oriented grassroots organizations and activist strategies such as
printmaking and murals that reached large audiences. Engaging in printmaking techniques, Self-
Help Graphics, for example, emerged in a garage in East Los Angeles through the collaborative
efforts of artists Sister Karen Boccalero, Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, and Frank Hernández
(among others).
116
Defined by the Mexican social mural movement, the Social and Public Art
Resource Center (SPARC) was formed in 1976 by artist Judy Baca to foreground the ethnicities
and histories that lacked representation and visibility in Los Angeles. Baca and SPARC
exemplify the ways in which Chicano/a artist-activists regarded public spaces as critical social
sites that could challenge perspectives and historical narratives through murals and community
engagement. Politically driven, grassroots art spaces like Self Help Graphics and SPARC
embraced posters, prints, and murals for their didactic qualities and ability to communicate to a
large public audience.

114
Chon A. Noriega, “No Introduction” in Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 5.
115
Noriega, Urban Exile, 19.
116
Self-Help Graphics, “Our Story.” Accessed October 1, 2021. www.selfhelpgraphics.com/history.

49
The Chicano student youth movement played an active role in the early stages of the
Chicano/a movement when student demonstrations and walkouts in East Los Angeles in 1968
resulted in a week-long shut down of five public high schools. Among the student protestors
were Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón, Patssi Valdez, and Gronk, who would go on to form the
performance art collective known as Asco, which loosely translates to mean “disgust” in
English.
117

Figure 12. Asco, Patssi Valdez in Spray Paint LACMA, 1972.

In 1972, Asco famously spray-painted their names on the façade of LACMA in 1972 as
an act of protest the museum’s prejudice against Chicano/a artists (Figure 12). The group’s
public intervention would expose the institution’s blatant discrimination.
118
Spray-paint LACMA
was spurred on after an exchange between Gamboa and a curator at LACMA who had expressed
the racist stereotype that Chicano/a artists were “usually in gangs and when they made art, it was
folk art, but certainly not fine art.”
119
This curator's bigoted vocalization is just one instance of
the racial bias that pervades institutions, evident in the mainstream art world's narrow

117
Harry Gamboa Jr, “In the City of Angels” in Chicano Art : Resistance and Affirmation, 1965-1985 (Los Angeles:
Wight Art Gallery, University of California, 1991): 121-124.
118
Gamboa, Chicano Art Resistance, 125.
119
Max Benavidez, Gronk (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2007): 38.

50
consideration for what and who is considered avant-garde, or even an artist at all. Gronk
elaborates:
Because when someone does not belong to the dominant culture and yet comes up
with concepts and / or theories that are equal to other ideas in the market, he is
generally overlooked and not taken seriously by those who are in fact agents
provocateurs of that culture, such as art critics, curators, museum directors…If a
Third World artist creates conceptual work, it is called folk art, but if Chris
Burden, Alexis Smith, and others create a similar work, it is hailed as fine art.
120

The complex relationship between the avant-garde and institutions, and the prejudice imbedded
in academic principles presents an immense challenge, and Asco’s work remains largely
underappreciated. Noriega asks, “what does the avant-garde look and sound like when it blooms
outside the hothouse of the bourgeoisie?”
121
Asco’s work exposes the limited perspective of
avant-garde theories in critical-institutional discourse. Noriega suggests that “to call Harry
Gamboa an avant-garde artist is to raise questions about the absence of Asco itself from art
history and historical exhibitions.”
122
Peter Plagens’ dismissive remarks about Asco and Gronk is
a blatant example of these limitations: “What Gronk does has no special claim to being ‘the true
avant-garde of Los Angeles,’ unless we’re to believe that an artist who chooses a funny name
and runs around doing funny things is automatically ahead of those who stay in studios and make
art objects.”
123
Plagens’ sour words stem from fear, seeing Asco as a threat to the canon in which
he yields power. Asco decenters the historical Euro-male-hetero avant-garde narrative, requiring
a redefinition and expansion of avant-garde to recognizing the activities of historically
marginalized artists. Gamboa expressed that until recently, Asco has been considered marginal in
Chicano art history, and “their internal critique of Chicano/a art itself remains conveniently

120
Gronk, as cited in Gamboa, Urban Exile, 48.
121
Chon Noriega, "'Your Art Disgusts Me': Early Asco, 1971—75." Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry,
no. 19 (2008): 120.
122
Gamboa, Urban Exile, 2.
123
Benavidez, Gronk, 39.

51
misunderstood. During the early 1970’s there was numerous Chicano/a artists who were intent
on creating works that would affect the development and direction of the cultural identity of
Chicano culture in Los Angeles.”
124

Asco’s exclusion from critical discourse and the mainstream art world was a key factor in
the establishment of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in 1978. LACE was
founded by a diverse group of thirteen artists dedicated to fostering innovative and experimental
art-making practices.
125
In the beginning, LACE was funded through the Comprehensive
Employment and Training Act (CETA) and recognized as a community service.
126

The name “LACE” is an acronym that also relates to its original location at 240 S.
Broadway—the bridal district in downtown Los Angeles. LACE’s founding artists were united
in their dedication to providing an exhibition space that was more accessible and connected to
the surrounding community—focused on generating cultural exchange through dialogue and
experimental-performance practices. During their first year, the thirteen artists rotated curatorial
leadership until 1979, when Marc Pally was appointed LACE’s first director. The space would
continue to evolve as LACE’s location, leadership, artists, and audiences changed.
In the catalog for the exhibition Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano LA (2017)—a
significant exhibition that focused on the dynamic network of queer Chicano/a artists working in
LA between the 1960s and early 1990s—art historian Ondine Chavoya describes LACE as “a
critical nexus for experimentation and political dissent, especially between queer and Chicano/a

124
Benavidez, Gronk, 67.
125
Founding artists include Bill Fisher, Robert Gil de Montes, Harry Gamboa, Jr, Gronk, Richard Hyland, Joe
Janusz, Marilyn Kemppainen, Sarah Parker, Ron Reeder, Alexander Sauer, Barry Scharf, David Scharf, and Nancy
Youdelman. See Karen Moss, “LACE’s First 10 Years: From El Monte to Industrial Street,” in LACE, 10 Yrs.
Documented (Los Angeles: LACE, 1988): 5-8.
126
See full list of CETA artists in Moss, “LACE First 10 Years,” in Perez, LACE, 10 Yrs. Documented, 6-8.

52
artists in Los Angeles and artists throughout Latin America.”
127
Chavoya’s essay asserts that in
LACE’s early stages, they were firmly situated in the Chicano/a Movement, and describes how
the space was originally conceived to bring together Chicano/a artists and recent Otis
graduates.
128
Of course, not all of the 13 artists who founded LACE were Chicano/a, but
Chicano/a art and activism was foundational to the conceptualization of the space and connected
to the demographics of their location in Los Angeles (Figure 13). At its core, LACE was (and
still is) dedicated to artists exploring performance and experimental methods of artmaking and
fostering new forms of audience engagement, and early exhibitions at LACE show an
intersection of identities and international exchange.

Figure 13. Harry Gamboa Jr., Roberto Gil de Montes, image from No Movie
performance and exhibition at LACE, 1978.

One of LACE’s first exhibitions in 1978 featured Asco’s No Movie series—an ongoing
critique of mainstream media and the Hollywood film industry. The group performed grotesque,
rasquachismo-style, abject subjects in public spaces across Los Angeles that complicated
Chicano stereotypes in the media (Figure 14).
129
The No Movie interventions were not captured

127
Ondine Chavoya, “Exchange Desired” in Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A. (Los Angeles: ONE
National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries, 2017): 211.
128
Chavoya, Axis Mundo, 222.

53
as moving images but documented as 35mm photographs and in the form of mail art and
ephemera. When asked to describe No Movie, Gronk replied, “It’s making a movie without the
use of celluloid, it’s projecting the real while rejecting the reel. It’s life before the advent of the
viewfinder.”
130
In Self/Image (2006), Amelia Jones notes:
The “no movie” project produces images and subjects that unhinge the modernist
idea that cities define or contain or reflect particular kinds of subjects or even, in
some cases, that particular subjects (say famous architects or urban planners) have
the power to produce urban spaces that condition the ways in which people live in
them, and thus have a predictable effect on subject formation
131

Asco’s self-imaging exposes the limited access marginalized subjects have to capital and social
networks, which determines who can and cannot participate in the formation of representation in
mainstream culture.
132

Figure 14. Asco, First Supper (After A Major Riot), 1974.

Several early exhibitions at LACE engaged with other networks of LA artists motivated
by rights movements. LACE’s 1978 exhibition Double X presented work by a group of artists

130
Gronk cited in Gamboa, Urban Exile, 47.
131
Jones, Self/Image, 82- 83.
132
Gronk stated, “I think the most exciting moments for me were creating the artworks in the series ‘No Movies’
(1973–78), because each had a sense of being a driven, in-your-face performance and, for us, that was the only way
to express things. We had to generate our own sense of an art world because people were not going to see us as
artists.”
Gronk, “¡Tenemos Asco!: An Oral History of the Chicano Art Group,” in Frieze, Issue 224 (January 4, 2022).
https://www.frieze.com/article/tenemos-asco-oral-history-chicano-art-group.

54
from the Double X feminist collective, many of which were involved with the Woman’s
Building.
133
Other early shows were interested in Los Angeles based artists in dialogue with
South American artists. Gil de Montes curated two exhibitions in 1979 that considered the
intersection between Chicano/a Los Angeles and Latin America, one of which featured
photography by sixteen Latin American artists.
134
The coinciding exhibitions Testimonios de
Latinoamerica and America en la Mira generated some of LACE’s earliest press including their
first review in the Los Angeles Times that described the show as “two exhibits rolled into one
overwhelming array of about five hundred conceptual artworks with political messages by Latin
American, Chicano, and European artists.”
135

Eventually, Gronk and Gamboa would leave LACE when, according to Max Benavidez,
they sensed “ a reluctance to regularly show Chicano artists and a movement towards more
conventional programming.”
136
In 1998, LACE announced that their programs would no longer
be curated by an artist-run committee, reassuring the public that their mission to support
experimental and performance practices would remain.
137
While the identity of LACE has
shifted over the decades, their mission statement has not changed—as stated on their website:
“LACE’s core values have remained the same since its founding in 1978: dedication to the art of
our time that focuses on freedom of expression; experimentation with ideas, materials, and new
forms; and content that is challenging and socially engaging.”
138

133
The Double X feminist collective included Deanna Belinoff, Nancy Buchanan, Caron Colvin, Merion
Estes, Judith Golden, Mayde Herberg, Connie Jenkins, Mary Jones, Leslie Labowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Cynthia
Osorne, Martha Rosler, Barbara Smith, Toby Tannenbaum, Cynthia Upchurch and Nancy Youdelman.
LACE, “Double X: July 8-31, 1978.” Accessed November 1, 2021. https://welcometolace.org/lace/double-x/.
134
Ondine, Axis Mundo, 223.
135
Ibid, 225.
136
Benavidez, Gronk, 58.
137
James, Sons and Daughters, 104.
138
LACE, “History.” Accessed November 1, 2021. www.welcometolace.org/about/

55
In the catalog for the 2011 Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Los Angeles Art from 1945
to 1980, LACE is cited briefly but there is no mention of the space’s ties to Asco, and their
Chicano/a origins are only loosely implied. The catalog defines LACE as the venue where
“young Los Angeles artists such as Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler found a site for their early
work.”
139
LACE’s Chicano/a origins are underacknowledged, considering their experimental and
performance practices and the early exhibitions that shaped LACE’s curatorial foundation.
140

Alternative spaces are inherently fluid and evolving with the ever-changing politics,
communities, artists and audiences that activate them. LACE has shapeshifted the most out of the
three case studies presented in this thesis. That said, it is also the case that LACE (like the Watts
Towers Art Center) is an outlier in its very existence, considering that most alternative spaces
that originated in the 1960s and 1970s are no longer standing. The Getty’s acquisition of the
LACE archives suggests, ironically, the need for institutional support in order to preserve the
legacies of alternative historical spaces. The archives, while still part of the gallery, were
accessible community resources. Now they live in boxes on a hill overlooking Bel Air. Even
though the archives are still nominally accessible to the public, the commute to the Getty and
required appointment are deterrents. Support from mainstream institutions has the power to
ensure the livelihood of artist-run, community-oriented, alternative spaces, and ultimately benefit
from them. In the case of the Watts Towers Arts Center, their livelihood became dependent on
federal funding in 1975 when they were forced to become a California Sate Heritage Site in

139
Jane McFadden, “Here, Here, or There: On the Whereabouts of Art in the Seventies” in Pacific Standard Time:
Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011): 286.
140
In 2011, LACE presented the exhibition and performance series, Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in
Southern California 1970-1983, honoring the performance art legacies of the 1970s by reimagining a selection of
historic performances that took place in LA. Artists included in the performance series were Ulysses Jenkins, Cheri
Gaulke, Jerri Allyn, Liz Glynn, Heather Cassils, Dorian Wood, Denise Uyehara, James Luna, and the OJO
collective. Suzanne Lacy re-produced Three Weeks in May, originally performed in 1977.
LACE, “Los Angeles Goes Live: Performance Art in Southern California 1970-1983.” Accessed November 1, 2021.
https://welcometolace.org/lace/los-angeles-goes-live-performance-art-in-southern-california-1970-1983/.

56
order to continue. Sarah Schrank expresses this conundrum and “discomfort with the evolution
of the towers into a nationally recognized civic landmark in a city with a long history of painting
over, literally and figuratively, representations of nonwhite and poor people.”
141

Are all alternative-grassroots and social movement organizations eventually fated to
choose between closing their doors or being absorbed by the mainstream? Organizations
grounded in social movements are inherently unstable due to the radical nature of their primary
function to change society rather than conform to its demands. Member of the Woman’s
Building Jo Freeman described these contradictions and challenges in a 1977 issue of Chrysalis,
stating that alternative social movement organizations are “torn by conflicting demands which
constantly threaten to tear it apart—which can never be completely resolved because each side
reflects an essential element in the movement’s functioning.”
142
The research put forth in this
thesis emphasizes the coalitional relationship between alternative art spaces and social
movements and how they shaped one another and Los Angeles as an art city.

141
Sarah Schrank “Nuestro Pueblo” in Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Immigrations, Development (New
York: Fordham, 2014): 271.
142
Jo Freeman, “Crises and Conflicts in Social Movement Organizations” in Chrysalis, no. 5 (May 1, 1977): 43.
https://jstor.org/stable/community.28034953.

57
Conclusion

This brief history of alternative spaces profoundly transformed ideas about art, audience,
activism, and community in Los Angeles and beyond. It's impossible to calculate the impact of
the Watts Towers Arts Center, the Woman’s Building, and LACE, but their legacies can be
found across the spectrum of contemporary art that followed. The alternative art spaces that
shape the Los Angeles art scene today include the Women's Center for Creative Work (WCCW),
18th Street Arts Center, Clockshop, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Active Cultures,
Monte Vista Projects, JOAN, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, Art + Practice, the Underground Museum,
Mistake Room, NAVEL, Human Resources, Eastside International Los Angeles (ESXLA), The
Armory Center for the Arts, and LAXART.
Coming back to Suzanne Lacy’s statement “entirely new strategies must be learned: how
to collaborate, how to cross over with other disciplines, how to choose sites that resonate with
public meaning, and how to clarify visual and process symbolism for people who are not
educated in art.”
143
This remains true as disciplines, publics, symbols, and modes of engagement
are constantly changing. As a result, new forms of “alternative” spaces and art-activism take
shape. Our present reality is oppressive in new and familiar ways, and the need for alternative
spaces and models are as urgent as ever. Counter-institutions continue to fight for a more
equitable, inclusive, and locally sustainable world—encompassing a multitude of voices and
experiences that inspire emergent strategies and offer alternative paths forward.
Lucy Lippard’s critique of the cliquish and narrow art world remains truer than ever,
“with its resentful reliance on a very small group of dealers, curators, critics, editors, and

143
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 177.

58
collectors who are all too frequently and often unknowingly bound by invisible apron strings to
the ‘real world’s’ power structure.”
144
As art has evolved and expanded, the power structure of
the commercial art world has grown tenfold alongside the rise of high capitalism. Several
alternative commercial galleries in Los Angeles attempt to reckon with this reality. The artist run
gallery Commonwealth & Council adheres to a profit share model that asks collectors to donate a
portion of every sale to benefit their artists and community programs. Following the murder of
George Floyd, the gallery created an online art-education program with a curriculum focused on
art and activism. Spaces like Commonwealth & Council adopt some of the principal values
embraces by alternative art spaces in the 1960s and 1970s. Alternative commercial spaces might
be contradictory by design, but they are also directly challenging the financial-power system of
art world.
Critic and art historian Mario Ontiveros has suggested that the concept of alternative is no
longer viable or desired by millennials because they have “grown up fully cognizant that there is
not and never has been an outside.” He goes on to suggest that this current generation “lacks the
necessary common political and social experience” to create alternative structures.
145
This
generation is responding to socio-economic and political conditions, but rather than starting with
identity, they consider the world as a whole, a dynamic entanglement, asking questions about
how we relate to each other, systems of power, and the natural environment. This generation's
ecological interests encompass identity politics, but not centrally the way artists in the 1960s and
1970s responded to the rights movements. My generation's dilemma is on a planetary scale—
grappling with extinction requires thinking on macro and local levels, personal and political. In
2019, Terry Wolverton updated her response to the question, “What is Feminist Art?” She states:

144
Lippard, Six Years, 164.
145
Mario Ontiveros cited in Ault, Alternative, 10.

59
Our understanding has expanded. So too our circles must expand. It’s necessary
but no sufficient to make art that insists that women be free from violence and
sexual exploitation and colonization. It’s necessary but not sufficient to make art
that declares women free to pursue every opportunity and express their wildest
visions. It’s necessary but not sufficient to make art that re-invents the meaning of
gender and the place of women in culture. Feminist art assert as well our
solidarity with the earth and all that lives upon it. Feminist art understands that
patriarchy and capitalism must be dismantled in order to achieve liberation.
Feminist art is willing to fight against and refuse to perpetuate white supremacy
and racism both within our own consciousness and in the world. Feminist art
transcends borders and boundaries. Feminist art is passionately committed to
profound and radical transformation of culture. The spiral never ends.
146

As our circles expand and power becomes more concentrated and centralized, it's necessary but
not sufficient to create alternative systems. I believe that there will always be alternatives.
Examining this history of alternative spaces is important as we think about new ways alternative
spaces might operate today—and what their particular motivations and goals might be. We need
alternatives of all kinds.

146
Terry Wolverton response to "What is Feminist Art?", 2019. What is Feminist Art? questionnaire responses,
2019. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

60
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Asset Metadata

Creator Guilford, Lauren Taylor (author)

Core Title ALT LA: alternative art spaces that shaped Los Angeles, 1964-1978

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere

Degree Conferral Date 2022-05

Publication Date 04/20/2022

Defense Date 04/20/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s art,1970s art,alternative art spaces,alternative practices,assemblage,avant-garde,Black Arts movement,Body art,Chicano movement,community art,experimental art,Feminist Art Movement,feminist pedagogy,grassroots art,Lace,Los Angeles,Los Angeles art history,Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions,OAI-PMH Harvest,Performance,political art,postmodernism,public art,site-specific art,social justice art,The Feminist Art Program,The Watts Towers Arts Center,The Women's Building,Watts

Format application/pdf (imt)

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Advisor Jones, Amelia (committee chair), Lacy, Suzanne (committee member), Moss, Karen (committee member)

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Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111037682

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu