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Community engaged art: no longer a form of resistance?

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Community engaged art: no longer a form of resistance?

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Content COMMUNITY-ENGAGED ART: NO LONGER A FORM OF RESISTANCE?
by
Sharon Elizabeth Danjuma
____________________________________________
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTERS OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
May 2010
Copyright 2010 Sharon Elizabeth Danjuma
EPIGRAPH
That tendency toward the hegemonic further suggests that theories confer power, and
they grant the power to exclude and to control art because they construct the definitions.
Some kinds of art, the kinds that fit snugly with the prevailing theory, dominate art
discourse.
Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen, “Active Sights: Art As Social
Interaction”
ii
DEDICATION
This thesis is dedicated to Edward Oliver “Pete” Lee my partner and supporter
throughout this entire process. With Pete’s encouragement, advice and consistent support,
the process was less arduous and the challenges less difficult. This work is a tribute to
Pete who died on October 29, 2009. His untimely death before seeing the completion
was a tremendous loss.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without the support and contributions by many people this manuscript would not have
been possible. I am deeply grateful and thankful to Dean Weisberg for all her support
and encouragement. To Christina Ulke whose advice and directions allow me to think in
new ways, to Elliott Pinkney and Judson Powell, who generously gave of their time and
knowledge. To John Outterbridge who was always available for questions and unselfishly
opened up his collections to me. Without his generosity, this project would not have been
possible. Finally I would like to thank Elizabeth Lovins for all her assistance.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgments iv
List of Figures vii
Abstract viii
Introduction 1
Introduction Endnotes 5
Chapter 1: Community-engaged art before co-optation and appropriation 6
Noah Purifoy and 66 Signs of Neon 6
John Outterbridge and Oh, Speak Speak 13
Chapter 1 Endnotes 19
Chapter 2: History of black settlement 22
Early arrivals 22
World War II migration 25
The Watts community formation and transformation 27
Chapter 2 Endnotes 30
Chapter 3: The social context of 1965 Watts 32
Postwar job loss and the creation of an underclass 32
Public housing transforms a community 33
The Los Angeles Police Department 34
The incident that ignited the 1965 uprising 35
Chapter 3 Endnotes 39
Chapter 4: Organizing resistance 41
The Nation of Islam 43
The Black Panthers 44
United Slaves 45
Chapter 4 Endnotes 48
v
Chapter 5: Current practices of community-engaged art 50
The Roof is on Fire and The Watts House Project 52
Shifts in political landscape/shifts in funding mandates 53
Chapter 5 Endnotes 55
Conclusion 57
Conclusion Endnotes 60
Bibliography 61
vi
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1: Judson Powell, Signs of Neon, 1966. 11
Figure 2: Noah Purifoy, Sir Watts, 1966. 12
Figure 3: Debby Brewer, Sun Flowers, 1966. 13
Figure 4: John Outterbridge, Elliott Pinkney, Charles Dixson and Dale Davis,
Oh, Speak Speak, 1972. 18
Figure 5: Interior of slum dwelling in Bronzevillel/Little Tokyo, 1944. 27
Figure 6: Building engulfed in flames during the 1965 Uprising. 38
vii
ABSTRACT
During the 1960s and 1970s, African American artists created site-specific community
engaged projects that were narrations of the social-cultural context of their communities.
Within this milieu, the art works became powerful communicative tools, as was the
case in John Outterbridge’s collaborative project Oh, Speak Speak and Noah Purifoy’s
66 Signs Of Neon. However, in recent years, a proliferation of community engaged
site-specific arts have emerged in various forms. These projects are appearing in the
discourse of mainstream texts, discussions, museum exhibitions and commissioned
public art works in the urban environment. Once looked upon with little regard by the art
world, community engaged art is now canonized in the academy and elite art circles by a
professional class of critics, curators, art historians and urban planners. This co-optation
and assimilation of the aesthetic has weakened the criticality of the practice creating a
disembodied commodification and a form of social work.

viii
INTRODUCTION
“Site-determined, site-oriented, site-referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive,
site-related”
1
are some of the terms according to Miwon Kwon that have emerged in
the last several years to describe the various “permutations of site-specific art in the
present.”
2
Kwon believes “that on one hand, this phenomenon indicates a return of sorts:
an attempt to rehabilitate…. the anti-idealist, anticommercial site-specific practices of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, [but] on the other hand, it signals a desire to distinguish
current practices from those of the past.”
3
This need to separate from the previous site-
specific praxis is “partly due to the conceptual limitations of existing models of site
specificity itself,”
4
as the practice moves away from the grounded object base aesthetic,
in a fixed physical site, to process engagement, situated in social conditions. I would
argue that this need to formulate new terminology is not situated in the restriction of the
paradigm, but in the commodification of this once marginalized practice by what Grant
Kester have termed the professional managerial class (PMC). These PMC’s, which are
middle class, usually white, MFA educated artists, critics, curators, art historians and
urban planners and according to Kester “have access to the privileged lifestyle of the
middle class, and are in fact often employed by foundations and agencies that serve the
interests of the middle and upper classes, they nevertheless believe that they can offer
disinterested solutions to problems.”
5
For African American artists in the 1960s and 1970s, site-specific community
engaged art was the only option available to them. Denied access to galleries and
1
museums, they created art with and for the community. These works were vehicles
for engagement and discussions in response to social conditions and a means of
encouraging “community… participation as a means of effecting social change.”
6
Yet,
many if not most of these projects were ignored by the PMC with little or no existing
archival evidence left in the wake. In this thesis I will discuss 66 Signs Of Neon and Oh,
Speak Speak. Two site-specific community-engaged art works that emerged within the
social context of the 1965 Watts uprising. Despite the significance and f the projects,
the academy and mainstream cultural institutions largely ignored them. However,
these works laid the foundation for current site-specific engagements such as Edgar
Arceneaux’s Watts House Project.
As New Orleans take center stage in the public discourse, a trend has developed to
“mobilize the site as a discursive narrative.”
7
This mobilization can be seen in the current
frenzy of college-educated artists and curators that are activating the space with various
site-specific works that are “narrative trajectories of the artist’ s prior projects executed in
other places.”
8
These new works become part of the artists’ vitae who then move on to
the next site leaving the community behind with the same economic and social problems
that attracted the artists to engage the site in the first place. This same phenomenon was
seen in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts uprising. A myriad of art programs emerged only
to varnish in a few years.
Now that the spotlight has faded from the 1965 Watts uprising, it is necessary
according to Maulana Karenga in an article published on August 6, 2009, in the Los
Angeles Sentinel to “protect and preserve the cultural and political integrity of this
2
historic event in terms of how it is remembered and interpreted as an act of collective
resistance rather than a riot.”
9
Keeping 66 Signs of Neon and Oh, Speak Speak in
contemporary discourse is one of the ways to accomplish this. The works served as
symbols for community resistance against social and economic inequality.
In Chapter One of this manuscript I will look at the two above mentioned
site-specific, community-engaged art projects that became “powerful means for
communicating the narratives”
10
of 1960s Watts. Both projects became tools for
remembrance by a group of artists that were not only part of the community, but were
committed to creating social change.
In Chapter Two, the history of African American settlement in Los Angeles will
be explored. Starting with the first arrivals in 1887-1888 to World War II migration.
For the dominant group, the early arrivals were not perceived as a threat, but as the
number increased during World War II migration, white Angelenos were forced to
interact with blacks in every facet of life. This second Great Migration as it came to
be known “permanently transformed the nature of race relation in urban America by
undermining the most fundamental rules separating black workers from white workers,
black neighbors from white neighbors, and even black men from white women.”
11
This
created tensions between blacks and whites and set in motion many policies and laws that
ultimately led to the creation of the racialized community of Watts.
Chapter Three will look at the social context of 1965 Watts within this racialized
space. A space that was not only regulated and “rely on governing principles and
practices”
12
for containment, but was justified within a discourse of cultural inferiority .
3
Resistance to this ideology emerged in the form of various nationalistic and cultural
groups, which laid the groundwork for many of the community-engaged art. The forms
of these resistances will be the topic of Chapter Four.
Finally, Chapter Five will look at the current manifestations of community-
engaged art. An art form that was once a source of criticality and engagement for
oppressed groups to “uncover and create their own stories.”
13
Stories that were “owned
by the people themselves, rather than by an elite class of artists”
14
are now being
appropriated and co-opted by the professional managerial class.

4
INTRODUCTION ENDNOTES
1
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge: MIT, 2004), 1.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid., 2.
5
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art
((Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 134.
6
Nina Felshin, But is it Art? The Spirit of Art As Activism (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1995), 9.
7
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity
(Cambridge: MIT, 2004), 46.
8
Ibid., 52.
9
Maulana Karenga, “Honoring the Watts Revolt: Rightful Remembrance and Renewed
Resistance,” Los Angeles Sentinel, August 6, 2009.
10
R. Elizabeth Thomas and Julian Rappaport, “Art as Community Narrative: A Resource
for Social Change,” in Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, ed.
M. Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizl, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris
(Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996), 317.
11
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 37.
12
Jennifer J. Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of
Toronto, 2008), 14.
13
R. Elizabeth Thomas and Julian Rappaport, “Art as Community Narrative: A Resource
for Social Change,” in Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, ed. M.
Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizl, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris
(Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996), 317.
14
Ibid.

5
CHAPTER ONE: COMMUNITY-ENGAGED ART BEFORE CO-OPTATION
AND APPROPRIATION
NOAH PURIFOY AND 66 SIGNS OF NeON
To me art is not art as we generally see it, held in high esteem. It to me, is a mere act of
doing something that fulfills or appeases the human urge to become universal.
Noah Purifoy
1

Before Edgar Arceneaux and The Watts House Project,
1
there was Noah Purifoy
and his community base social engagement. Born on August 17, 1917, Noah Purifoy was
one of thirteen children born to sharecropper farmers in segregated Snow Hill, Alabama.
At the age of three he was picking cotton alongside his parents and siblings. Later the
family moved to Birmingham, Alabama. After high school he enrolled in Alabama State
Teachers College where he majored in history and education, but racism denied him the
opportunity to teach in his fields. Unable to find employment as a history and education
teacher, he took a job at Tuscaloosa high school teaching industrial arts and woodshop.
In 1942 during World War II, Noah enlisted in the Navy and despite having a
college degree, his job in the military was that of a carpenter’s mate under the supervision
of a white high school drop out. Following the service, he enrolled at Atlanta University
where he received a Masters in Social Work. For the next several years he worked as a
social worker, first in Cleveland, Ohio and later at the Los Angeles county hospital in Los
Angeles, California.
Finding social work depressing and ineffectual as a tool for social change, he
1. A collaborative project across from the Watts Towers that’s engaging the site by
painting and redeveloping several of the homes.
6
decided to give art a try. In 1952, he enrolled at Chinouard School of Art (later CalArts)
where he majored in industrial arts before switching to fine arts. Although it was well
known that Nelbert Chouinard, the founder of Chouinard, distained blacks, Noah called
his experience at the school rewarding. According to Noah:
What turned me on to art, really, was art history…. when I got to study how art
is formed and all the kinds of manifestations, it gave me the impetus to do art.
Because I had these things inside of me ready to be expressed, but I didn’t have a
media through which to express them, I tried education, that didn’t work. I’d try
this and that, didn’t work. It didn’t communicate to the people my deep feelings.
So I was almost always at a loss to feel that I was understood. And art, being
a nonverbal language, enabled me to feel I at least understood myself, if others
didn’t.
2
After graduating from Chouinard in 1956, Noah worked a series of jobs for the next eight
years until 1964 when The Committee to Save the Watts Towers hired him as the first
director of the Watts Towers Arts Center. At that time, the art center was located inside a
small house on 107
th
street next to Simon Rodia’s structures. It was here that Noah began
to formulate his philosophy “that art should be rooted in the community.”
3
In a 1992
interview, Noah describes one of his community-engaged projects.
We had many extremely interesting projects including the whole community, one
of which was outstanding in my mind, where we painted all the houses on 107
th

Street. We collected the paint from the paint stores, and the kids donned their
work clothes, and we invited people from outside the community to come and
help and so forth. After painting all the houses, we washed the street down and
had a party that night and everybody came. The whole community came. The
streets were so crowded we had to spend most of our time directing traffic. For
the open house, as we called it, we erected a mural outside with some painting and
sculpturing and whatnot.
4

7
Although the community considered this community-engaged process driven project
successful, it went unnoticed by the PMC’s.
Noah’s approach and belief in the power of art to communicate and create social
change crystallized in the days following the Watts uprising. According to Noah, “The
debris from the riot is what finally launched me on my own course.”
5
In the catalogue for
66 Signs Of Neon, Noah recalled how he and Judson Powell:
While teaching at the Watts Tower Art Center, watched aghast the rioting,
looting and burning during the August happening. And while the debris was still
smoldering, we ventured into the rubble like other junkers of the community,
digging and searching, but unlike others, obsessed without quite knowing why.
By September, working during lunchtime and after teaching hours, we had
collected three tons of charred wood and fire-moulded debris…. Often the smell
of the debris… turned our thoughts to what were and were not tragic times in
Watts: and what to do with the junk we had collected.
6

With three tons of debris, Noah and Judson collaborated with Max Neufeldt, Arthur
Secunda, Ruth Saturensky, Debby Brewer, Gordon Wagner, Leon Saulter and Frank
Anthony on sixty-six assemblage pieces. Creating such works as Signs of Neon by
Judson Powell, (see figure 1) Sir Watts by Noah Purifoy (see figure 2) and Sun Flowers
by Debby Brewer (see figure 3). According to Judson in an interview with the author,
“Noah [was] a very profound artist. His ability to immediately interpret material was
incredible.”
7
Noah described 66 Signs of Neon as:
A one-to-one format of communication between individuals who otherwise
would not or could not communicate. The ultimate purpose of this effort, as we
conceived it then, was to demonstrate to the community of Watts, to Los Angeles,
and to the world at large, that education through creativity is the only way left
for a person to find himself in this materialistic world. Junk was chosen as the
medium for a variety of reasons, in addition to its obvious impact as the artifacts
of tragedy.
8

8
66 Signs of Neon was first exhibited on April 3, 1966 at the Simon Rodia
Commemorative Watts Renaissance of the Arts held at Markham Junior High School. In
a perfunctory human-interest story, written after months of endless negative portrayal of
the community, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer Art Berman Wrote:
The flames of August still flickered along 103
rd
St. as Judson Powell and Noah
Purifoy searched through the rubble. Unlike many Negroes who picked over
the debris of the Watts riot seeking something of monetary value, Powell and
Purifoy looked only for worthless junk. They were excited by what they found-
hunks of melted neon signs, medicine bottles embedded in the molten remains
of colorful plastic raincoats, twisted bits of mental, charred wood, pieces of
smashed automobiles…. For the last seven months, Powell and Purifoy, have
been transforming their treasured “junk” into unique and fascinating art forms.
…. Such assemblages along with more traditional art works by hundreds of Watts
artists will be featured at the Simon Rodia Commemorative Watts Renaissance of
the Arts.
9

After the showing at Markham, 66 Signs of Neon exhibited at the first Watts Summer
Festival before traveling for the next three years, first to universities throughout
California then to Washington DC and finally to Tennessee. However, the works were
never displayed in the art galleries. Noah described his experience on the road with the
work. “We always showed in the student union or someplace like that. And they had
terrible facilities, sleeping quarters and so forth. They were just terrible. People felt
sorry for us because we complained a lot and put us up in their homes.”
10

Wanting to engage with the audience, at each stop the artists provided a pad and
pen behind a curtain for viewers to write down their comments. The remarks ranged
from “scrap metal salad,” “Shredded newspapers,” “400 frenzied orangutans hurling
paint cans,” “demented junkman’s paradise,” “You people, citizens of Watts,
9
Los Angeles, USA did it-saw art in a calamity or made it so,” to “the highest form of the
artistic spirit is here in abundance.”
11

In 1969 after the work had traveled for a few years the pieces “came back in a
truck just about in the same shape it was when we found it in Watts, in the smoldering
embers of the Watts riot. In other words, that was the end of Signs of Neon. It was back
in its original state: Junk!
12
Today there is very little evidence that the work ever existed.
After two years as director of the Watts Towers Art Center, the board forced Noah
out indicating that they wanted a more “sophisticated” art program. According to Noah:
Their more sophisticated art program was to include people outside the
community, kind of an art school where people come to matriculate, you know.
They wanted to be known as something profound, some advanced art school of
some echelon, I don’t know what. It made me very unhappy about their attitude,
because they didn’t fully realize that that was Watts. That you can’t get to know
a community by having a sophisticated arts school there that did not include the
community.
13

During his time as director, Noah became “an important example of an artist who
rejected commercialism and the trappings of success and instead pursued excellence in
his community.”
14
In the process, becoming a mentor to emerging artists such as David
Hammons, Betye Saar and John Outterbridge who ultimately replaced Noah as director at
the Watts Towers Art Center.
10
FIGURE 1. Signs of Neon by Judson Powell, Los
Angeles, California (1966). Courtesy of John
Outterbridge, Photograph by Harry Drinkwater
11

FIGURE 2. Sir Watts by Noah Purifoy, Los Angeles, California (1966). Courtesy of
John Outterbridge. Photograph by Harry Drinkwater.
12
FIGURE 3. Sun Flowers by Debby Brewer, Los Angeles, California (1966). Courtesy of
John Outterbridge. Photograph by Harry Drinkwater.
JOHN OUTTERBRIDGE AND OH, SPeAk SPeAk
Much like Noah, John Outterbridge believed in art’s ability to create change.
John was born in Jim Crow Greenville, North Carolina in 1933. After high school he
attended North Carolina A& T for a year before attempting to join the Air Force hoping
to become a pilot. After being told that there was a quota for black pilots and the quota
was filled, he joined the Army and was shipped off to Germany for three years. Upon
returning to the United States, John enrolled at the Chicago Academy of Art before going
to the American Academy of Art while working as a bus driver with the Chicago Transit
Authority. According to John “I remained a bus driver for eight years or more. I went to
13
school. I painted. I started to show in galleries and that kind of thing. I developed some
popularity as an artist in Chicago. But those were crude years.”
15

In 1963, John and his new wife moved to California. It took him three months to
find employment. Over the next few years he worked several part time jobs, including
one as an installer at the Pasadena Art Museum. In a 1973 interview with Allen Bassing,
John recalled:
Being a black artist, I’ll never forget how hard we worked to hang the show that
opened the new Pasadena Art Museum. I think that show illustrated what had
happened on the West Coast in art from 1944 to 1968… A lot did happen…. but
nothing happened with black artists or with any black individual, who was an
artist, according to what was installed in that show.
16

In 1964 John came into contact with Noah Purifoy and James Wood, a
community organizer and the founder of Studio Watts, one of the most influential
cultural/artistic institutions in Watts. John described James as a man that saw art as a tool
to make social changes. “He was one of the first people that I started to hear that from
when I came to California, he and Noah Purifoy, community involvement through the
arts, and using your creativity as a way to reestablish and to extend the whole concept
and notion of community.”
17
This consciousness would appear in many of John’s work.
According to John:
I think that most of the work and the feeling to work has always developed from
the things around me, people around me, situations around me, conditions in
the world, and so on. For a period of time, I did things that might have fallen in
the category of social commentary without even being aware of it. But, anyway,
whatever I did came from some outside influence.
18

14
John applied this approach to Oh, Speak Speak. A16 feet by 4 feet four-panel multi-
dimensional sculpture created in collaboration with Charles Dickson, Dale Davis, Elliott
Pinkney and Nate Farance (See figure 4). Sited at the corner of 103
rd
and Beach Street in
an ad-hoc park, which contained “The Freedom Tree” so named because it survived the
uprising when everything around it burned. The title of the work referenced a musical
prayer by community artist and musician Troy Robinson and was commissioned to
commemorate the Watts Community Housing Corporation (WCHC).
For Wood, art was a framework for social change, and WCHC was a chance
to infuse art into the neighborhood. This low-income housing project, which was a
partnership program between James Wood, Westminster Solid Rock Baptist Church and
the Watts Area Redevelopment Agency, would incorporate the arts and arts programs as
part of the housing community. Located in the once vibrant cultural vein around 103
rd

Street in the area that came to be known as “Charcoal Alley” in the aftermath of the
uprising due to the extensive damage, WCHC would be an artists/tenants space. “Each
of the artist-occupants… will get a stipend in return for a commitment to community
participation, offering lessons, organizing art events, and acting as the resource for the
expression of needs, joys and desires of their neighbors.”
19
To celebrate his vision for WCHC, Wood created the “Ceremony of the Land”
festival. For two days in April 1973, the festival was as a “dedication commemorating
the beginning of the new arts-oriented housing project… where each artist instructs his
neighbors in the arts, not just from a craftsman’s point of view but from the point of
view which sees art as an integral expression of the community, the culture, the country,
15
the times.”
20
But Ceremony of the Land for Wood was also a dedication to the dead.
According to Wood, “I’ve been trying to find out who they were-the dead-from the
police to the people. All the symbols of the past have been lost, so we’ve had to go into
the land and from these recreated new symbols. The most important thing is that each of
these brings to the Ceremony their own dedication.”
21
Within this context, John
conceptualized Oh, Speak Speak. In an interview with the author, John talked about the
evolution of the project:
I was contacted by Jim [James] to do a piece for “the Ceremony of the Land.”
I was given one thousand dollars. I wanted other artists to be a part of this, so I
contacted Charles, Elliott Pinkney, and Dale Davis. The piece would be a four-
panel sculpture with a bell at the top. Each artist was given a panel to do whatever
they wanted. We did not see each other’s work until the day it was installed.
Then every two years, the four panels would come down and another four panels
by new artists would go up. We would then donate the panels to the mothers of
Watts. The work was about voice. Giving the people a voice.
22

Elliott recalled it being “a tribute to people who died in the riot. A living
piece. The poem written along the panel is their voice.”
23
But Oh, Speak Speak never
realized its full potential. After only six months, the work mysteriously burned down.
No one knew who destroyed the work, but at the time it was rumored to be the act of a
disgruntled artist that later turned out to be confessed FBI informant Darthard Perry, who
also went by Ed Riggs and Othello.
2

Both 66 Signs of Neon and Oh, Speak Speak were about collective remembering
and empowerment in the face of oppression. They were significant projects, because
they gave a sense of the importance to the past and became a cultural memory for the
2 In a April, 1977 interview with Mother Jones writer Roger Rapoport, Perry talked
about burning the Watts Writers Workshop and other forms of sabotage for the FBI.
16
community. Yet, they were ignored, destroyed and erased from the dominant discourse.
This form of “organized forgetting” according to Milan Kundera “is a form of death…and
also the great problem of politics. When a big power wants to deprive a small country of
its national consciousness it uses the method of organized forgetting… A nation which
loses awareness of its past gradually looses itself.”
24

This type of forgetting is often witnessed in the United States particularly in
relation to the African American community. The need for erasure in Watts is situated
in white fears of black militancy. According to Gerald Horne, this fear was articulated
in a 1965 article written for Fortune magazine by Charles Silberman who wrote, “Black
anger would no longer be turned inward but directed outward. The revolt bolstered
the self-esteem of the residents and gave the area an identity and a touch of glamour…
the foreign visitor to Los Angeles is now more likely to tour Watts than MGM or Forest
Lawn.”
25
Acknowledging the art works would mean illuminating the social inequalities
that produced them, and a community resistance to the oppression.
17
FIGURE 4. Oh, Speak Speak by John Outterbridge, Elliott Pinkney, Charles Dixson and
Dale Davis, Los Angeles, California (1972). Courtesy of John Outterbridge.
18
CHAPTER ONE ENDNOTES
1
Samella Lewis and Ruth Waddy, Black Artists on Art. Vol. 2. (Los Angeles:
Contemporary Crafts, 1971), 68.
2
Noah Purifoy, interview conducted in 1992 by Karen Anne Mason, Center for Oral
History Research, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Audio
recording, tape no. II, side one. 32.
3
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 76.

4
Noah Purifoy, interview conducted in 1992 by Karen Anne Mason, Center for
Oral History Research, Young Research Library, University of California,
Los Angeles. Audio recording, tape no. III, side one. 69-70.
5
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los
Angeles. (Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 76.
6
Noah Purifoy as told to Ted Michel, “The Art of Communication as a Creative
Act,” in Junk Art: 66 Signs of Neon (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of Neon, Ca.1966).
7
Judson Powell interview by Author, Compton, CA, September 24, 2009.
Assemblage artist, community organizer and co-founder of The Communicative Arts
Academy, a community arts program that trained young people in a variety of art forms
including photography, music, dance, theatre and the visual arts. Also one of the artists on
the collaborative art project 66 Signs of Neon.
8
Noah Purifoy as told to Ted Michel, “The Art of Communication as a Creative Act,”
in Junk Art: 66 Signs of Neon (Los Angeles: 66 Signs of Neon, Ca.1966).
9
Art Berman, “Junk From First Watts Riot Turned Into Works of Art.” Los Angeles Times
March 28, 1966.
10
Noah Purifoy, interview conducted in 1992 by Karen Anne Mason, Center for
Oral History Research, Young Research Library, University of California,
Los Angeles. Audio recording, tape no. IV , side two. 91.
11
Abby Wasserman, http://www.museumca.org/global/reso_articles_noah_purifoy.html
(accessed August 8, 2009).
19
12
Noah Purifoy, interview conducted in 1992 by Karen Anne Mason, Center for Oral
History Research, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Audio
recording, tape no. IV , side two. 96.
13
Ibid.
14
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 76.
15
Oral History interview with John Outterbridge, 1973 Jan. 3, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonia institution.
16
Ibid.
17
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 76.
18
Oral History interview with John Outterbridge, 1973 Jan. 3, Archives of American Art,
Smithsonia institution.
19
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 76.
20
Johnie Scott, “The Ceremony of the Land,” originally published in Art in Society,
vol. 10, no.3 (Fall-Winter, 1973), 33-39; Watts, 1966, in From the Ashes; Voices of
Watts, edited by Budd Schulberg, (new York: The New American Library, 1967) under
“Settings” epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context...
(accessed August 18, 2009).
21
Ibid
22
John Outterbridge interview by Author, Los Angeles, CA August 28, 2009. Artist,
arts administrator and organizer with a career spanning decades, he co-founded the
Communicative Arts Academy, a community arts program that trained young people in
a variety of art forms including photography, music, dance, theatre and the visual arts.
Between 1975-1992, he served as director of the Watts Towers Arts Center before retiring
to concentrate on his arts full-time.
23
Elliott Pinkney interview by Author, Compton, CA October 5, 2009. Painter,
printmaker and sculpture and one of Los Angeles most prolific and accomplished
Muralist, he created a series of works for the Los Angeles bicentennial. In addition, he is
known for extensive public murals seen throughout the city and county.
20
24
Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS epidemic, and The
Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California, 1997), 7.
25
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo,
1997), 40.
21
CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY OF BLACK SETTLEMENT
EARLY ARRIV ALS
“The first identifiable black settlement in Los Angeles, which coincided with
the great land boom of 1887-1888, was on First and Los Angeles Streets adjacent to the
downtown rail yards.”
1
The small settlement, which consisted mainly of the Southern
Pacific railway porters and their families “climbed steadily, from 2,131 in 1900, to
15,579, in 1920, to 38,898 in 1930.”
2
Over the next several years, the population
expanded as boosters, porters and propagandists spread word of California’s bucolic
conditions. Although this was an attractive selling point to many African Americans,
the majority migrating was fleeing the harsh violent conditions of Jim Crow South.
According to Lonnie G. Bunch “From 1882-1901 more than two thousand African
Americans were lynched in the South. The racial violence … was so severe that
lynching… [was a] weekly phenomena.”
3

On the surface, California offered an appearance of freedom and possibilities for
middle class accomplishments. A notion perpetuated by black propagandist Jefferson
Edmonds in his position as editor for the Los Angeles newspaper the Liberator.
Edmonds carefully “crafted an optimistic, middle-class vision of what black life could
become in Los Angeles.”
4
The belief was supported by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) officer W.E.B. Du Bois on his May 1913 visit
to Los Angeles.
22
In an article written by Du Bois for The Crisis in 1913, Du Bois stated that:
Los Angeles was wonderful. The air was scented with orange blossoms and the
beautiful homes lay low crouching on the earth as though they loved its scents
and flowers. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully
housed, nor the average efficiency intelligence in the colored population so
high. Here is an aggressive, hopeful group-with some wealth, large industrial
opportunity and a buoyant spirit.
5

Los Angeles did offer African-Americans a potential for freedom and middle class
achievements, particularly in the ability to purchase homes, but it was far from the racial
paradise Du Bois reported. In pre-war Los Angeles, homeownership amongst blacks
were higher that any other city in the United States, but limited economic opportunities
made it an impossible dream for many.
On the eve of World War I, the small African American community that settled
on First and Los Angeles Streets had grown and expanded. “These Black Angelenos
settled throughout the city-in Pico Heights, on Alameda Street between First and Third,
along Central Avenue north of First Street, near Azusa and Weller streets, and along West
Adams Boulevard.”
6
This dispersed settlement indicated that racist restrictive housing
covenants did not yet play a role.
On January 4
th
1914 when Jefferson Edmonds died, his views of Los Angeles as a
racial paradise had shifted. Near the end of his life, he lamented over the state of African
Americans. “He believed that for colored citizens, there is danger ahead.”
7
His words
were prophetic. By 1920 as the African American population increased, “so did the
restrictions and racism that blacks experienced.”
8

Blacks faced segregation in all facets of their lives, including the use of public
23
spaces. “Black Angelenos could only swim at certain beaches, use municipal pools at
specified times, and attend movies and concerts at certain theaters or sit in segregated
seats often called (“nigger heaven”).”
9
In addition, the gains that blacks had made in
homeownership were now being threatened and limited by race-restrictive covenants and
red lining policies and laws. These covenants remain in place all the way into the 1960’s.
“In areas where restrictive covenants had failed to curtail minorities, the Ku Klux Klan,
which surfaced in Los Angeles during the 1920s, served a similar function, intimidating,
threatening, and sometimes attacking Blacks who moved into white neighborhoods.”
10

African Americans became confined to a restricted community around Central Avenue.
By the 1930s, it was estimated that over a million blacks had left the Southern
states for cites in the Northeast, Midwest and Western states, with Los Angeles
“African American population growing to 38,898.”
11
Despite, the racial restrictions
and discrimination in these urban centers, they were the “Promised Land” for African
Americans fleeing the segregated south, and for the next several years, the exodus
continued.
Black migration from the Southern states into Los Angeles occurred in three
phases. The first occurred between 1890-1915 and consisted of what Du Bois refers to as
The Talented Ten. They were the more affluent educated African Americans. Since this
was a small group of either professionals or service workers with middle class values,
and not perceived as a threat for jobs, they were not spatially segregated and confined.
As indicated earlier, this community was geographically dispersed.
The second phase of migration occurred between 1916-1930. Known as the
24
Great Migration, it is estimated that 1.6 millions African-Americas left the South for the
cities in the North. However, despite the labor shortage and the availability of industrial
jobs, black migration to Los Angeles during this period was slow and steady. These black
migrants usually had some savings and were not rural folks but had lived and worked in
the Southern cities. They were also not in search of jobs, but better social conditions.
And like the earlier arrivals, they were not geographically confined. However , this would
change with the beginning of World War II migration when blacks began to represent a
threat to white privileges.
WORLD WAR II MIGRATION
World War II transformed cites throughout the Northern, Midwestern and
Western United States and “initiated a fundamentally new era in African American
life and history.”
12
Fleeing Jim Crow South in search of defense production jobs, it is
estimated that over 5 millions blacks left Southern cities between 1940 and 1960 in
search of economic opportunities. This “Second Great Migration” “generation resolved
to improve their lives and the lives of their children.”
13
It is estimated “at the peak of
the migration in 1943, more than six thousand African Americans came to Los Angeles
each month, and more than two hundred thousand arrived in the 1940s.”
14
Due to the
increase in the number of African Americans in the city, “whites were now forced
to interact with blacks to a degree unimaginable in pre-war Los Angeles, a situation
that generated unprecedented racial conflict and more frequent articulations of racist
sentiment throughout the city…. Many whites residents openly protested the arrival of
more migrants.”
15

25
Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Little Tokyo became the entry point for many
blacks:
Formerly home to Los Angeles sizable Japanese population, who had been swiftly
relocated to internment camps during the war, Little Tokyo became the port of
entry for new black migrants. Located just south of Union Station, where the
Southern Pacific ended its route, “Bronzeville” – as it came to be called- became
the center of the black migrant community and a visible symbol of the worst
effects of residential segregation.
16

Seeing an opportunity for economic gains, many owners exploited wartime housing
shortages by “sub-dividing small, single-family apartments into multiple-occupancy
“kitchenettes” [that] were grossly substandard…[with] inadequate plumbing and sever
systems.”
17
According to a 1945 article written by Dorothy Baruch of The Nation and
cited by Josh Sides:
In place after place children lived in windowless rooms, amid peeling plaster,
rats and the flies that gathered thick around food that stood on open shelves or
kitchen-bedroom tables. Ordinarily there was no bathtub; never more than a single
washbowl or lavatory. Sometimes as many as forty people shared one toilet.
Families were separated only by sheets strung up between beds. Many of the beds
were “hot,” with people taking turns sleeping in them.
18

For the thousands of African American war migrants, Los Angeles was not
the paradise Du Bois championed in The Crisis three decades earlier. Conditions
were horrific and living conditions were deplorable (see figure 5). But there were few
options available to the new arrivals. “Those with family ties…often doubled up with
family members on Central Avenue,”
19
which was also severely overcrowded. As the
communities of Bronzeville and Central Avenue swelled beyond capacity, many African
Americans moved to the small multi-racial city of Watts.
26
FIGURE 5. Interior of a slum dwelling in Bronzeville/Little Tokyo, Los Angeles,
California (1944). Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
WATTS COMMUNITY FORMATION AND TRANSFORMATION
“The community of Watts, about seven miles south of downtown Los Angeles
and five miles south of the heart of South Central”
20
was given to the Spanish-Mexican
settlers in 1820 as part of the Rancho La Tajiata land grant. Originally, the land was used
for cattle gazing and farming. By 1870, as white settlers moved out west, the lands were
sold off and subdivided into small residential lots. Known as “Mudtown” for its swampy
terrain, Watts was named after C.H Watts, a real estate developer from Pasadena. In
1902, Watts became an important stop along the Southern Pacific line with a bustling
hub that connected the unincorporated city of Watts to downtown Los Angles and the
outlining suburbs.
With accessible transportation, developers seized the opportunities to build
27
housing tracts. But “the narrowness of [the] lots limited the size and quality of the homes
to be built, guaranteeing that only a persecuted minority like blacks would be attracted
there.”
21
However, “its boosters advertised it as a workingman’s dream, where one could
buy a home for one dollar down and one dollar per week.”
22
For blacks, homeownership
became a possibility.
By 1926, a significant number of middle class blacks resided in Watts. This
increased in the African American population attracted the attention of whites particularly
in the all white communities - of Lynwood, South Gate, Bell and Compton -that
surrounded Watts. Referring to Watts as “Nigger Heaven,” whites began to fear that “a
black town with black elected political leadership could be utilized to advance black
interests in the region.”
23
To ward off this possibility, Watts was incorporated in 1926
into Los Angeles under the guise of expanding the “tax base in order to pay for precious
water brought by the Owens Valley Aqueduct.”
24

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, although the black population grew, Watts
remained a small multi-racial working class community with “Chinese lottery dens,
honky-tonks, and speak-easies.”
25
Watts early black residents were usually lighter
skinned middle class African Americans from Louisiana. Recently, a ninety-one year old
Los Angeles resident informed me with pride in his voice, “When I came to Los Angeles
from New Orleans, I did not move to Central Ave, I moved into Watts.”
26
Later as
wartime migration brought poorer blacks to Watts, conflict and friction emerged between
the middle class blacks and the poorer arrival. “This led to “year consciousness” or status
determined by what year one arrived.”
27
28
As more African Americans migrated to Los Angeles in search of defense jobs,
Watts doubled in size. It is estimated that between 1940 and 1946 over “ten thousand
new residents moved into Watts.”
28
This influx created tensions between the established
middle class black community who saw the darker newcomers as unsophisticated and not
“attuned to urban folkways.”
29

This racial hierarchy would manifest itself in many of the social causes taken on
by the civil rights groups.
As thousands of poorer black migrants arrived, the tendency toward intra-racial
friction between upper and middle class blacks and lower-class blacks led to
“year consciousness,” or status determined by what year one arrived. There
was a perception that lighter skin correlated with early arrival in LA. This year
consciousness may have influenced the strategies of civil rights or ganizations,
which focused more on restrictive covenants-a particular concern of the middle
class-than on public housing, a particular concern of the strapped sector of the
working class.”
30

As the migrations of the poorer blacks continued, blacks with the economic means fled
Watts for the segregated middle class black communities of West Adams and Baldwin
Hills. The once economically diverse, culturally rich community of Watts would become
a site of despair and poverty.
29
CHAPTER TWO ENDNOTES
1
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to
the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 15.
2
Ibid.
3
Lonnie Bunch, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L Edmonds, Black
Propagandist of the California Dream,” in Seeking el Dorado: African Americans in
California, ed. Lawrence B. De Graff, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, (Settle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2001), 132.
4
Ibid., 131.
5
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 11.
6
Lonnie Bunch, “The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L Edmonds, Black
Propagandist of the California Dream,” in Seeking el Dorado: African Americans in
California, ed. Lawrence B. De Graff, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, (Settle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2001), 132.
7
Ibid., 142.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 143
10
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 18.
11
Lonnie Bunch, “ The Greatest State for the Negro: Jefferson L Edmonds, Black
Propagandist of the California Dream,” in Seeking el Dorado: African Americans in
California, ed. Lawrence B. De Graff, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor, (Settle, WA:
University of Washington Press, 2001), 144.
12
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present. (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 36.

13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., 43
30
15
Ibid., 44.
16
Ibid., 44-45.
17
Ibid., 45
18
Ibid., 44
19
Ibid., 45.
20
Ibid., 19
21
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1997), 27.
22
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 64.
23
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time the Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1997), 27.
24
Ibid.

25
Ibid.
26
Wendell Collins interview by Author, Los Angeles, CA, October 19, 2009.
Wendell Collins is an artist/activist/community organizer. A graduate of Dillard
University Louisiana, he lived in Los Angeles since 1948. For several years, Wendell
was the first vice chair of the Congress of Racial Equality CORE) and was a part of the
McCone Commission hearing after the 1965 uprising. As a graphic designer, Wendell
created posters for the Black Panthers Party and various African American political
candidates. He formed and ran an artist collective known as the firehouse, which
supported many of the African American artists in Los Angeles.
27
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1997), 33.
28
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 98.
29
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1997), 33.
30
Ibid., 34.
31
CHAPTER THREE: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF 1965 WATTS
According to a September 1965 LA City Council report, Watts reported a
“population of 34,800.”
1
And had become a mainstay for working class and lower class
blacks. The term Watts according to former resident, and minister of information for
the Black Panthers Party, Eldridge Clever, “the very term Watts had become an epithet.
Watts residents not only endured segregation and regional insult suffered by all blacks,
[but] had an added burden to bear that gave added intensity to their anger; they not only
faced interracial pain but the intraracial variety as well.
2
A Los Angeles native from
Baldwin Hill recently told me “when I married my first wife, my mother was upset
because she was from Watts. She [my mother] wanted to know of all the girls out there
why did I have to go find one from Watts?”
3
As a Watts resident you were “deemed out
cast [and] looked down on by other blacks. You were the bottom of [the] barrel. Lighter
skinned blacks looked down on their darker skinned brothers and sisters, refe rring to
[them] as those black niggers in Watts as if they were a whole different race.”
4

POSTWAR JOB LOSS AND THE CREATION OF AN UNDERCLASS
World War II initiated an era of economic prosperity in the United States that
would continue for more than two decades. Sustained by the country’s heavy
manufacturing industries, this boom created thousands of new jobs and laid the
foundation of a new standard of comfort for the American workers that included
union membership, home and automobile ownership, and expanded discretionary
income.
5
3 Interview with a Los Angeles artist wishing to remain anonymous. The interview
was confidential; the name of interviewee is withheld by mutual agreement.
32
The economic prosperity and middle class standard of living that Americans
obtained during the war years is also true for Afvrican Americans, but unlike whites most
were not allowed to be part of the postwar economic boom. This was particularly true for
Watts residents who worked in the smokestack industries along the Alameda corridor.
Within easy reach from Watts, work in the “meatpacking, automobile, rubber tire,
chemical and petroleum refining plants,”
5
provided jobs for black men, and a chance at
middle class life. Although the work was hard, hot, and dirty it was “steady, plentiful,
and, most important, open to black workers.”
6
However, by 1965 these wartime jobs
were being replaced by the aircraft/aerospace defense industries located in the industrial
suburbs. For many of the Watts residents, a lack of transportation made it impossible to
get to these sites. In addition, white resistance to workplace integration made these jobs
unavailable. Unable to find employment, many of the African American residents of
Watts found themselves slipping into poverty and often onto welfare rolls and into public
housing.
PUBLIC HOUSING TRANSFORMS A COMMUNITY
Initially, public housing was a temporary solution for war veterans and their
families. But, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, many poor blacks began moving into
these projects. Soon “Public housing, both in reality and in public perception, was
becoming synonymous with black housing.”
7
According to Josh Sides:
The extent of this perception was evident in several battles over the construction
of housing projects by the Los Angeles County Public Housing Authority, an
organization faced with the unenviable task of finding suitable sites in the largely
white suburbs of the city. Proposed county projects in Compton and Santa
33
Monica met with fierce resistance from white residents, who considered them
“negro housing,” and the projects were ultimately relocated to Watts.
8

Watts contained the infamous housing projects of Jordan Downs, Nickerson Gardens,
and Imperial Court. These sites referred to, as “nigger hatcheries”
9
by the Los Angeles
Police Department (LAPD) became “self contained ghettos in which the worst effects
of segregated life-including racial isolation, overcrowding, crime, and frustration-were
highly concentrated.”
10
By 1965, over eighty-five percent of the community were African
Americans, “overwhelmingly working class, and segregated at the bottom.”
11
In a
Special Census taken that same year:
The entire South Central Area was severely disabled socially and economically
according to all of the criteria measured, and Watts was one of the most disabled
of the communities measured. Unemployment was over 13 percent; the median
income was below the poverty lined defined by the Federal Government; over
10,000 families were headed by females.
12

THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT (LAPD)
Adding to the spatial and social isolation was a corrupt police force with a history of
abusive tactics and disdain for the community. In a detail account, a former white officer,
Mike Rothmiller, paints a picture of the racist practices of the LAPD:
Racism was expected, part of the group persona. Shrink from it and you were an
odd duck, perhaps a pink one…race hatred was nonetheless a dominating force.
Officers lied in arrest reports on routine felony cases…. These were crazies whose
ultimate goal was to waste someone, lunatics who liked nothing better than to
inflict pain. Some officers randomly and arbitrarily beat and tortured black men,
even those who were not suspected of anything. Bending fingers, twisting ears,
tightening hand cuffs….Slamming the victim’s head into the door while placing
him in a vehicle. Overwhelmingly, their illegalities were perpetrated against black
men, who were perceived to be least able to protest effectively.
13

34
After years of abuse by the LAPD, the community was tired of suffering indignities at the
hands of the Police Department. In one instance after another, Watts residents could tell
of the Los Angeles Police Department tactics of harassment and false arrest. Finally on
August 11, 1965 the community watched as police officers beat a motorist after a minor
traffic stop and suddenly LAPD became “the signal offender in angering blacks to the
point of insurrection.”
14

THE INCIDENT THAT IGNITED THE 1965 UPRISING
On Wednesday August 11, 1965 South-Central Los Angeles was in the midst of a heat
wave simmering under 90-degrees temperatures and the “yellow-gray converlet of
smog.”
15
Trying to stay cool, Watts resident Marquette Frye spent the evening with his
stepbrother Ronald at a friend’s house drinking vodka and orange juice. After having
“three or four drinks,”
16
Marquette Frye decided it was time to go home. Driving his
mother 1955 Buick, a black motorist reported to the LAPD that Marquette was swerving
in and out of traffic. As he drove past 117
th
Street, California Highway Patrol motorcycle
Officer Lee Minikus pulled him over. He was only a block from home. Confident that
he had not done anything wrong, Marquette stepped out of the car and approached the
officer in a friendly manner. Smelling alcohol on his breath, Officer Minikus, determined
that Marquette was drunk, and called for back-up and “a transportation car to take
Marquette to jail.”
17

In the meantime, a crowd began to gather. Before long, someone had notified
Rena Frye, Marquette’s mother, who arrived at the scene in minutes. “Wearing a loose
35
fitting shift and recovering from a major operation.”
18
Rena pleaded with the officer
to not arrest her son who was now in handcuffs. Meanwhile, the crowd continued to
swell. As Officer Minikus was writing up the arrest, police backup arrived in the form of
Officers Wayne Wilson and Veale J. Fondvill from the Highway Patrol. Ronald, who had
sat in the car, until they had placed the handcuffs on Marquette, pleaded with the officers
to let him take Marquette home. As Ronald appealed to Fondvill and Minikus,
Officer Wilson:
Without speaking… jabbed the riot baton into the pit of Ronald’s stomach.
As Ronald doubled over, he jabbed again. Ronald rolled to the ground. With
one adversary dispatched, it was but a half dozen steps to where Marquette
was fending off Minikus. Wilson swung the baton. He caught Marquette with
a glancing blow to the forehead, above the left eye. As Marquette turned
instinctively to meet him, Wilson jabbed him hard in the stomach. Marquette
doubled over. Instantly Minikus caught his head in a vise and [led] him to the
patrol car.
19
Watching Ronald beaten by the officers and forced into the patrol car, Rena Frye rushed
to rescue her son. She jumped on the back of Minikus’s. However, she was ripped away
by Officer Fondville, who handcuffed her hands behind her back and forced her into the
patrol car. The crowd, now estimated to be around 150, began shouting for the police to
“leave the old lady alone!”
20
All the while, more officers arrived and the crowds continue
to grow in numbers and agitation. One of the spectators to arrive in the midst of the
chaos was a nineteen years old student name Joyce Ann Gaines. She had been working
at a nearby beauty shop and decided to inquire to what was causing all the commotion.
Wearing a barber smock that made her appear pregnant, she attempted to navigate her
way through the crowd to see what was going on. Suddenly she found herself being
36
dragged backwards by one of the many officers now at the scene. Someone in the crowd
had spit on an officer, and they were determined to arrest the offender. Although no one
could prove that Joyce Ann was responsible for the offense, she was handcuffed and
arrested anyway. As she resisted the arrest, she was threatened and beaten.
As the crowds watched Joyce Ann being carted off to the police station in one
car, with Marquette, his brother Ronald and his mother Rena in another, someone in the
crowd “hurled [an] empty pop bottle… toward the last of the departing black-and-white
cars. Striking the rear fender of Sgt. Rankin’s car, it shattered.”
21
Suddenly, decades
of frustration and anger exploded. The crowd began throwing whatever objects they
could find at the cars and buses that were now halted along the streets. “It was 7:45 p.m.
Amidst the rending sounds of tearing metal, splintering glass, cries of bewilderment and
shouts of triumph, the Los Angeles uprising had begun.”
22
For the next six days, the city
was ablaze. (See figure 6) When it was all over:
At least 34 people died….1,000 more were injured, and 4,000 arrested. Property
damage was estimated at $200 million in the 46.5 square-mile zone (larger
than Manhattan or San Francisco) where approximately 35,000 adults “active as
rioters” and 72,000 “close spectators” swarmed. On hand to oppose them were
16,000 National Guard, Los Angeles Police Department, highway patrol, and
other law enforcement officers; fewer personnel were used by the United States
that same year to subdue Santo Domingo.
23

The actual situation, which triggered the massive destruction, may appear benign to
the world outside the geographic boundaries of Watts. .But it erupted out of decades of
systematic social, economic, cultural and political oppression situated in a theoretical
justification of cultural inferiority.
37
FIGURE 6. One of the many buildings engulfed in flames during the 1965 Watts
Uprising. Watts, California, (1965) Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
38
CHAPTER THREE ENDNOTES
1
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da
Capo, 1997), 50.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 50-51.
4
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to
the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 57.
5
Ibid., 75.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., 118.
8
Ibid.
9
Robert Conot, Rivers Of Blood, Years Of Darkness (New York: Bantam Books,
1967), 41.
10
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley:University of California, 2003), 121.
11
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles.
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 69.
12
Ibid.
13
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York:
Da Capo, 1997), 135.
14
Ibid., 134.
15
Robert Conot, Rivers Of Blood, Years Of Darkness. (New York: Bantam Books,
1967), 6.
16
Ibid., 7.
17
Ibid., 10.
39
18
Ibid., 13.
19
Ibid., 15.
20
Ibid., 16.
21
Ibid., 29.
22
Ibid.
23
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the
1960s (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 3.
40
CHAPTER FOUR: ORGANIZING RESISTANCE
Racism is practice: the practice of discrimination, at all levels, from personal
abuse to colonial oppression. Racism is a form of practice which has been
tremendously important in European society for several hundred years, important
in the sense that it is an essential part of the way the European capitalist system
maintains itself.
1

To justify racism and its practices, a theoretical belief is necessary in order to rationalized
behaviors and actions. These justification of actions are mobilized through discourse or
discursive formation. According to Foucault, “a discursive formation is defined neither
in terms of a particular object, nor a style, nor a play of permanent concepts, nor by
the persistence of a thematic, but must be grasped in the form of a system of regular
dispersion of statements.”
2
Though a discourse of cultural inferiority, the dominant
culture shaped and “regulated, spatialized social relations. “Relations…realized in
and through violence, degradation and poverty,”
3
and sanctioned through policies and
regulations.
In United States, “Racism-as-practice, that is discrimination”
4
is essential to
forming and maintaining racialized space. Over the centuries, the justifications were
supported through various theories, “each consistent with the intellectual environment of
a given era,”
5
and supported by authoritative sources such as governmental reports and
commissions, media and city officials. These theories have ranged from “the biblical
argument, grounded in religion. [The] biological argument grounded in natural science.
And [cultural theory] grounded in historical argument.”
6
The years leading up to the
Watts uprising, cultural theory or “cultural inferiority” was the dominant discourse that
41
framed and shaped the making of Watts. “This theory argued…that non-Europeans
are not racially, but rather culturally backward in comparison to Europeans because of
their history: their lesser cultural evolution,”
7
and must be kept separate. According to
Douglas Flemming:
When white people looked at other people, they went into group-think mode,
imposing blanket characterizations on any Negro in front of them. The
assumptions were blacks, as an undifferentiated group, were criminal, violent,
dirty, ignorant, lazy, loud, unsanitary, oversexed, carefree, and unambitious…
When [whites] met blacks who obviously did not fit the stereotype, they classified
those blacks as “exceptional”-the exception that proved the rule—thereby
preserving their presumption of black inferiority.
8
Resistant to this ideology began to emerge during the civil rights movement. “Born
during World War 11…most Americans did not recognize its presence until the late
1950s.”
9
In the Southern United States, the movement was crystallized by black civil
rights organizations such as NAACP and SCLC, but in Los Angeles, these organizations,
particularly the NAACP was “hobbled by ineffectual leadership.”
10
Filing this void
and “perhaps the most outspoken and militant advocate for black equality…was the
Communist Party.”
11
However, as the House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC) swept through United States in the 1950s, black membership dwindled and the
“Communist influence in the city’s civil rights movement ended abruptly.”
12
This left
a vacuum that was filled by a more aggressive movement of Black Nationalism, which
appeared in three forms: the Black Panthers party, the Nation of Islam and Cultural
Nationalism.
42
THE NATION OF ISLAM
One of the first Black Nationalist organizations to appear was the Nation of Islam
also known as Black Muslims. According to Eric Lincoln, they were “one of the best
organized and most articulate of the protest movement.”
13
The Black Muslims movement
began in the black ghettos of Detroit in 1930 during the Great Depression by a mysterious
peddler who suddenly appeared sometime in the summer of 1930. Known as W.D Farad
Muhammad he used his goods as a way of getting to people’s homes where he would
preach about the black man’s cultural contribution and introduced them to the Holy
Qur’an. “Before long, the house-to–house meetings were inadequate to accommodate all
those who wished to hear the prophet. The solution was obvious: they hired a hall, which
they named the Temple of Islam.”
14
This temple came to be known as Temple No. 1, and
marked the beginning of the Black Muslims movement. Within three years, the temple
grew to include two schools and a military training facility. To help run the organization,
Farad began training officers, which he called Ministers of Islam. One of the first to
be trained by Farad was Elijah Muhammad who “devoted himself wholeheartedly to
Fard and to the Movement.”
15
In June 1934, when Farad Muhammad mysteriously
disappeared, (to this day no one knows anything of his whereabouts) Elijah took reins of
the organization. After a falling out with other members at Temple No.1, Elijah moved
from Detroit to Temple No 2. in Chicago. “There he set up new headquarters and began
to reshape the Movement under his own highly militant leadership.”
16
Under Elijah, the
Black Muslims became known as a Black Nationalist organization that “made black the
ideal, the ultimate value.”
17
Situated in this ideology is the central theme of glorification
43
of black civilization and a rejection of the symbols of the white culture. By 1965, the
small following of Farad Muhammad had swelled into tens of thousands of disciples
primarily amongst the inner-city poor. In Los Angeles the Nation of Islam (NOI) had
established a major base in South Central and was a constant target of the LAPD, which
ironically aided the growing membership. More important the NOI filled the gap left
by the civil rights groups, which were preoccupied with concerns of the middle class.
Addressing the problems of the poor ultimately went to the NOI and the Black
Panthers Party.
THE BLACK PANTHERS PARTY
Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, The Black
Panthers Party (BPP) was known as a “revolutionary” nationalist party. Their direct
confrontations with the state and their stance against the abusive, bias justice system,
particularly the police force, made them a constant target of the FBI CONTELPRO
surveillance program, and an attraction for the growing gangs in Los Angeles. The
primary concern of the BPP was economic, social and political equality for the urban
poor. During their existence, the BPP implemented over 65 community base programs.
From their free medical clinics to drama classes, they stressed self-determination and
self-reliance. “As self-proclaimed descendants of Malcolm, the members of the BPP
declared themselves to be black and proud.”
18

In J. Edgar Hoover’s eyes, the BPP was a threat to national security and
needed to be eliminated. In order to destroy the BPP, the FBI put in place a series of
44
counterintelligence measures aimed at eradicating the BPP. One method was to sow
suspicion amongst the various community and nationalist groups.
On January 17
th
1969 after a confrontation between the BPP and the Cultural
Nationalist organization of Unites Slaves (US) led by Ron Karenga, two BPP members
lay dead. It was also the beginning of the end for the BPP. However, the demise left an
opening, which was later filled by the various South Central gangs. “When the state
crushed the BPP...the gangs that had been influenced by the BPP descended further into
crime.”
19

UNITED SLA VES
United Slaves (US) was founded on September 7 1965, by Ron Karenga in the
aftermath of the Watts uprising and according to Karenga, Its stated purpose was “to
challenge the energies of such uprisings all over the nation [and] for African–Americans
to recover their African heritage…[because] unless blacks create a culture of their own
they will always be marginal men.”
20
To solidify his philosophical conviction, Karenga
created the Pan African cultural holiday Kwanzaa.
Unlike the BPP, the Cultural Nationalist did not engage in direct confrontation
with the state, but they believed in “black pride” and the role of culture in building self-
determination and resistance to oppressive structures. To commemorate the uprising and
the community stance against “the system,” Ron Karenga along with Tommy Jacquette,
Booker Griffin, and Stan Sanders organized the Watts Summer Festival in order to “honor
the dead [and] commemorate the uprising.”
21
For the next fourteen years, the festival
45
became a symbol of resistance and race pride. But it also became a target of the LAPD.
“By 1979 the festival was a shadow of its former size and also gone were the militant
symbols of race pride.”
22
In 1982 the festival disappeared from the cultural landscape
taking with it the symbol of resistance.
These movements rejected all cultural symbols they believed were not reflective
of the African American. From this rejection a “black aesthetic,” emerged. According to
Richard J. Powell:
This is an aesthetic grounded in the idea of a new, that is, a post-emancipation and
post-colonial, black identity, which from Jazz-Age Harlem and Montparnasse,
to the “sound system” societies of West Kingston, south London, and south
central Los Angeles, thrives in black communities where artistic creativity and
performance are the basic cultural currencies.
23

In 1965 Watts, this cultural currency situated in cultural nationalism gave rise
to various innovative and engaging artistic expressions “that stretched the boundaries
of artistic as well as social conventions with innovative creations, performances, and
productions [that] challenged artistic boundaries in terms of the type of art produced and
the purpose and role of art and artist within the community.”
24

Art became an apparatus of community resistance to systematic oppression, and
an instrument to rewrite the community narratives. According to Judson Powell, “many
compared 66 Signs of Neon with the Phoenix rising.”
25
But these symbols of fighting
back became all too powerful for the dominant culture, and needed to be erased. This
erasure was done either through outright physical destruction as in the case of
46
Oh, Speak Speak, or through appropriation as in the case of the various manifestations
of the current community-engaged site-specific art, which will be the topic of the next
section.
47
CHAPTER FOUR ENDNOTES
1
James Blaut “The Theory of Cultural Racism” Antipod: A Radical Journal of
Geography 23, [1992] under “Settings,”
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/journals/anti/Blaut.James.(accessed July 23, 2009).
2
Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977,
edited by Colin Gordon translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham and
Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 63.
3
Jennifer J. Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto:
University of Toronto, 2008), 14.
4
James Blaut “The Theory of Cultural Racism” Antipod: A Radical Journal of
Geography 23, [1992] under “Settings,”
http://www.blackwellpublishers.co.uk/journals/anti/Blaut.James.(accessed July 23, 2009).
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America
(Berkeley: University of California, 2005), 12.
9
Josh Sides, L.A City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great
Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), 131.
10
Ibid., 133.
11
Ibid., 134.
12
Ibid.
13
C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: Beacon, 1973), xx.
14
Ibid., 13.
15
Ibid., 17.
16
Ibid., 18.
48
17
Ibid., 36.
18
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da Capo,
Press, 1997), 187.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid., 200.
21
Ibid., 202.
22
Ibid., 204.
23
Richard Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (New York: Thames & Hudson,
1997), 15.
24
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006) 74-75.
25
Judson Powell interview by Author, Compton, CA, September 24, 2009.
49
CHAPTER FIVE: CURRENT PRACTICES OF COMMUNITY-ENGAGED ART
As indicated earlier, community engaged site-specific art has taken on many
new definitions. These new terms allow the contemporary projects to move from a
place of illegitimacy into the academy, with the discussions of the works becoming an
intellectually exercise. In addition, it has allowed an appropriation of an art form that was
once a tool for critically into a form of social work. It is at this juncture I will add yet
another term. Dialogical Aesthetics.
Dialogical Aesthetics, Kester argues, has its roots in avant-garde art practices
of the twentieth century, A practice that is “based on the assumption that the work of
art should challenge or disrupt the viewer’s expectations about a given image, object,
or system of meaning.”
1
The work should also move “beyond the art for art sake and
away from the dominant culture definition of art. A definition based in a discursive
system that construct the category of art as a repository for values.”
2
Still these works
of art were showed in elite art spaces and seen by an exclusive audience. Although the
avant-garde artist “sought to challenge, rather than corroborate, conventional systems
of meaning, whether through realism’s introduction of taboo subjects such as poverty
and prostitution,”
3
the people and places embodied in the works were objectified for the
privileged gaze.
Beginning in the 1960s and into the 1970s, artists begin seeking ways in which
to actively engage the audience. “The museum, with its fusty art historical association,
appeared ill equipped to provide a proper context for works that explored popular culture
or quotidian experience.”
4
These bastions of exclusitivity meant art was only for the
50
privilege. Attempting to make art more accessible, artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark,
Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson choose to create site-specific art projects that were
informed by the location. But these works were usually sited in remote places thereby
making them inaccessible for many.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s a new group of artists involved in site-specific
art removed the works from remote sites to “marginalized” communities. Away from
object making to process driven engagements that Kester refers to as a “discursive form
of communication, in which material and social differentials are bracketed and speakers
rely solely on the compelling force of superior argument, from more instrumental
or hierarchical forms of communications.”
5
In these projects, the artist normally
an “outsider with the institutionally sanctioned authority to engage the locals in the
production of their (self) representation,”
6
take the experiences and everyday life of the
community turning it “into an anthropological exhibit.”
7
This type of engagement, which
Kester refers to as aesthetic evangelism, is much like the Victorian nineteenth-century
reformist ideology with the artist functioning as a social worker. According to Kester:
Both the community artist and the social worker possess a set of skills
(bureaucratic, diagnostic, aesthetic/expressive, and so forth) and have access to
public and private funding (through grant writing, official status, and institutional
sponsorship) with the goal of bringing about some transformation in the condition
of the individuals who are presumed to be in need.
8

In these practices, which are “often centered on exchange between an artist and a given
community in need of empowerment or access to creative/expressive skills,”
9
requires a
community functioning on the margins of society. “Thus the community in community-
51
based public art often refers to individuals marked as culturally, economically, or socially
different from the artist.”
10
This dynamic can be seen in Suszanne Lacy’s The Roof Is on
Fire and Edgar Arceneaux’s Watts House Project. In both exchange there’s an unequal
relationship. The artist becomes the voice through which the marginalized can speak.
THE ROOF IS ON FIRE AND THE WATTS HOUSE PROJECT
In The Roof Is on Fire, internationally exhibited artist Suzanne Lacy took over
two hundred high school students from the Oakland school district onto a parking
garage rooftop in downtown Oakland, California to sit in “parked cars under a twilight
sky [where] they enacted a series of improvisational dialogues on the problems faced
by young people of color.”
11
To add to the performance, Lacy invited representatives
from the media to record the “dialogue.” While the objective of this engagement was to
challenge various stereotypical images of the youth in society, especially by the Oakland
Police Department, this type of process has taken place in many after-school programs.
Like Lacy, Edgar Arceneaux Watts House Project is a process driven project.
Arceneaux activity consists of renovating and painting houses across from the Watts
Towers. Defined as an artist driven urban revitalization initiative, the artists along with
volunteers, paint and renovate a handful of homes. When I described the project to a
friend, he wanted to know if all house painters were artists.
Kester relates this type of engagement to a “persuasive cultural mythology
grounded in romanticism, that conceives of the artist as a shamanistic figure able to
identify with, and speak on behalf of, the poor and marginalized.”
12
In a New York Times
52
article, Michael Kimmelman remarked that these projects “often look more like social
work than artwork and questions if the money might not be better spent for “established”
social programs, and if programs such as these tend to “ghettoize” art for the poor and
assume that museums are irrelevant to such people.”
13
In every urban center, artists
became engaged in the “Pollyanna syndrome”
14
where the artists were perpetuating their
“good and relevant deeds on behalf of the arts… but somehow privileged to stay apart
from it.”
15
As the bastard aesthetic became legitimate, a plethora of text and research
emerged to validate the practice. With theories and discussions becoming “a form of
soioeconomic behavior. Speaking theory [became] a form of economic aggression in a
limited market place.”
16

SHIFTS IN POLITICAL LANDSCAPE/SHIFTS IN FUNDING MANDATES
This proliferation of these community-engaged projects emerged in the 1980s
when the political landscape of the United States had shifted. The era ushered in
the conservative movement supported by a neoconservative administration that did
not support a broad-base funding of the arts. Since the conservatives “opposition
to government funding of the social science and the art arises from the deep-seated
conviction that the major source of liberal and radical social change [are] political and
intellectual elites.”
17
Taking away their government funds to “promote social change”
18

would ultimately create their demise. Suddenly new criteria became part of grants
application.
53
According to Kester:
The growing influence of new genre public art was evident in the changing
funding mandates of major private foundations. The Lannan Foundation in Los
Angeles shifted its emphasis from supporting art to “social issues,” the MacArthur
Foundation-the largest private funder of media arts in the country-rewrote its
program guidelines to explicitly reject media art in favor of “community-based
organizations that are working to promote social justice and democracy through
media, and the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundation developed new programs
to fund artists who worked with “communities.
19
Artist now traveled to crime ridden, blighted, neglected “communities” with critics,
curators and art historians not too far behind with the abundance of the necessary theories
and texts that’s required to elevate the work.
It is true that these relational aesthetics to borrow the term from Nicolas
Bourriaud are in response to social ills and needs, but are these projects challenging the
systems that contribute to these problems or are part of perpetuating the exploitation on
marginalized communities? And can the contemporary or current forms of art support
real social change when many are part of the biennials and exhibitions that are usually a
tool used in the gentrifying process, which further alienate and displace communities?
54
CHAPTER FIVE ENDNOTES
1
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication In Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 17.
2
Ibid., 89.
3
Ibid., 27.
4
Ibid., 124.
5
Ibid., 109.
6
Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity (Cambridge: MIT, 2004), 138.
7
Ibid.
8
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication In Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 37.
9
Ibid., 137.
10
Ibid.
11
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication In Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 4.
12
Ibid., 140.
13
R. Elizabeth Thomas and Julian Rappaport, “Art as Community Narrative: A Resource
for Social Change,” in Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, ed. M.
Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizl, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris (Philadelphia: Temple
UP, 1996), 318-319.
14
Joseph Golden, Pollyanna in the Brier Patch: The Community Arts Movement
(Syracuse: NY: Syracuse UP, 1987) xi.
15
Ibid.
16
Greg Sholette, “Waking Up to Smell the Coffee: Reflections on Political Art
Theory and Activism” in Reimaging America, ed. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little
(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), 27.
55
17
Jerome L. Himmelstein and Mayer Zald. American Conservatism and Government
Funding of the Social Science and the Arts. (University of Michigan, 1984)
Google Scholar. JL Himmelstein, M Zald-Sociological Inquire, deeepblue.
libunich.edu (accessed October 26, 2009).
18
Ibid.
19
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication In Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 129.

56
CONCLUSION
African American artists have a long tradition of community engaged/dialogical
aesthetics situated in African communal cultural traditions. According to Steven Isoardi,
“The slaves’ expressive arts and sacred beliefs were more than merely a series of outlets
or strategies; they were instruments of life, of sanity, of health, and of self-respect. Slave
music…slave folk beliefs…created the necessary space between the slaves and their
owners and were the means of preventing legal slavery from becoming spiritual slavery.”
1

The artists working in the wake of the uprising “concluded that an alternative value
system and aesthetic that drew from the communal aspects of their history and addressed
contemporary needs was necessary.”
2

Often denied access to art institutions and publications, artists such as Noah
Purifoy and John Outterbridge made the community their museum. This meant a
redefinition of the role of the artist. They were no longer the lone isolated romantic
notion propagated in western culture, but someone engaging, involving and activating the
community. These community-engaged artists’ works differ from political art, although
at times the two are linked together. But, unlike community art, which is usually
collaborative, political art is the creation of an object by an individual artist responding to
a particular concern with the intention of challenging the hegemony. On the other hand,
community engaged art is expression and engagement that emerges from communities of
people working together to improve their individual and collective circumstances. Artists
such as Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge used art as a narrative to help the community
interpret their experience. The projects were about giving the members a place to vent
57
their frustrations and anger. However, art in and of itself cannot create social change
unless it is part of the larger social system, because “neither individual nor collective
development toward complexity, creativity, or altruism can take place until basic needs
for food, shelter, and safety have been met.”
3
Following the 1965 uprising, Watts witnessed a proliferation of organizations and
groups attempting to understand why. “Studies by social scientist of what they called
the “riot” were a minor cottage industry.”
4
Some of the research even continued to
perpetuate racist view. According to Gerald Horne:
The soundness of some perspectives could be questioned. Vernon Mark, who
utilized sources from apartheid South Africa, entitled his contribution “Does Brain
Disease Play a Role In Riots and Urban Violence?” [This] idea that African-
Americans might be crazy was not an unusual theme, and this inevitable led to
suggestions as to how their brains should be fixed.
5

Many of these reports failed to address the structural inequalities of the community.
Watts, in dominant discourse have been defined in negative and racist terms. Following
the uprising, Chief Parker of the Los Angeles Police Department told the L.A Weekly
“one person threw a rock, and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing
rocks.”
6
Parker’s language reflected the racist views held by the power structure.
As name brand artists travel from site to site portraying their art projects as “the
bastion of avant-garde social change, much of what is legitimated as art is controlled
by the most powerful and conservative forces in government and the private forces in
government and the private sector.”
7
These appropriated forms of community-engaged
art, objectify the members of the community and treat them as indicated earlier a “form
of raw material in need of transformation.”
8
With the artist becoming a social healer
58
“mediating between the people and the harshness of the physical, social, and spiritual
environment.”
9
As if a Love sign on top of a house in Watts would eradicate the
economic and social condition of the occupants.
In addition, as the PMCs’ enter a community with their bag full of theories they
tend to alienate the community artists that have resided there all along. In fact one PMC
who was going into New Orleans to be part of “activating” the site had never heard of the
New Orleans community artist John O’Neal who worked with his community for decades
and was a major participant in the struggles for civil rights. After their “work” is done,
the PMC’s usually return to the academy to theorize about the deeds that was done with
yet another marginalized group. The community is left behind with the same social and
economic conditions. The only thing achieved was the PMC served as a buffer for the
dominant class.
66 Signs Of Neon and Oh, Speak Speak became art that is “more than a mere
super-structure built on social and economic foundations of time and space,”
10
but a place
to heal and transform for “individuals…to empty the historic moment of its disturbing
contents.”
11
The projects were attempting to build social capital, stimulate discussion and
open up dialogue. “The arts serve as a means by which a society reminds itself of the
stories it wants to remember.”
12

These projects were erase and ignored, because they stood, as a testimony to
a demand for equality by a community the power structure would rather ignore. The
uprising was “the worst shock to ruling class nerves since the near victory of the Socialist
Party in 1912 Mayoral election”
13
and “a sense of triumph all over the city.”
14

59
CONCLUSION ENDNOTES
1
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 8.
2
Ibid., 12.
3
Leo Schneiderman, Psychology of Social Change (New York: Human Sciences
Press, 1988), 11.
4
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time the Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da
Capo Press,1997), 39.
5
Ibid.
6
Steven L. Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz And The Community Arts In Los Angeles
(Berkeley: University of California, 2006), 71.
7
R. Elizabeth Thomas and Julian Rappaport., “Art as Community Narrative: A Resource
for Social Change” in Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, ed. M.
Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizl, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris (Philadelphia: Temple
UP, 1996), 317.
8
Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication In Modern Art
(Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 138.
9
Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen, Active Sights: Art as Social Interaction
(Mountain View: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1998), 63.
10
Leo Schneiderman, Psychology of Social Change (New York: Human Sciences
Press, 1988), 146.

11
Ibid., 167.
12
R. Elizabeth Thomas and Julian Rappaport, “Art as Community Narrative: A Resource
for Social Change” in Myths about the Powerless: Contesting Social Inequalities, ed. M.
Brinton Lykes, Ali Banuazizl, Ramsay Liem and Michael Morris (Philadelphia: Temple
UP, 1996), 317.
13
Gerald Horne, Fire This Time the Watts Uprising and the 1960s (New York: Da
Capo Press, 1997), 41.
14
Ibid., 67.
60
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62

Abstract (if available)

Abstract During the 1960s and 1970s, African American artists created site-specific community engaged projects that were narrations of the social-cultural context of their communities. Within this milieu, the art works became powerful communicative tools, as was the case in John Outterbridge's collaborative project Oh, Speak Speak and Noah Purifoy's 66 Signs of Neon. However, in recent years, a proliferation of community engaged site-specific arts have emerged in various forms. These projects are appearing in the discourse of mainstream texts, discussions, museum exhibitions and commissioned public art works in the urban environment. Once looked upon with little regard by the art world, community engaged art is now canonized in the academy and elite art circles by a professional class of critics, curators, art historians and urban planners. This co-optation and assimilation of the aesthetic has weakened the criticality of the practice creating a disembodied commodification and a form of social work.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Danjuma, Sharon Elizabeth (author)

Core Title Community engaged art: no longer a form of resistance?

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/19/2010

Defense Date 02/14/2010

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

Tag 66 signs of neon,community art,Elliott Pinkney,John Outterbridge,Noah Purifoy,OAI-PMH Harvest,Oh, speak speak,Watts Rebellion

Place Name California (states), Los Angeles (city or populated place), Watts (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Ulke, Christina (committee chair), Decter, Joshua (committee member), Outterbridge, John (committee member)

Creator Email danjuma@usc.edu,sharondanjuma@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2938

Unique identifier UC189270

Identifier etd-Danjuma-3565 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-309984 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2938 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Danjuma-3565.pdf

Dmrecord 309984

Document Type Thesis

Rights Danjuma, Sharon Elizabeth

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu