Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Four women, four public art projects, four decades: exploring socially conscious public art and social change
(USC Thesis Other)
Four women, four public art projects, four decades: exploring socially conscious public art and social change
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
FOUR WOMEN, FOUR PUBLIC ART PROJECTS, FOUR DECADES:
EXPLORING SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS PUBLIC ART AND SOCIAL CHANGE
by
Rebecca Allisyn Ansert
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
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
August 2008
Copyright 2008 Rebecca Allisyn Ansert
ii
Epigraph
“To find the whole we must know and respect all the parts.” – Lucy R. Lippard
iii
Dedication
To my Mom and Dad, sisters Aly and Kati, with all my love.
iv
Acknowledgements
First and foremost I want to thank my parents for their unwavering support
and constant encouragement. There is not doubt in my mind that the endless visits to
art museums as a child influenced my future career and passion for the arts. I want
to then thank my advisors Karen Moss and Susan Gray whose patience and advice
helped me to push my thesis beyond what I thought I was capable of achieving. A
big thank you is in order to Sandy Ansert, Heidi Krolick, and Jessica Vernizzi for
their hours devoted to reading my drafts. I could not have done this without the
education provided by the highly regarded faculty in the Public Art Studies program
including: Anne Bray, Sarah Cifarelli, Joshua Decter, Dawn Finley, Lauri
Firstenberg, Caryl Levy, Ferdinand Lewis, Jorge Pardo, and Carol Stakenas.
A special thank you is in order for my colleagues, my friends, my sisters,
Tiffany Barber, Xiomara Cornejo, Sara Daleiden, Liz Dinerstein, Nicole Gordillo,
Claire Haasl, Sandra Liljenwal, Tania Picasso, Alice Schock, and Evelyn Tseng.
Your laughter, support, and endless inspiration will be missed but not forgotten.
v
Table of Contents
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Preface viii
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Endnotes 10
Chapter 2: 1960s – Anna Halprin, Ceremony of Us, 1969 12
Endnotes 19
Chapter 3: 1970s – Judith F. Baca,
The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 21
Endnotes 28
Chapter 4: 1980s – Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1989 30
Endnotes 36
Chapter 5: 1990s – Sheila Levrant de Bretteville,
Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 38
Endnotes 48
Chapter 6: Conclusion 50
Endnotes 59
Bibliography 60
Appendix 63
vi
List of Figures
A.1: Anna Halprin, Ceremony of Us, 1969 17
A.2: Anna Halprin, Ceremony of Us, 1969 18
A.3: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 24
A.4: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 25
A.5: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 25
A.6: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 25
A.7: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 25
A.8: Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001 25
A.9: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1989 32
A.10: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1989 34
A.11: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 41
A.12: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 41
A.13: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 41
A.14: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 42
A.15: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 42
A.16: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 42
A.17: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 43
A.18: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 43
A.19: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 44
A.20: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 44
A.21: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991 44
vii
Abstract
Anna Halprin, Judith F. Baca, Barbara Kruger, and Sheila Levrant de
Bretteville created socially relevant public art projects beginning in the 1960s and
continuing on into the 1990s. Four Women, Four Public Art Projects, Four
Decades: Exploring Socially Conscious Public Art and Social Change takes a closer
look at these women-produced public artworks and pulls together the common
threads found throughout: the artists are all feminists and they each created public art
to help diverse communities grapple with difficult social or political issues in an
effort to improve conditions and stimulate dialogue. The four projects and their
artistic intentions situated within a specific historical context exemplify a developing
dialogue in the field.
viii
Preface
I find that the most exciting aspect about public art is its potential to engage
community members from diverse social, economical, and educational backgrounds
into a productive dialogue in the effort to mend divisions and celebrate differences.
After several years as an art gallery director, I wanted to find a way to combine my
passion for the arts and my commitment to giving back to the community. The
Public Art Studies program at the University of Southern California seemed a perfect
choice for taking that next step. I focused my attention on how public art could
impact and encourage dialogue within communities, possibly offering solutions to
those who had struggled with social injustices.
During my time as a student I was fortunate to obtain an internship in
Australia for three months that opened my eyes to artists outside of the United States
who were also committed to producing art with a social consciousness. In particular,
I found the public work of Fiona Foley, a female Indigenous Australian artist, as a
powerful example of how socially conscious artwork could be an aesthetic attribute
within a city and also an opening statement for a new communication to take place
within diverse groups. When I returned to Los Angeles I continued to research
public artworks that encouraged dialogue within communities, not only addressing
social issues, but also assisting them to heal through the open communication. I
found great interest in how the notion of socially conscious work developed from the
1960s-1990s and focused my case studies to projects produced by second-generation
feminist artists.
ix
Contemporary public art is unique because it has the powerful ability to
evoke layered meanings within our communities and public spaces. It challenges us
to understand an artist’s conceptual intentions and has the ability to speak to and
resonate within everyone regardless of his or her educational, cultural, or ethnic
background. Encompassing all types of production, permanent or ephemeral, public
art has the strength to generate both internal and external responses from a
community. Successful Projects that are specific to a place, not only enhance the
physical fabric of the area, but reveal the underlying history, social, and political
issues of the site. Public art is accessible, in meaning and physical form, and often
used as a way to increase the use of public domain, encouraging human interaction,
helping to implement a sense of identity, pride, communication, and community
ownership.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Since the 1960s artists have prodded socio-political issues to create works of
art for the public domain, which challenged mainstream ideals and heightened the
public audience’s awareness of contentious topics. Lucy Lippard defines these
public-oriented works, “Community-based art is grounded in communication and
exchange, activist art is based on creative dissent and confrontation . . . while most
‘political art’ is rejective of the status quo.”
1
The examples cited in this thesis cannot
be clearly categorized within these existing definitions of art, and it is for this reason
I have fused the existing definitions into one descriptive term, “socially conscious
art.” A socially conscious public artwork has no boundaries in form or subject
matter. It is created to engage the community in a productive dialogue specifically to
address social or political issues, such as race, gender, or sexual identity. In order to
affect as many participants as possible, it relies on collaborative participation from
the community to create a project that is meaningful and relevant to the issues in
question. Socially conscious public artwork requires an explanation of the artist’s
intentions, point of view, and social environments. This thesis explores four socially
conscious public art projects created by women artists, Anna Halprin, Judith F. Baca,
Barbara Kruger, and Sheila Levrant de Bretteville from the 1960s-1990s. Each
project was conceived to relate to its individual site and produced in an effort to
garner participatory support from the community to explore avenues of resolution or
healing, for underlying social and political issues, through dialogue.
The term healing is used in this thesis to define a community’s restoration to
balance and harmony, physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. In socially
2
conscious public art, acceptance is the basis for social healing. By examining Anna
Halprin’s Ceremony of Us, 1969, Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles,
1974-2001, Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Questions), 1989, and Sheila Levrant de
Bretteville’s Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991, I will demonstrate how these
artists are able to assist a community to recognize and then reconcile a history of
social differences and disagreements.
These individual artists brought knowledge of the city’s economic and
physical history to their projects, but it was the people within the community and
their shared memories and experiences that constructed an honest representation of
important relevant social issues. Author Dolores Hayden helps to identify the
community as a group of people who have a “unique understanding of and insight
into their immediate surroundings and can help others to understand” the
significance of certain idiosyncrasies within their group.
2
Critic Miwon Kown
defines the importance of these projects,
A central objective of community-based site specificity is the creation
of a work in which members of a community—as simultaneously
viewer/spectator, audience, public, and referential subject—will see
and recognize themselves in the work, not so much in the sense of
being critically implicated but of being affirmatively pictured or
validated.
3
Each project considered in this thesis addresses distinct and diverse
communities, Halprin works specifically with two select dance troupes, Baca
intervenes with at-risk youth in Los Angeles, while Kruger and de Bretteville open
up their definition of community to include the entire city of Los Angeles.
3
To understand how and why artists strived to engage the community in the
design, creation, and dialogue surrounding socially conscious public art, it is
important to establish its historical background. In 1958, avant-garde composer John
Cage taught an experimental musical composition class at the New School for Social
Research in New York. The course is now recognized as one of the earliest
examples of participation-oriented art, which encouraged “non-hierarchical
exchanges of information across national, disciplinary, and age boundaries.”
4
In
1959, as a student within Cage’s class, Allan Kaprow was encouraged to blur the
lines between art and life, and as a result Kaprow invented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,
the first in a series of ephemeral performances that continued through the 1960s.
5
The theory behind Happenings was to broaden the scope of art to include a wider
source of materials and subject matter; to move beyond conventional exhibition
spaces to eliminate any preconceived notions of what should take place during the
performance, and to challenge the definition of artist and audience.
In his essay The Event, 1966, Kaprow, like his teacher John Cage, explains
that he was interested in keeping the line between art and life as “fluid”, and as
“indistinct as possible.”
6
Kaprow’s main focus was in developing a new artist-
spectator relationship, one that did not comply with the traditional notions of the
theater’s stage-audience relationship, and required active participation from the
spectator to complete the artwork. Kaprow challenged the definition of a
professional artist within his lifelike Happenings by including willing and committed
people to play a part in pre-arranged scenarios. In his book, Assemblage,
Environment, and Happenings, Kaprow states, “The best participants [for a
4
Happening] have been persons not normally engaged in art or performance, but who
are moved to take part in an activity that [was] once meaningful to them in its ideas
yet natural in its methods.”
7
Kaprow, like the artists cited in this thesis, relied on
public participation to activate and validate the project’s intentions.
Kaprow chose to hold his performances in unconventional settings, such as
old school gymnasiums, lofts, and parking lots, which always resulted in an
unstructured and spontaneous conclusion. With the move to alternative venues,
artists like Kaprow found freedom to explore a variety of subject matter, materials,
actions and relationships between them, purposefully avoiding anything already
established within the arts and gravitating towards everyday recognizable items and
events.
8
This is important because Kaprow then recognized that “by avoiding the
artistic modes there [was] a good chance that a new language [would] develop that
[had] its own standards.”
9
This language developed through the active collaboration
of the Happenings participants is the basis for the dialogue surrounding socially
conscious art because it valued every person’s values, beliefs, and contributions
equally.
Likewise, Joseph Beuys, a German artist and instructor at the Kunstakademie
in Düsseldorf, was also interested in blurring the boundaries between art and life.
Beuys became acquainted with the experimental work of Nam June Paik and Fluxus
artists whose participation revolved around everyday actions and situations.
10
Beuys
soon introduced the notion of a “social sculpture,” defined as the creative potential in
all human beings working cooperatively and incorporating ideas from a variety of
different disciplines.
11
For example, his project 7000 Oaks, introduced at
5
Documenta 7 in 1982, was intended to be the “first stage in an ongoing scheme of
tree planting to be extended throughout the world as part of a global mission to effect
environmental and social change.”
12
His plan included planting seven thousand trees
in Kassel, each paired with a four-foot tall rectangular stone, in which the
community donated their time and energy to fulfill the project’s needs. The Dia Art
Foundation strongly supported the project and it was finally completed after five
years under the auspices of the Free International University (FIU), founded by
Beuys.
13
Working within these ideals, Joseph Beuys emphasized that all people have
the ability to contribute creatively to improve society. The impact of Allan
Kaprow’s Happenings and Joseph Beuys “social sculpture” resonates in artists who
challenged the conventional norms of an artist’s practice and is clearly evident
throughout the four decades of contemporary art discussed in this thesis.
With a greater understanding of the historical background for this mode of
art, we can begin to understand the trajectory of how socially conscious public art
strived to affect the audience through participation. Chapter One begins in the 1960s
when an emerging counterculture in the political climate within the United States
caused a portion of the public to take action in response to the Vietnam War, the
Civil Rights movement, and progressive liberation movements, like feminism and
the sexual revolution. Anna Halprin’s Ceremony of Us, 1969, evidences that artists,
like the counterculture, had strong desires to create socially relevant artwork for
communities to explore specific issues such as race. The community in Halprin’s
project is composed of two dance troupes, her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, an
entirely white ensemble, and the Studio Watts Group, a black ensemble, and the
6
ephemeral audience who witnessed the performance. During the finale of the
performance of Halprin’s loosely choreographed movements, the dancers and
audience united in an impromptu dance integrating the group and helping to mend
previous tensions about race.
By the end of the 1970s, artists like Judith F. Baca were creating work that
addressed identity politics, working within oppressed groups who shared a common
identity, such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. Spanning over a half-mile down
the Tujunga Wash flood control channel (that runs along Coldwater Canyon Avenue
between Burbank Boulevard and Oxnard Street, Van Nuys), The Great Wall of Los
Angeles, 1974-2001, in Chapter Two, is a visual history of California, especially the
progress of marginalized groups in the state. Produced by more than 250 juvenile
offenders, gang members, and Van Nuys community members, under the direction
of Judith Baca, director of Social and Public Art Resource Center, the mural is an
ideal example of a collaborative public artwork that offered a community an
opportunity to build a common identity. It is particularly important because it aided
the diverse groups to initiate in a new dialogue and ongoing relationship through its
creation.
Richard Bolton, in his book Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent
Controversies in the Arts, notes that by the end of the 1980s the conservatives in
Congress and the Reagan administration had attempted to restrict government
funding for the arts in an effort to “limit the public exchange of ideas.”
14
The
Culture Wars forced a public debate about public funding of controversial artworks
and censorship, in particular to subjects of cultural identity, sexual orientation,
7
feminism, sexual liberation, and freedom of speech, which continued on through the
1990s. Artists who were engaged in working with these controversial subjects were
accused of trying to introduce progressive antisocial agendas into society.
15
Some
artists, in opposition to the constraining Culture Wars, sought out alternative venues
in an attempt to build stronger relationships with their audiences and to openly
discuss social and political concerns.
Chapter Three of this thesis will investigate Barbara Kruger’s Untitled
(Questions), 1989, commissioned for Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art,
Temporary Contemporary. Kruger proposed a mural that unintentionally sparked an
intense conversation between Japanese-American community members and the
museum’s representatives regarding a forgotten history in Los Angeles. Socio-
political concerns were always a topic of interest for Kruger whose text based-work
tactfully subverted the mainstream commercial media system by using an
interrogative voice to evoke dialogue in the community. Theorists, newspapers, and
the artist’s retrospective museum catalogue assist in the investigation of the artist’s
intention, the reasons for contentious response from the Japanese-American
community, and the final transformation of Kruger’s mural before its final
installation in 1989 at the peak of the Culture Wars.
In spite of the Culture Wars and clear divide in American society’s values,
artists in the 1990s were creating works which focused on freedom of speech and
equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Art produced in
the 1990s built upon the established relationship between artist and audience and
focused on initiating dialogue in the community about social issues. In Chapter Four
8
I will examine Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991,
one aspect of a larger public art component implemented by The Power of Place, to
exemplify the continued drive for artists to address racial issues in their artwork
within the public realm. The project highlighted the life and work of one of Los
Angeles’ forgotten role-models, Biddy Mason, an African-American woman, a
former slave, mid-wife, land-owner, and founder of the first African Methodist
Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. Interviews with both the artist and the
descendants of Biddy Mason’s slave owner reveal both the struggle in the production
of the work and a more recent reconnection to the Mason family.
The examples within this thesis were chosen specifically to illustrate and
substantiate an understanding of socially conscious public art. The combination of
the four projects and their artistic intentions situated within a specific historical
context exemplify the trajectory of a newly developing dialogue in the field. Taking
a closer look at these four women-produced public artworks, one can recognize
several common threads found throughout. First the artists are all feminists, 1
st
and
2
nd
generations. Their purpose and intentions are similar because they each created a
socially conscious public artwork to help diverse communities grapple with difficult
social or political issues in an effort to better and heal society. Their projects
progressed from the notion of being site-specific to site-generated; and an increase of
community participation became essential to the success of each individual project.
16
These feminist artists specifically chose to work with controversial social and
political subject matter, then moved into redefining the notion of audience and artist,
9
and finally evolved into creating public artworks solely to establish dialogue between
diverse groups.
10
Chapter 1: Endnotes
1
Lucy Lippard, “Time Capsule,” in Art and Social Change, ed. Will Bradley and Charles Esche, 409
(London: Tate Publishing, 2007).
2
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1995), 235.
3
Kwon, One Place After Another, 95.
4
Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 11.
5
Ibid., 2.
6
Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966),
188.
7
Ibid., 195.
8
Ibid., 189.
9
Ibid., 190.
10
Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 2.
11
Walker Art Center, Joseph Beuys: A Brief Biography,
http://www.walkerart.org/archive/2/A84369EE5A576E446161.htm.
12
Dia Center Foundation, Joseph Beuys: 7000 Oaks, http://www.diacenter.org/ltproj/7000/.
Documenta is an exhibition of modern and contemporary art which takes place every five years in
the town of Kassel, Germany. Artist and designer Arnold Bode founded the cyclical exhibition in
1955. For additional information about Documenta please visit their website,
www.documentaarchiv.stadt-kassel.de.
13
Ibid.
14
Richard Bolton, Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York:
New Press, 1992), 15.
15
Ibid., 5.
11
16
The history of Feminism is composed of three “waves” of radical movements initiated by women.
The first wave is cited to have begun in the early 20
th
century and mainly addresses women’s
suffrage movements, such as the women’s right to vote. Second wave feminism began in the 1960s
and changed how American women viewed themselves and their surrounding environment. Media
was a large influence on the movement because it made it acceptable to discuss women’s issues and
allowed for feminists to spread their ideals to a wide audience through newspapers, television, and
books. The third wave of feminism is credited as a continuation of the preceding waves, beginning
in the 1990s. Read Desiring Revolution: Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American
Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 by Jane Gerhard and Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at
Century’s End by Sara M. Evans for additional information.
12
Chapter 2: 1960s – Anna Halprin: Ceremony of Us, 1969
During the era of the 1960s, artists strived to connect broad audiences and
therefore created art in reaction to momentous events, such as the Vietnam War and
the struggle for Civil Rights. Across the nation, unified groups of people within
individual communities gathered in the forms of a protest or integrated
demonstration to address the various contentious social injustice issues at hand. The
method of creating a socially conscious public artwork was important at this time
because the nature of the process included much more than merely placing a
sculpture in a public space. It relied on a working relationship between the artist and
the community to create a work of art that was relevant to prevailing issues.
Under the direction of Anna Halprin, a dancer and choreographer, a
community of dancers from San Francisco and the Watts area of Los Angeles
changed one another’s lives during a workshop and subsequent performance of
Ceremony of Us, 1969. Halprin’s work with the Ceremony of Us ensemble provided
a foundation for the dancers to converse about the controversial issues of race and
gender in a non-judgmental environment. Halprin states, “To heal is to aim at
attaining a state of emotional, mental, spiritual and physical health."
1
The
performance allowed for the dancers to explore negative stereotypes in an effort to
restore the balance and feelings of equality between the racially diverse community
of performers.
Before discussing the Ceremony of Us it is important to understand the
background and context of Halprin’s career. Halprin worked within the ideals of
artists John Cage, Allan Kaprow, and Joseph Beuys to merge art and life by
13
incorporating ordinary acts and everyday people into her dances. In her
autobiography, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, the
choreographer notes that her theories on dance derived from the teachings of Cage.
Halprin was especially interested in his ideas of taking everyday sounds, objects or
actions out of their normal context forcing the audience to reexamine the subject as
strange, but using that notion of strange as the basis for a new form of art, in
Halprin’s case it was dance.
2
And, similar to Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, Halprin
investigated the space between audience and performer by incorporating “ordinary
life in her avant-garde dance/theater pieces.”
3
Her work is comparable to Joseph
Beuys’ theory of a social sculpture, by definition, all human beings have the ability
to contribute in a creative way, Halprin found “appreciation of the dancer in every
person, whether trained or not.”
4
Sally Banes notes Halprin’s inclination to take on the role of activist within
the dance community in the introduction of Moving Toward Life,
Halprin’s interest in community and the rituals that create and sustain
it eventually led her away from dance as a theatrical art and toward
dance (or simply movement) as a healing art—whether in social
terms, as in the healing of racial divisions, or in physical/psychic
terms, as in her [later] work with persons confronting cancer and
HIV/AIDS.
5
Halprin disowned the modern dance world and its teachings when she moved
to California in 1944 and found fulfillment in reflecting the art of everyday life.
Shortly thereafter, Halprin traveled back to the east coast to attend an American
National Theatre Academy event in New York.
6
It was at this event that she felt
uninspired by the current trend of modern dance and when she returned to California
14
she established a workshop to investigate her interest of intertwining art and life into
her choreographed movements. Halprin recalls, “Because I didn’t know what I
wanted to do, or what I wanted to teach, I set up a workshop situation in which I
gave myself permission to explore.”
7
In a 2002 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Lara Adair notes, Halprin’s
ability to blur the lines between dance and therapy left many in the dance community
perplexed while “others hailed her as the inventor of postmodern dance.”
8
Within
the newly formed workshop, Halprin was able to guide her students through radical
improvisation techniques to express their everyday movements. She received
numerous honors and awards, including yearly choreographer fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American
Dance Guild Award for outstanding contributions to the field of dance.
9
The group established themselves in Marin County, called themselves the San
Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, and soon acquired a reputation for their performances
that created an atmosphere of “participation, freedom, and involvement between
performers and audience.”
10
Students who participated in Halprin’s workshop
included: Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Luciano Berio, Terry Riley, LaMonte
Young, Robert Morris, Richard Brautigan, Michael McClure, Yvonne Rainer,
Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown and, later, Eiko and Koma.
11
As the group expanded,
so did Halprin’s reputation, and in 1969, James Woods, director of Studio Watts
Workshop in Los Angeles, invited her to come work with his dancers to emulate a
performance similar to what she was able to achieve with her own group. With this
15
invitation Halprin recollects that she “wanted to do a production with a community
instead of for a community.”
12
As Halprin recalls,
The chief intention of my works at this time was to understand how
the process of creation and performance could be used to accomplish
concrete results: social change, personal growth, physical alignment,
and spiritual attunement. This necessarily involved studying the
relationships between audience and performers, between a person’s
life issues and the performance content, between performance skills
and life skills. In other words, developing an integrated life/art
process.
13
Halprin proposed a new dance, Ceremony of Us, 1969, in which she would
infuse her San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop, an entirely white ensemble, with the
Studio Watts Group, a black ensemble, for an original performance to take place at
Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum. Halprin was interested in probable racial and
gender tensions within the group and designed a workshop that forced the dancers to
live, eat, and work together for ten days. This performance initiated a life-long
interest for Halprin to incorporate real life into her movement pieces, toward an
appreciation for dance as a healing art, in social, psychological, and physical terms.
14
As Banes notes in her autobiography, “Since the late 1960s, [Halprin] has worked
with multicultural groups specifically to struggle with racial and ethnic tensions.”
15
The straightforward performance of Ceremony of Us heightened awareness within
each dancer about their internal discomforts and positions about race, while also led
to a greater understanding of each of the dancers’ hopes and fears, strengths and
weaknesses, and desires. Halprin’s method was in direct contradiction to most
performance companies, especially dance, who replaced diversity with uniformity.
16
16
During the first encounter between the two diverse groups, a powerful sexual
tension was felt between the white women and the black males. Halprin wanted the
group to confront the dominant attitudes and the underlying tension became the
unifying theme of the performance. She observed, “It was as if sexual attraction and
repulsion was the force that either brought them together or split them apart.”
17
On
the opposite end, the white males and black women were left feeling abandoned and
in a state of shock.
18
Within the structure of the workshop, men and women worked
apart for a period of time. Halprin found that it was easier for the groups to
overcome the “barriers of defining themselves as heterosexual, bisexual, or
homosexual.”
19
With less pressure, a greater creative result emerged when the men
and women then came back together to work as one ensemble. By the following
week, the entire ensemble had a chance to absorb the prior events and deconstruct
the stereotypes that faced them. Halprin commented, the white men “had a great
deal of trust and openness and sexuality for the black women” which allowed for the
entire ensemble to meld together as one group.
20
At the staged performance, Halprin heightened the audience’s awareness of
race immediately when they entered the lobby of the theater. Lined up along one
wall were the black dancers and opposite were the white dancers, all of whom were
dressed in plain clothes, standing next to separate doors, one painted black and one
white. Individual audience members were then forced to choose which door to enter
through to the theater, black or white. The dancers followed the audience into the
theater, where a pre-recorded audio soundtrack of the dancers finishing the sentence
“When I see you I see . . .” could be heard, and the performers continued to mingle
17
with the crowd until a specified sound signal was heard. The dancers then stripped
off their plain clothes to reveal their leotards and shorts and gracefully posed along
the edge of the stage allowing the audience to stare, visually acknowledging that they
were the entertainment.
Ceremony of Us consisted of a number of organic performances, including
the power-structured game of red light-green light and the lineup where the group
split into a snake formation in two groups, black and white, forcing the notion of
racial tension, and formed the shape of a snake, constantly changing leaders through
their improvised movements (see fig. A.1). The performance continued through
several more stages, highlighting differences between genders with the only two
structured choreographed works, the male and female rituals, and eventually the
ensemble came together again as if they were celebrating after a long conflict.
21
For Halprin, dance was a series of rituals combined in a series for neither
spectacle nor entertainment. Halprin wanted each person to dance his or her own
dance. In the performance Ceremony of Us, the groups chose to focus their rituals on
gender-specific acts such as a woman giving childbirth. The rituals were healing in a
sense that they brought a “sacred awareness to ordinary life—and to movement.”
22
James T. Burns, an audience member at the performance, noted the sense of
improvised choreography at the end of the performance commenting, the dancers
traveled up and down the aisles “taking more and more of the audience along:
humming, chanting, everyone up and moving, on stage and in aisles, on outside into
Music Center Plaza, stomp and clap, drums, dance, colored plastic billowing
overhead.”
23
The audience, with encouragement from the dancers, united together
18
into an impromptu dance, combining the once segregated black and white dancers, as
well as breaking down the boundary between artist and audience (see fig. A.2).
Halprin’s original intention to heal the intimate community of dancers and audience
involved in Ceremony of Us was fulfilled when all the participants integrated
together in harmony. The scored performance may not have cured all of the racial
stereotypes and gender biases held by the participants involved, however it seems
clear that the dance affected this specific community in a positive way.
19
Chapter 2: Endnotes
1
Lara Adair, “Anna Halprin: The dance of life: Anna Halprin turns her talent into a tool for
inspiration, enlightenment, healing,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 29, 2002, pg. E1. In the
New York Times article “Bridging Past and Present,” printed June 11, 2000, critic John Rockwell
notes, The next thirty year trajectory of Halprin’s performances concentrated on the notion of healing
through “communal dances of togetherness, dances for AIDS patients, [and] dances to exorcise
demons.”
2
Anna Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance, (Hanover:
Wesleyan University Press, 1995), 73.
3
Ibid., 4.
4
Ibid. Halprin was very interested in blurring the boundaries between art and life and eventually her
later work in the 1980s and ‘90s was more focused on relationships between men and women, the
diseases of HIV/AIDS and cancer, and awareness for the environment.
5
Ibid., 3.
6
Ibid., 75.
7
Ibid.
8
Adair, “Anna Halprin,” San Francisco Chronicle. Janice Ross, a Ph.D, author of Performance as
Experience: Dance, American Culture, and Anna Halprin and professor of dance at Stanford
University, states, "She held a series of very important workshops in the early ' 60s on her outdoor
dance deck. The folks who took those summer workshops went back to New York and began this
whole movement known as postmodern dance.
9
Halprin, Moving Toward Life, 75.
10
Ibid, 152.
11
Rockwell, “Bridging Past and Present,” The New York Times.
12
Halprin, Moving Toward Life, 152.
13
Ibid., 228.
14
Janice Ross, “Anna Halprin: from dance art to healing art,” Dance Magazine, June 2004,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_1_78/ai_112212768.
20
15
Halprin, Moving Toward Life, 4.
16
Ibid., 52.
17
Ibid., 155.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid, 54.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 166.
22
Adair, “Anna Halprin,” San Francisco Chronicle.
23
Halprin, Moving Toward Life, 168.
21
Chapter 3: 1970s – Judith F. Baca: The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
The 1970s brought a wider acceptance from the public to the “radical” ideas
introduced in the previous decade. There were major advances in civil rights,
increased influence of the women’s liberation movement, and a heightened concern
for the environment. By the 1970s, artists creating projects with a social conscious
were on the rise. Critic Erika Doss observes, a new form of public art, focused on
“democratic participation and community revitalization in public spaces,” surfaced
within works such as Judith F. Baca’s The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
1
Baca, whose
public and personal work is rooted in her own belief that “art is a tool for social
change and self-transformation and is capable of fostering civic dialogue in the most
uncivil places,” worked in underserved communities, building a shared authority
within social and political groups.
2
Dolores Hayden defines the "shared authority" approach as one that is
focused on the community’s ideas, “rooted in an aesthetic of nurturing and
connection,” and encompasses a broad range of options for a public comprised of all
ages, ethnic backgrounds, and economic circumstances.
3
Baca aspired to paint
murals that would aid in a community’s healing; hoping that if the public shared
their ideas, feelings, and experiences about their cultures it would lead to a collective
understanding of each other within their shared environment. She incorporated large
groups of residents from the neighborhood into her mural projects to encourage a
deeper level of communication. Through participation, planning, and the creative
process, Baca was able to establish a strong support from the community.
22
Baca began her community-based murals in 1970 teaching art in Boyle
Heights, a neighborhood in East L.A., as an employee of the Los Angeles
Department of Recreation and Parks. She set out to work with gang members from
different neighborhoods to “establish networks between them to promote peaceful
solutions.”
4
Through her own training as a painter, Baca redirected the graffiti
inclined artists to painting murals as a way for them to create constructive cultural
markers.
5
The initial group of young people was small, but the relationships Baca
developed at the different Eastside parks established her credibility among the gang
members. Baca recalls,
It also marked the first step in the development of a unique collective
process that employs art to mediate between rival gang members
competing for public space and public identity. Through this work we
formulated a group incorporating four rival neighborhoods within the
same team, named Las Vistas Nuevas ("The New View").
6
As a Mexican-American woman painter, Baca was heavily influenced by
Cesar Chavez and the political climate of the early 1970s. In the spirit of the three
great Mexican muralists of the early 20
th
century, Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente,
Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Baca and several other Hispanic artists
coordinated their efforts to re-establish the mural movement in Los Angeles.
7
The
renewed movement, which soon grew to include African-American, Asian, and
white muralists, generated at least 3,000 murals across the cityscape of Los Angeles,
helping to establish the city as the public mural capital of the world, according to
Robin Dunitz, previous director of the currently inactive Mural Conservancy of Los
Angeles.
8
23
Los Angeles murals were saturated in images about community activism,
ethnic pride and power, and spoke to the cultural demands of previously
marginalized groups. Baca explained that some murals became “cultural-affirmation
images, asserting only that we exist as distinct cultures; others addressed the hard
task of articulating and advocating for resolution of issues affecting the places where
our people lived and worked.”
9
She continues, “We consciously avoided Western
European aesthetics, instead privileging Chicano popular culture, religious
iconography, Mexican calendars, tattoos, street writing; whatever could better and
more accurately portray our direct life-experience. We did not even look closely at
Mexico City, an influence far-removed from the Diaspora of the Southwest.”
10
The new social power found within the murals was not limited to immigrants
or indigenous people. The subject matter of the visual markers began to tackle larger
social injustice issues relevant to the marginalized communities; “issues of police
brutality, border crossings, drug addition, gang warfare, and other difficulties of a
life of poverty and exclusion.”
11
The audience for these murals spread to the array of
Los Angeles’ multi-ethnic communities of African-American, Thai, Chinese, Jewish,
and Japanese.
12
Beginning in the summer of 1976, Baca initiated a mural project she titled
The Great Wall of Los Angeles.
13
With the help of painting teams of approximately
700 participants, which included over 400 young people, 14-21 years of age, of
diverse cultural and economic backgrounds, Baca produced 2,435 running feet of
murals in segments over seven summers.
14
The scale of the mural, Baca explained
was “about amplifying the voice, about making it the voice of people who were
24
excluded from history.”
15
She recognized that she needed an extremely diverse
group in order to provide a stimulating and enduring tribute to California’s history
and therefore worked in cooperation with scholars, oral historians, hundreds of
community members and several artists including, Judy Chicago, Christina
Schlesinger, Gary Tokumoto, Yreina Carvantez and Patssi Valdez.
16
Just over a half-mile in length and 13 ½ feet high, the mural was
commissioned by the U.S. Army Corps in conjunction with their renovation of the
Tujunga Wash Flood Control Channel in the San Fernando Valley (see fig. A.3).
Many considered it to be the “flagship for a vast collection of outdoor artworks that
sprang up throughout the city beginning in the early 1970s.”
17
Baca recollects about
the murals location,
The uniqueness of the site provided a safe haven to assemble youth
from different neighborhoods of Los Angeles without fear of reprisals
from warring gangs, as drive-by shootings, commonplace in L.A.,
were virtually impossible in the Wash; and the endless wall provided
a natural site for a narrative work. Fresh from organizing in the
disparate communities of Los Angeles, I was hopeful about a site that
necessitated a large team from many places. Unclaimed by any one
gang, it was an excellent place to bring youth of varied ethnic
backgrounds from all over the city to work on an alternate view of the
history of the U.S., which included people of color who had been left
out of American history books.
18
Baca envisioned The Great Wall as an important visual representation of non-
Anglo minorities of California whose contributions were essential to the diverse
makeup of the state. The mural was arranged in chronological order and began with
images of creatures from the prehistoric age, followed by scenes of indigenous
Chumash Indians’ daily life and religious beliefs. Each momentous event occurring
in the mural was identified with a label just below the image. The arrival of the
25
Spanish was delineated by an image of a large white hand “uprooting a native during
the Spanish conquest” and continued in several panels that told the story of
colonization, Mexican rule, and the presence of Catholic missionaries.
19
Baca took
time to include the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo, a turning point in which Mexico
ceded southern California to the United States, the Gold Rush, and a scene depicting
the influx of immigrants from Europe and Asia (see fig. A.4). Shortly thereafter
images of the development of the railroad using Chinese laborers, and the beginnings
of the women’s suffrage movement were dramatically illustrated (see fig. A.5).
20
The mural then continued into the twentieth century with images of the
devastating “impact of the Great Depression on various ethnic groups: blacks
segregated in South-Central Los Angeles, Indians selling their land for forty-five
cents an acre, and the 350,000 Mexican-Americans deported to make room for the
Dust Bowl refugees.”
21
Baca highlighted the injustice that occurred in the Japanese-
American community during World War II with images of the Japanese Fighting
442d, a regimental combat team composed of primarily Japanese-American soldiers
of the United States Army, juxtaposed with the internment camps where many
Japanese-American families were sent during this time (see figs. A.6, A.7).
22
The
mural triumphantly finishes with images of the Civil Rights movement, and new
rights gained by minorities during the 1950s and 1960s through portrayals of
victorious minority Olympian track stars, Wilma Rudolph and Billy Mills (see fig.
A.8).
Baca envisioned a collaborative project capable of uniting the distinctive
communities of Los Angeles, while raising public consciousness to the area’s diverse
26
ethnic and cultural history.
23
Baca recognized the importance of the message within
her work and treated the mural as an educational tool, a “vehicle for the
rehabilitation of self-esteem,” and invited people from a variety of ethnic and racial
backgrounds to work on the mural, many of whom were gang members or on
probation.
24
She insisted on paying each of the youth participants for their work,
instilling a sense of pride and self-worth for a job well done. After a summer in the
program, Todd Ableser, a youth invited to paint the mural, wrote about his newly
found feelings of identity and pride stating,
After my first year on the mural, I left with a sense of who I was and
what I could do that was unlike anything I’d ever felt before. The
feeling came from . . . seeing what I was personally capable of at a
time in my life when my self-confidence had been extremely low.
25
The mural was much more than painting pre-selected images on a wall. Baca
was interested in battling the existing notions of stereotyping and racism among the
teens. She organized the crews to be diverse, arranged for them all to have history
lessons on Friday afternoons, and used improvisational theater techniques to reveal
the dangers of racial assumptions and stereotyping. “The work became a monument
to interracial harmony as methods were developed to work across the differences of
race and class” and as a result life-long relationships were formed.
26
The youths, a
community within themselves, in return learned to be more accepting and were
empowered to spread the word back to their individual cultural communities.
The surrounding San Fernando Valley greatly benefited from Baca’s mural.
Several residents volunteered to interact with the youths in painting the mural while
others conducted open forums regarding the work and intentions behind the public
27
piece. The historians, who were researching data to be included in Baca’s design,
spent time interviewing citizens and presented their stories at public lectures, many
of which would then be included in the final concept.
27
And on another level, local
high school teachers saw the mural as an opportunity to discuss history outside of the
classroom without textbooks.
The Great Wall of Los Angeles is arguably one of the most acclaimed
monumental cultural projects in the United States dealing with interracial relations.
Baca’s approach to the community and participants involved was sensitive and
thoughtful, and demonstrated what is necessary to produce a successful socially
conscious public artwork. The mural had the ability to engage diverse groups in
dialogue to encourage social healing within their community. The mural addressed
the needs of the constantly evolving community, reflected individual social issues,
and helped establish an exchange of ideas while simultaneously building a
community identity. It helped establish a new dialogue which renewed the public’s
faith in the power of civic dialogue and offered an opportunity for the community to
discuss issues such as racism, cultural identity, and gender in a non-threatening
manner.
28
Chapter 3: Endnotes
1
Erika Doss, “Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art: Contrasting Projects by Judy
Baca and Andrew Leicester,” American Art, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1992), 69.
2
Judy Baca, Statement, http://www.judybaca.com.
3
Hayden, The Power of Place, 235.
4
Public Broadcasting System, American Family: The Art of the Mural,
http://www.pbs.org/americanfamily/mural.html.
5
Ibid. The climate of the time was shaped by the civil rights movement, with events such as the
Chicano Moratorium March in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. (This historical march
occurred because Chicanos opposed the Vietnam War; Chicanos had the highest number of
casualties in the war proportionate to their number in the population. The Chicanos urged non-
violence for all Chicanos who participated in this event, and the Chicanos had agreed on this despite
their anger towards the war. Despite this, Ruben Salazar, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times
newspaper sympathetic to Chicano civil rights activities, was killed by a police tear gas canister shot
blindly into the Silver Dollar Café, where police thought organizers were gathering. The Brown
Berets were the motivators of the Chicano Moratorium.).
6
Ibid.
7
Barbara Tannenbaum, “Where Miles of Murals Preach a People’s Gospel,” New York Times, pg.
2.29, May 26, 2002.
8
Brenda Rees, “Talking Walls: A Guide to L.A.’s vast collection of murals where artists paint
snapshots of history and hope,” Los Angeles Times, pg. 6, April 16, 1998.
9
Public Broadcasting System, American Family.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
In 1976, Judith Baca founded the Social Public Art Rescource Center (SPARC), as an
independent, Venice-based non-profit organization of artists, which has since been at the forefront of
the L.A. mural movement. In the mid-1980s, Mayor Tom Bradley created a budget line for SPARC,
making it the sole organization to receive city money for murals. In 1988, the concept of the Great
29
Wall was taken to a city-wide level in Los Angeles with the “Neighborhood Pride: Great Walls
Unlimited Program,” which has so far sponsored more than 104 murals by artists from different parts
of the city reflecting the issues of diverse groups in their own neighborhoods. For additional
information visit www.sparcmurals.org.
14
Baca, Statement.
15
Tannenbaum, “Where Miles of Murals Preach a People’s Gospel,” New York Times.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
18
Public Broadcasting System, American Family.
19
Doss, Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art, 71.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid .
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
Ibid.
26
Public Broadcasting System, American Family.
27
Doss, Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art, 73.
30
Chapter 4: Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Questions), 1989
Barbara Kruger’s work emerged in the late 1970s, “in an era that developed
ideologies now considered postmodern, when the idea of the author and originality
were debated and artists began to appropriate and deconstruct images already in
circulation.”
1
As a second generation feminist, Kruger appropriated and wrote text
to deconstruct social clichés and stereotypes, regarding issues like feminism and
censorship, by juxtaposing images and interrogative text to produce a new collaged
image, one which forced the viewer to question the messages embedded in the
montage. Kruger investigated how identities are constructed, how stereotypes were
formed, and how narratives within our environment could be shaped and accepted in
advertorial media.
2
By the 1980s, curator Mary Jane Jacob noted that the role of public art shifted
from that of “renewing the physical environment to that of improving society, from
promoting aesthetic quality to contributing to the quality of life.”
3
Socio-political
concerns were always a topic of interest for Kruger whose text based work tactfully
subverted the mainstream commercial media system by using a questioning voice to
evoke dialogue in the community. Public artists during this time produced work
relevant to the public’s interests and similar to the artists from the previous two
decades because they forced themselves into the real world. Critic, Arlene Raven
identified the shift as art-in-the-public-interest and notes, artists were “devoted to
public artistic expression and to the critical issues raised,” they worked within
emerging art forms and venues to create artistic interventions including street art,
31
guerrilla theater, video, page art billboards, protest actions and demonstrations, oral
histories, posters, and murals.
4
After successfully integrating her style into the traditional gallery and
museum world, Kruger sought to translate her work into larger public projects
including billboards, bus shelters, murals, and large-scale architectural commissions.
Untitled (Questions), 1989 was less about aesthetically enhancing the public space
and more about addressing relevant social issues, creating a significant and lasting
impact within the community, and promoting dialogue.
Barbara Kruger learned first hand that it was necessary to approach
individual projects with the basic understanding of the community’s core social
issues in order to create a meaningful work to address sensitive issues, while also
building a productive dialogue within the community. Rosalyn Deutsche notes,
when Kruger creates a public project “she uncovers the social conflicts internal to
spaces that seem harmonious and insinuates tensions and differences into spaces that
repress them beneath the appearance of homogeneity—whether the space in question
is an art institution, work of art, self, category, discipline, social group, nation, or any
other would-be unity.”
5
In 1989, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
(MOCA) invited Kruger to paint a large mural on the side of their Temporary
Contemporary building. The southern facing wall overlooked the “embarkation
point from which thousands of Japanese-Americans were sent to relocation camps
during World War II.”
6
MOCA’s director, Richard Koshalek, stated that Kruger was
an ideal candidate for the mural project because historically, her work had the ability
to confront “the central artistic issue; the meaning of art in a media- and consumer-
32
influenced era, and the meaning of representation within this art.”
7
For this project,
Kruger proposed the recreation of a bumper sticker that she had previously
developed for another museum exhibition that included text from the Pledge of
Allegiance (see fig. A.9).
8
The proposed mural confronted the viewer and
challenged them to question the difference between art and the other forms of visual
media seen in our world.
9
The artist and museum were unaware of how this very
public form of art would affect the nearby community of Japanese-Americans.
Initially, Kruger’s mural was opposed by a resident spokesperson from the
Japanese-American community, Katsumi (“Kats”) Kunitsugu, who declared that the
mural was offensive to the residents of Little Tokyo because of the artwork’s
prominent use of the Pledge of Allegiance.
10
The neighboring Japanese-American
community was particularly sensitive to the mural’s subject matter because of their
personal experiences prior to 1942. Following the racist hysteria after the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, over 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their
Los Angeles homes and relocated to remote desert relocation centers, recognized by
the U.S. Secretary of the Interior as “American concentration camps.”
11
While living
at the centers, Japanese Americans were constantly subjected to national loyalty
tests, including being forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, behind barbed-wire
fences. The combination of Kruger’s choice of words and site for the mural “seemed
to threaten this nascent renewal of [the] Japanese American cultural – and perhaps
economic – energies in Little Tokyo.”
12
“The pledge was such a slap in the face,” remarked Kunitsugu, “the question
of loyalty has always been a sensitive issue [in the Japanese American community] –
33
people think we are not automatically loyal because we are not white. [The Japanese
American community was asking:] Why facing Little Tokyo? Why now?”
13
But if
the mural were painted in a different part of the city would these issues still arise?
The artist’s true intention was to stimulate awareness about the power and meaning
of particular words and pictures and the intention was completely misinterpreted by
the Japanese-American community as a racial slur.
14
Doss explains that Kruger’s
“democratic intentions in the public sphere were misread as evidence of artistic
egocentrism and art museum arrogance.”
15
Of course, if Kruger had involved the community from the beginning of her
process, it is possible that this controversial dialogue would not have occurred and
the issue would not have been addressed in a form of public art. This mural
unintentionally raised repressed feelings within the neighboring Japanese American
community. Neither the museum officials nor the non-resident artist thought that
something that happened nearly 50 years ago could be so fresh in the community’s
memory. In the end, the mural acted as a catalyst to raise a new awareness and
understanding of the modern Japanese American community within the context of
Los Angeles. Ultimately it became a “story of public art and democratic culture”
because the public process allowed for the community’s voice to be heard through an
open session dialogue between the artist, museum, and community.
16
If Kruger and
MOCA had stopped the public art process when they initially encountered
controversy from the residents of Little Tokyo, the Los Angeles community would
not have been able to tackle the difficult underlying situation that was clearly still
felt among the Japanese American community.
34
Untitled (Questions) was an important vessel for the Japanese American
community to remember the past and reconcile their unresolved tensions with the
American government. The mural acted as a facilitator for the Japanese American
community, allowing them to voice their concerns about race discrimination in the
city of Los Angeles. The entire democratic public art process and the dialogue that
occurred between Kruger, MOCA, and the citizens of the Little Tokyo district was a
crucial part of its development.
Kruger ended up going back to the drawing board and she returned with an
improved design. Ultimately, Kruger chose to remove the Pledge of Allegiance as
the main text and replaced it with the questions she was really interested in having
the public address, “WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND
SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS
ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES
FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST? (see fig. A.10)”
17
Her use of the interrogative
pronoun, both non-gender and non-ethnic specific, in the mural opened up the
potential audience to extend beyond the Japanese-American community.
The public mural was imposed not only in reaction to the ongoing censorship
crisis, the Culture Wars, but was also created to instigate communication in the
public, more specifically in this case, the city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times art
critic Christopher Knight reviewed the work noting that the “mural addresses you as
a peer, as a citizen or fellow member of the public world. It means to start a
conversation.”
18
Although Kruger did not specifically set out to engage the
Japanese-American community in dialogue about the site’s history and location, it
35
was because she was able to gather the full support from them through the public art
process that this work was successful. In the end, the new mural was more relevant
to a wider audience within the city of Los Angeles and the active participation of the
neighboring Japanese-American community added a better understanding,
appreciation, and sense of ownership of the public mural, thus building a shared
identity.
36
Chapter 4: Endnotes
1
West of Rome presents: Women in the City, http://www.womeninthecity.org/.
2
Lynne Tillman, “Interview with Barbara Kruger,” in Thinking of you: Barbara Kruger, ed.
Stephanie Emerson, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), 189.
3
Mary Jane Jacob and others, Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago,
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 56.
4
Arlene Raven, Art in the Public Interest, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 1.
5
Rosalyn Deutsche, “Breaking Ground: Barbara Kruger’s Spatial Practice,” in Thinking of you:
Barbara Kruger (see note 2), 77.
6
Knight, “MOCA’s Flag Mural: It’s A Wrap Art: After 18 months in the planning stage—and
overcoming many roadblocks—Barbara Kruger’s artwork finally adorns the Temporary
Contemporary,” Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1990, pg. 1.
7
Erika Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American
Communities (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 2.
8
Doss, Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art, 69. The text of the proposed mural,
Untitled (Questions), 1989, was “constructed to challenge the political agenda of the New Right,
particularly in condemnation of contemporary art,” and included the Pledge of Allegiance bordered
by questions meant to provoke discussion from the audience.
9
Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs, 2.
10
Ibid., 6.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 9.
13
Ibid., 10.
14
Ibid., 11.
15
Ibid.
37
16
Ibid., 237.
17
Ibid., 243.
18
Knight, “MOCA’s Flag Mural,” Los Angeles Times.
38
Chapter 5: Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Building upon the previous activist and identity-focused politics of the
preceding decades, art in the 1990s reflected society’s resurgence of liberal political
movements. Unrestricted in their choice of subject matter, materials, and process,
artists were solely focused on how to create a work of public art that would help the
community engage in a healing dialogue about contentious social issues. Suzanne
Lacy, artist and author of Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, explains, up
until the mid-1990s public art was built upon individual “concepts of audience,
relationship, communication, and political intention.”
1
The amalgamation of these
ideas in the 1990s is what Lacy terms as “new genre public art.” Whether ephemeral
or static, new genre public art is participatory; more about the community
involvement and relationship between artist and community than the actual physical
enhancement of the geography surrounding it; supportive, encouraging community
dialogue about social and political issues, and emblematic of the unique
characteristics of the community.
2
The audience-participation aspect of this
movement within public art gave the work relevancy within the community and
suggested that there was great potential for the art to affect the lives of those in and
outside of the community.
3
This method of public art was rooted in the basic fundamental ideas
established by Allan Kaprow and Joseph Beuys, which identified the relationship
between the artist and the audience as the necessary component to a project’s
success. Kaprow and Beuys’ theories, along with their intentions of redefining the
role of the artist by blurring the boundaries between art and life, were primarily
39
interested in the artistic aspects of the new relationship between artist and audience
and were solely concerned with gaining public participation to create a work of art.
In contrast, the work being produced in the 1990s built upon the established
relationship between artist and audience and focused on initiating dialogue in the
community about social issues. A closer examination of Sheila Levrant de
Brettville’s Biddy Mason: Time and Place will reveal her strong desire to produce a
public artwork, her first, which was capable of investigating social issues through a
collaborative process with the community of Los Angeles, and will also disclose her
unforeseen struggle to engage the community in dialogue.
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a graphic designer, artist and educator, has a
history of first time achievements. In 1971 she founded the first design program for
women at the California Institute of the Arts, and two years later co-founded The
Women’s Building, a public center for female culture, and it’s Women’s Graphic
Center in Los Angeles. Following this, in 1981, she initiated the communication
design program at the Otis Art Institute of the Parsons School of Design.
4
Since
1990, de Bretteville has been the director of the Yale University Graduate Program
in Graphic Design, was the first woman to receive tenure, and continues to accept
commissions for public artworks around the world. Biddy Mason: Time and Place
was the first public commission de Bretteville received in her career and because of
her inexperience in the field she approached the work in a cautious manner, tediously
selecting durable materials and carefully selecting text and images that would
literally reveal the history of the site.
40
During a redevelopment phase of downtown Los Angeles, a new parking
structure was proposed for 331 Spring Street to accommodate the historic Bradbury
Building, commercial venues, and surrounding government owned structures. Under
a Percent-for-Art Policy implemented by the Community Redevelopment Agency of
the city of Los Angeles (CRA/LA), the developers were required to include a public
art component with the new parking garage.
5
Robert Chattel and Richard Rowe, two
CRA/LA planners, assisted the developers in project managing the public art
component and invited The Power of Place, a non-profit organization, who was
producing socially significant work throughout Los Angeles, to propose a
commemorative piece for the site.
The Power of Place, founded in 1982 by Dolores Hayden, was created to
“situate women’s history and ethnic history in downtown [Los Angeles], in public
places, through experimental, collaborative projects by historians, designers, and
artists.”
6
In a collaborative fashion, Dolores Hayden solicited assistance from
several people and financial institutions.
7
A public workshop sponsored by The
Power of Place and UCLA in late 1987, generated comments on proposals for the
project by approximately 50 people in attendance. Most importantly, Hayden asked
Sheila Levrant de Brettville, an artist and graphic designer, and Betye Saar, and
artist, to create the artwork for the site.
8
Saar’s smaller project placed in the elevator
lobby, Biddy Mason: A Passage of Time, was more intimate but still complimented
de Bretteville’s monumental work.
9
The largest and most involved work within the public art component was
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s 81-foot long by 8-foot high wall entitled Biddy
41
Mason: Time and Place (see fig. A.11). Located between the Bradbury Building and
331 S. Spring Street, the black concrete wall was divided into ten segments, each
representing a decade of Biddy Mason’s life. Utilizing intertwining shapes and
historical text, the artwork garnered acclaim for its ability to engage the community
in a visual conversation about the contributions of an overlooked figure in Los
Angeles’ African-American community. The work reads chronologically as one
enters from the Bradbury Building from Mason’s birth in 1818 until her death in
1890.
Initially, words played an important role for de Bretteville in the artwork
because she wanted the entire audience to be able to comprehend the historical
context and importance of the site. In an interview with the artist she revealed that
the text, in its entirety, was written by Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture,
urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University.
10
Hayden, sensitive to Mason’s
ability to overcome oppressing obstacles despite her race and gender, strived to
heighten the audience’s perception of the forgotten woman by utilizing the pronoun
‘she’ in almost every descriptive phrase.
11
De Bretteville designed the graphic font
that was used in smaller panels describing Mason’s life in further detail (see fig.
A.12). She chose to utilize Mason’s freedom papers and her deed to the Spring
Street property (which are the only surviving documents from her life), juxtaposed
with maps and drawings from Los Angeles in the mid-19
th
century to be etched into
small squares of stone, anchoring Mason’s life within the context of Los Angeles’
history (see fig. A.13).
12
42
The first segment established the mood of the entire wall and included a
small neutral colored stone etched with historical events occurring during Mason’s
birth including a statement about the initial arrival of African Americans to Los
Angeles in 1781, a map of the first pueblo, and the first in a series of descriptive
phrases raised from the flat plane of the concrete wall, Biddy Mason born a slave
(see fig. A.14). In preliminary research, The Power of Place in collaboration with de
Bretteville, discovered that Biddy Mason, “managed to gain a good knowledge of
livestock, herbal medicine, nursing, and midwifery skills” while working for Robert
Smith, the owner of a Mississippi plantation.
13
The following two panels, although
minimal, introduce an important aspect to de Bretteville’s artwork. The artist used
three-dimensional objects to imprint the surface of the concrete, leaving a ghostly,
hollowed image of the object (see fig. A.15). Clearly, the intention of this tactic was
to encourage the audience to participate with the work by running their fingers
through the hollowed space, causing the viewer to reflect about the symbolism
within the image. These particular panels were marked with an aloe plant, medicinal
bottle, and medical practitioner’s bag to signify the beginning of Mason’s education
as a midwife. De Bretteville includes Hayden’s descriptive phrase She learns
midwifery along the upper section of the 1830 panel (see fig. A.16).
In 1847, Smith, a religious man, decided to move his family, along with
Biddy Mason and her three daughters, to Utah to join the growing Mormon
community along the Salt Basin region. With three daughters, the oldest ten-years-
old and the youngest still nursing, Biddy Mason walked more than 2,000 miles in
about seven months.
14
A few years after their arrival to Utah, news spread of
43
Brigham Young’s new Mormon community in Southern California and Smith was
asked by the church to once again move his entire family to San Bernardino, CA in
1851. To emphasize the hardship of Mason’s journey across the country, the artist
imprints a succession of four wagon wheels accompanied by the phrase Biddy Mason
walks to California behind a wagon train (see fig. A.17).
California had been admitted to the Union by this time, possibly a fact that
Smith did not know, and small communities of free African-Americans were
developing in the region.
15
Biddy was introduced to Robert Owens and Elizabeth
Rowan, free African-Americans who encouraged Mason to petition for her and her
family’s freedom. By 1855, sentiments against slavery began to grow and Smith was
making preparations to move to Texas, one of the few remaining states in which
slavery was legal, with Mason and her family.
16
Mason finally decided to take Smith
to court and after a three day hearing in January 1856, Judge Benjamin Hayes ruled
that Mason and her three daughters were entitled to their freedom. Biddy Mason
wins freedom in court supplements the 1850 panel which also includes replications
of Mason’s court documents etched onto colored stones and placed within the
concrete walls (see fig. A.18). It was very uncommon for a slave to win freedom
from their owner in court but due to several of Smith’s actions including bribery, and
attempted kidnapping, the judge ruled in Mason’s favor granting her and her entire
family freedom.
17
Robert Owens, Mason’s friend and soon to be son-in-law, invited
her family to move to Los Angeles to stay with him.
Once in Los Angeles, Mason found work as a midwife and nurse and soon
developed a reputation as a kind and giving woman who was recognized for her
44
courage and outstanding medical skills. Mason lived a modest life saving much of
what she earned which enabled her to be one of the first African American women to
purchase a plot of land in Los Angeles.
18
De Bretteville made the historic moment
visual with the imprint of a picket fence, She owns land, and the replication of the
deed to her home (see fig. A.19).
In a small house Mason rented on San Pedro Street, she and a few other
members of the African American community established Los Angeles’ First
African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872. In the 1870 panel, Biddy Mason
delivers hundreds of babies, recognizes all of her years as a midwife along with the
repeated imprint of the medical bag (see fig. A.20). Mason enjoyed giving back to
the community donating money, shelter, and food to families made homeless by
seasonal floods.
De Bretteville finalizes the artwork with Hayden’s phrase Los Angeles
mourns and reveres Grandma Mason (see fig. A.21). After several years of
community service Biddy Mason died on January 15, 1891, and was buried in an
unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery, located in the Los Angeles community of
Boyle Heights.
19
In the final chapter on the wall representing Biddy Mason’s life, de
Bretteville prominently displayed a portrait of Biddy Mason in tribute to her
honorable life. It was important for de Bretteville that the portrait be large enough to
be visible from the street to entice the audience to interact with the piece.
20
For the
artist, the image was also a political symbol acknowledging a lack of monuments or
memorials for women in the public realm.
21
45
Biddy Mason: Time and Place received critical acclaim for its socially
conscious approach to publicly documenting the life of a forgotten minority woman
role-model in Los Angeles within an artwork and was featured in Dolores Hayden’s
book The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, published in 1995.
Sixteen years after the installation of the artwork, Mike Boyette, a native of Texas,
currently working as a risk management consultant for Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia,
began genealogical research about his family and great-great grandfather Robert
Mason Smith.
22
Through an internet search Boyette was introduced to Hayden’s
book, and inadvertently to his great-great grandfather’s connection to Biddy Mason.
Boyette recalls, when I came across Mason’s historic journey with Robert Mason
Smith’s family I thought it was a “fascinating story…it’s like one of these journeys
we go on and the more we go down it the more interesting it becomes.”
23
Boyette discovered de Bretteville’s public artwork through reading Hayden’s
book and soon after he reached out to the CRA/LA to assist him in contacting Biddy
Mason’s descendants. He remarks,
We have this connection between her family and my family and I
think it would be wonderful to connect with them and share stories
about our ancestors. I think it’s fascinating that she had the
courage to stand up and take the action that she took. She’s just a
captivating character to me and the fact that she went on to become
so successful and a leader in the Los Angeles community is
remarkable. Thank goodness my great-great grandfather lost that
court case.
24
Boyette has made some effort and continues to express an interest in
reuniting with the family someday but has yet been able to contact Mason’s
descendants. Although the artwork did not directly lead to these two families
46
reuniting or even reconciling a dark history, it was through Boyette’s discovery of
the CRA/LA’s public artwork which will enable him to originate a new conversation
to take place between the two families who were once bound together.
Looking back at the public artwork de Bretteville recognizes that in many
ways the Biddy Mason project was overtly literal. She says, “But I don’t think that
every piece of public art should be that literal, in fact I think that fewer of them
should be literal, more of it should be open to, not just to interpretation, but to
participation.”
25
When asked if she thinks the artwork would be just as powerful
without the text she agrees,
you get that she [Biddy Mason] was there, she and the agave, the
wagon wheels, the midwife’s bag, [without the narrative text] you
would be asking about that story and not being told the story and
that’s really who I have become. I was totally fixated on the fact
that she had made this impression and I wanted the work to kind of
resemble that.
26
De Bretteville also recognizes her failed attempt at truly connecting with the
community,
It was not until the work was revealed to the public and people
would come up to me and question why I phrased certain things
the way I did or why I included certain aspects of the city’s history.
It was then that I realized I had not involved the community in
enough of a dialogue to uncover the real issues at hand.
27
Her more recent works reflect her feminist ideals and center around “asking”
for user participation rather then “telling” the community about contemporary social
issues.
28
The artist immerses herself into the communities where her artwork is to be
placed and researches the site through recording residents’ voices, learning of their
47
shared lives and memories, to produce projects that are significant to all of the local
populations. With a mind-set to keep the final result open-ended, de Bretteville
pushes her audience to read the artwork, through visualization and participation, and
encouraging them to comprehend it before they are able to interpret the work.
48
Chapter 5: Endnotes
1
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 28.
2
Ibid, 30.
3
Ibid, 58.
4
AIGA: Medalists, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/medalist-
sheilalevrantdebretteville.
5
Biddy Mason: Time and Place is different from the other artworks previously mentioned in this
thesis simply because it was financed with public funds by a government agency, the CRA. One
must recognize that it is difficult for government agencies, such as the CRA, to fund public artworks
which wish to address a community’s social or political concerns for a couple of reasons. First,
during the development of this project there were heated debates about this type of potentially
controversial artwork being funded with public money, and, secondly, the work must be produced
under the constrictions of a government policy. The Percent-for-Art Policy varies in different cities
and artists often view it as limiting in respect to budget and materials. Public art created from
Percent-for-Art policies is also subject to review by a committee of the communities leaders.
6
Hayden, The Power of Place, xi.
Ibid., 172.Michelle Isenberg, who was the art consultant for the public art installations at the
Broadway-Spring Center, also helped raise money for the project along with the contributions and
support from the Afro-American Museum, the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the
National/State/Country Partnership, UCLA, the Broadway-Spring Center and the Community
Redevelopment Agency.
8
Ibid, 172.
9
Additional women who worked on the project included:Susan E. King, was a specialist in
letterpress books, who assisted in producing a text to accompany the public artwork. Donna Graves,
who brought a background of art, urban and social history was hired as Executive Director of the
Power of Place. Assistance with initial research was provided by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Kathy
Perkins, Mason descendants Linda Cox and Gladys Owens Smith, Miriam Mathews, and local writer
Bobi Jackson.
10
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, phone conversation with the author, March 7, 2008.
11
Public Art in LA, Biddy Mason’s Place: A Passage of Time,
http://www.publicartinla.com/Downtown/Broadway/Biddy_Mason/mason.html
49
12
Ibid.
13
Hayden, The Power of Place, 141.
14
Ibid, 143.
15
Ibid, 145.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid, 150.
18
Ibid, 158.
19
Ibid, 139.
20
De Bretteville, phone conversation with the author, March 7, 2008.
21
Public Art in LA, Biddy Mason’s Place,
http://www.publicartinla.com/Downtown/Broadway/Biddy_Mason/mason.html
22
Michael Boyette, phone conversation with the author, March 7, 2008.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25
De Bretteville, phone conversation with the author, March 7, 2008.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid.
28
Ibid.
50
Chapter 6: Conclusion
As Lucy Lippard notes, the “world is crumbling: Nothing that does not
include the voices of people of color, women, lesbians, and gays can be considered
inclusive, universal or healing. To find the whole we must know and respect all the
parts.”
1
Ultimately, for the artists examined in this thesis, it was more important for
their public artworks to create feelings of ownership within the community rather
than merely producing aesthetically pleasing work that did not contribute to the
greater good of the public. Socially conscious public art relies on public
involvement and communication to succeed. As exemplified with the projects in this
thesis, it is through the collaborative dialogue in conjunction with the public art
process that a community is able to explore differences to identify resolutions.
Public audiences in the 1960s and 1970s were faced with a contentious
political climate and a rising counterculture that were taking action in response to the
Vietnam War, Civil Rights movement, and progressive liberation movements, like
feminism and the sexual revolution. Anna Halprin explored racial and gender issues
within in her performance piece Ceremony of Us, 1969. She focused her attention on
smaller communities, consisting of specific dance ensembles and audiences, and was
capable of portraying scored improvised techniques as a healing art, to mend racial
divisions, both physically and mentally. Although the work was not site-specific in
location, it was specific to the hand-picked dance communities she worked with.
The dancer was progressive in her technique and approach to incorporate ordinary
life, incorporating everyone into the performance, both audience and artist/dancer.
Halprin integrated the life/art process to achieve social change within the community
51
because her dances were developed with the community rather than for the
community.
Judith F. Baca’s unique approach to creating public art was democratic and
focused on revitalizing a community through the creating of an artwork in a public
space. Like Halprin, Baca’s chosen community was hand selected but consisted of a
much larger and diverse group of people. The site-specific project, The Great Wall
of Los Angeles, 1974-2001 fostered a new dialogue among the San Fernando Valley
residents and the troubled youth gang members hired to assist in painting the mural.
The collaborative process of creating Baca’s mural healed the two distinct
communities because it facilitated a dialogue of ideas, feelings, and experiences
about their cultural differences, encouraged each of the groups to be more accepting,
and empowered each participant to then educate their individual communities.
These two communities, an unlikely unison, helped to deconstruct the preconceived
notions and instead became the foundation of several new relationships.
In light of the Culture Wars of the late 1980s through the early 1990s,
audiences and artists alike forced a public debate challenging governmental notions
of censorship in relation to issues of cultural identity, sexual orientation, feminism,
and freedom of speech. Public art concentrated on enhancing the quality of life in
society and was less focused on improving the physical cityscape. Barbara Kruger
intentionally proposed a mural for the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to
provoke the public into a dialogue to question the government’s limitations on art
and American society’s polarized viewpoints, and unintentionally sparked a debate
with the Japanese-American community. Kruger’s site-generated mural, Untitled
52
(Questions), 1989, faced controversy because she failed to involve the community in
the discussion of the public artwork and therefore alienated an entire ethnic-specific
community. Once she included the Japanese-American community in the dialogue
she was more sensitive to the community’s needs, they were more receptive to her
ideas, and she restructured her initial design into one that was more powerful to
encompass the entire community of Los Angeles.
Sheila Levrant de Bretteville’s Biddy Mason: Time and Place, a collaborative
project, had great potential to affect those within the community of Los Angeles.
The commemorative artwork was conceived to include the community through
public workshops; however in reality, the artist received very little community input
in the artworks development. Designed to function as a marker of local pride,
visually illustrating a story that belonged to a specific place and community within
Los Angeles, the artwork failed to engage the community in the public art process
from the beginning. However, even though de Bretteville was unable to interact with
a specific group, it is the random public, the community of Los Angeles, who
ultimately benefited from engaging with the piece on an ongoing basis.
It is important to recognize that if de Bretteville was able to garner more
participatory support in the development of the artwork, how dramatically it would
have changed the end result. The artist herself recognized that it was the pure lack of
community involvement that weakened the end result of Biddy Mason: Time and
Place. She believes that if the text illustrated on the wall would have been
compromised, perhaps enhanced, or omitted altogether, it would have altered the
entire appearance of the project. As illustrated in the previous three projects, a
53
crucial element of creating a successful socially conscious public artwork relies on
the participation of as many people as possible. De Bretteville’s project had the
potential to affect a much larger constituency that could have been achieved with an
outreach for community participation. In a sense, de Bretteville’s project succeeds
because it lives on in Dolores Hayden’s book, The Power of Place, as well as on the
internet to function in a fundamental effort to raise awareness about Biddy Mason’s
life. These resources aided in Mike Boyette’s genealogical search and perhaps
someday will be a crucial element in two families connecting to reunite and address
a shared history.
From Halprin and Baca’s much focused definitions of a community to Kruger
and de Bretteville opening up their notion of a community to involve the entire city
of Los Angeles; it is interesting that socially conscious art progressively emphasized
community participation as the practice matured through the decades. Each artist
was faced with different social issues, from race to forgotten histories, but focused
the development of the work to incorporate the basic ideals within socially conscious
art. The four public artworks were created with the intention to engage the
community in a productive dialogue specifically to address a social or political issue,
relevant to that particular community. Each project was cultivated to affect as many
participants as possible and relied on the collaborative process from the community
to create a meaningful work of art.
The success and failures within each work varied in how the artist
approached the project, incorporated the community, and conceptualized its function
within the city. Critic Claire Bishop believes that “There can be no failed,
54
unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally
essential to the task of strengthening the social bond.”
2
And, as clarified in the four
projects in this thesis one can recognize the success Halprin, Baca, and Kruger found
when working in conjunction with the community. In order for a work of art to be
successful, Howard Becker, sociologist and author of Art World, explains, “someone
must respond to the work once it is done, have an emotional or intellectual reaction
to it, ‘see something in it,’ [and] appreciate it.”
3
The most successful examples of
socially conscious public artwork, as exemplified by this thesis, encouraged dialogue
within the public, and as a result, the community gained a greater understanding
about one another’s distinct and unique qualities.
Curator Mary Jane Jacob recognizes that collaborative projects were “not
designed to provide answers but to raise questions; not an attempt to limit the
definition of “audience” or “public” or “sculpture,” but to extend those definitions”
in an attempt to discover a new integrative art that could really become a part of, be
relevant to, and push the boundaries of people’s everyday lives.
4
The real value of
Halprin, Baca, Kruger, and de Bretteville’s works came through the building of
communal memory through the community’s shared experience in the development
of the art. Ultimately, it was the dialogue that ensued between the artist and
community that became the most important component of the projects themselves.
In The Power of Place, Dolores Hayden clarified that the act of creating a
public artwork is “about giving respect to members of a community, listening to
them and talking to them as equals, and earning their trust."
5
When the public
engaged with an artist to create a socially conscious public art, the community,
55
(whether dance troupes from San Francisco and Los Angeles, the residents of the
San Fernando Valley, or African-Americans in Los Angeles), had the opportunity to
come together as one voice. This “community” was then more likely to create a
public artwork that acknowledged and celebrated their differences, which helped
them take one step closer to ending social fragmentation. These publics, who built
memories together, united their community and strengthened the community’s
identity within the city and were healed in the process.
It is interesting that as the community involvement progressed through the
four decades, the artists not only altered their approach to the site but also to how
they interacted with the community. Halprin’s performance worked within a
diffused sense of site, not necessarily specific to Los Angeles, and focused on her
interest in uniting two different ethnic dance ensembles. Several years later Baca
was commissioned to create a site-specific mural and its subject was heavily
influenced by those involved with producing it. Later, Kruger and de Bretteville,
found the community input to be invaluable to the development of their projects as
their site-generated projects addressed the history of the place and surrounding
immediate community.
Each of these women-produced projects resulted in various notions of
community healing. The dance troupes working with Halprin and audiences
engaged with the performance experienced a sense of temporary healing. Her radical
approach was engaging, relying on everyone’s participation, and eventually was
recreated several times in different locations because of its success. Baca’s mural,
because of its ongoing progression, has offered a prolonged sense of healing for the
56
communities involved in producing it. In the case of Kruger’s mural, the ethnic-
specific community was able to achieve a sense of immediate healing when they
spoke up and engaged the artist and museum in an open dialogue about the
underlying political issues. And finally, de Bretteville’s project continues to promote
and interject hope for healing within the community, as the descendent of Mason’s
slave owner attempts to make contact with Mason’s descendents.
“It is telling that much of the best public art has been made by women,”
notes Lucy Lippard in a 2007 essay, “Time Capsule.”
6
The four women cited in this
thesis were exposed to feminist and other social ideals generated in the 1960s.
Halprin slightly preceded the 2
nd
generation of feminists that emerged in the 1960s,
which included Baca and de Bretteville, while Kruger followed suit several years
later, clearly influenced by the 2
nd
generation’s momentous landmarks. Their
purpose and artistic intentions were geared towards helping diverse communities
confront difficult social and political issues. Their overarching goal was simply to
force a public dialogue about contentious issues in an effort to improve society.
Lippard also recognizes, “Art inspired by social energies—including
community murals and gardens, works embedded in urban planning, education and
social policy—is today more organized, better funded, less funky than it was in the
1960s.”
7
A demand for socially conscious public art is marked by the sheer number
of contemporary artists working in communities to create artworks that are
significant and meaningful. In a post-9/11, internet-dependent and consumer-
oriented world, the works of public artists today is similar to those of their
57
predecessors through their intentions but vary slightly in their subjects (and
subjectivity).
8
As we progress into the future it is inevitable that the success of a work of art
in the public realm will be determined by the social benefits it provides to the public,
its ability to encourage dialogue between different social groups, and capacity to
offer modes of change for existing conflict within the community. As exemplified in
this thesis, I believe that when all parties within a community feel free to speak about
social issues, then an effort to heal resentment can begin to take place. When art is
recognized by the public for its capability to function beyond the aesthetic, society
will embrace and find value in the potential of its problem-solving abilities. The
notion that the public is uneducated to have intimate and meaningful conversations
about public art is outdated and grossly overgeneralized. It is not necessary to obtain
a formal education to enjoy and participate in public art. If a work of art is
successful, it is because it was created with the community in mind and was able to
relate to their specific interests.
As previously noted, it is through the public’s shared ideas, feelings, and
experiences that a community can obtain a common understanding of the past and
create a sense of place within the public realm. Dolores Hayden explains that it
takes a great deal of research to bring out the meanings of urban life, “but this
process can lead from urban landscape history into community-based urban
preservation, as understanding the past encourages residents to frame their ideas
about the present and future.”
9
I believe if the public can create socially conscious
art, then perhaps future generations will be less likely to be uniformed about cultural
58
differences and will be more accepting of ethnicities and societies outside of their
own.
The projects cited within this thesis exemplify strong significant urban public
artworks that encompass the entire community adding to the residents’ sense of pride
and identity. A healthier sense of pride in the community will trickle down into a
sense of ownership and residents will embrace the neighborhood/community,
making it their own, caring for it and respecting it. A positive shared identity in the
community can only be established through the public art process in creating a
socially conscious public art, which allows for the public to share a collective
experience.
59
Chapter 6: Endnotes
1
Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, 32.
2
Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” in ARTFORUM, February
2006, http://artforum.com/inprint/id=10274.
3
Howard Becker, Art Worlds, (University of California Press, 1982), 4.
4
Jacob, Culture in Action, 13.
5
Hayden, The Power of Place, 228.
6
Lucy Lippard, “Time Capsule,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed. Will Bradley and
Charles Esche, (London: Tate Publishing, 2007), 415.
7
Lippard, “Time Capsule,” 409.
8
For instance, Fallen Fruit, a Los Angeles collective project by David Burns, Matias Viegener and
Austin Young, hosted a Nocturnal Fruit Forage event where they led public tours through the streets
of Echo Park to point out, pick, and take home the wide varieties of public fruit growing along the
community’s sidewalks. The collaborative project, similar in theory to Leslie Labowitz’s Sproutime,
was based in education, participation, and communication. In 2006, the collective conducted a
Public Jam, a continuation of their previous project, in which they invited the Los Angeles
community to bring along home-grown fruit or public fruit for a communal jam-making session.
Fallen Fruit’s ephemeral projects helped the public work together to achieve a shared result and
raised awareness of the community’s environment. Fallen Fruit and Family exemplifies a
participation oriented project on a neighborhood level, similar to Baca’s Great Wall, which have a
greater impact within the community because of the project’s dependence on the aspect of
collaboration to complete the work.
9
Hayden, The Power of Place, 227.
60
Bibliography:
Adair, Lara. “Anna Halprin: The dance of life: Anna Halprin turns her talent into a
tool for inspiration, enlightenment, healing,” San Francisco Chronicle, pg. E1,
December 29, 2002.
Becker, Howard. “Art worlds and Collective Activity.” Art Worlds. University of
California Press, 1982.
Bishop, Claire, editor. Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art. London:
Whitechapel, 2006.
_____, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents” in ARTFORUM.
February 2006, http://artforum.com/inprint/id=10274.
Borrup, Tom. The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook: How to Transform
Communities Using Local Assets, Art, and Culture. St. Paul: Fieldstone
Alliance, 2006
Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles. Downtown Art in
Public Places Policy: Adopted August 26, 1985. Los Angeles: CRA/LA, 1985.
_____, Public Art Policy: 1993. Los Angeles: CRA/LA, 1993.
Doss, Erika, “Raising Community Consciousness with Public Art: Contrasting
Projects by Judy Baca and Andrew Leicester,” American Art, Vol. 6, No. 1
(Winter, 1992), 62-81.
Doss, Erika. Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in
American Communities. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
Ferrell, David. “Hidden Portrait of a City; Billed as the longest mural in the world,
the half-mile painting is due for a badly needed update and restoration,” Los
Angeles Times, pg. B2, February 21, 2002.
Halprin, Anna. Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of Transformational Dance.
Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.
Holliday, Taylor. “Art: L.A. Murals: Up Against the Wall,” The Wall Street Journal,
pg. W.8., September 29, 2000.
61
interReview, Leslie Labowitz Interview: Ginger Wolfe-Suarez interviews Leslie
Labowitz, http://www.interreview.org/LeslieLabowitz.html.
Jacob, Mary Jane, and Michael Brenson, Eva M. Olson, Sculpture Chicago. Culture
in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
Judy Baca, Statement, www.judybaca.com.
Kaprow, Allan. Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1966.
Kirshenblatt-Gimlett, Barbara. “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance
Medium,” Performance Research, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1999): 1-30.
Knight, Christopher. “MOCA’s Flag Mural: It’s a Wrap Art: After 18 months in the
planning stage-and overcoming many roadblocks-Barbara Kruger’s artwork
finally adorns the Temporary Contemporary,” Los Angeles Times, pg.1, July 4,
1990.
Kwon, Miwon. Once Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.
Lacy, Suzanne. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press,
1995.
Lucy Lippard, “Time Capsule,” in Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader, ed.
Will Bradley and Charles Esche, London: Tate Publishing, 2007.
Morales, Aurora Levins. Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of
Integrity. Cambridge: South End Press, 1998, p. 23-38.
Parachini, Allan. “Panel Does a Double Take, Decides Kruger Work is Art Ruling:
Building and Safety commission reverses itself, unanimously declares mural is
not a sign,” Los Angeles Times, pg. 3, May 2, 1990.
Public Art in LA, Biddy Mason’s Place: A Passage of Time,
http://www.publicartinla.com/Downtown/Broadway/Biddy_Mason/mason.html.
Public Broadcasting Service, American Family: Journey of Dreams, The Art of the
Mural, http://www.pbs.org/americanfamily/mural.html.
Raven, Arlene. Art in the Public Interest. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.
62
Rees, Brenda. “Talking Walls: A guide to L.A.’s vast collection of murals, where
artists paint snapshots of history and hope,” Los Angeles Times, pg. 6, April 16,
1998.
Rockwell, John. “Bridging Past and Present,” The New York Times, June, 11, 2000,
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E6DA143FF932A25755C0
A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all.
Ross, Janice. “Anna Halprin: from dance art to healing art.” Dance Magazine, June
2004, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_1_78/ai_112212768.
Singer, Toba. “The Personal and Political Portrayed through Collaboration: Flight to
Ixcan.” Ballet-Dance Magazine, February 20, 2004, http://www.ballet-
dance.com/200403/articles/FlighttoIxcan20040220.html.
Tannenbaum, Barbara. “Where Miles of Murals Preach a People’s Gospel,” The New
York Times, pg. 2.29, May 26, 2002.
Walker Art Center, Joseph Beuys: A Brief Biography,
http://www.walkerart.org/archive/2/A84369EE5A576E446161.htm
Weintraub, Linda, Arthur Danto, and Thomas McEvilley. Art on the Edge and Over:
Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s-1990s. Litchfield,
CT: Art Insights, 1996.
63
Appendix:
A.1. Anna Halprin, Ceremony of Us, 1969. Dancers performing Red Light/Green
Light.
Source: Photograph by Tylon Barea. Anna Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five
Decades of Transformational Dance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995, p.
167.
64
A.2. Anna Halprin, Ceremony of Us, 1969. Dancers interacting with the audience.
Source: Photograph by Tylon Barea. Anna Halprin, Moving Toward Life: Five
Decades of Transformational Dance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1995, p.
163.
65
A.3. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
A.4. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
66
A.5. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
A.6. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
A.7. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
67
A.8. Judith F. Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1976-2001
Source: Photograph by the author
A.9. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1989
Source: Doss, Erika, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural
Democracy in American Communities. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1995, p. 2.
68
A.10. Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Questions), 1989
Source: Doss, Erika, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural
Democracy in American Communities. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1995, p. 245.
69
A.11. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
70
A.12. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
71
A.13. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
72
A.14. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
73
A.15. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
74
A.16. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
75
A.17. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
76
A.18. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
77
A.19. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
78
A.20. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
79
A.21. Sheila Levrant de Bretteville: Biddy Mason: Time and Place, 1991
Source: Photograph by the author
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
Art and time: temporary public art and contentious space
PDF
Mejor vida/better life and day-to-day exchanges: Networks of social exchange in contemporary arts practice
PDF
Making art public: mobilizing public art through technology
PDF
Collaborative art practice in the public sphere: The death of the artist?
PDF
Now. Not now. And now: Toward a feminist critical envisioning of social practice
PDF
(M)other work: feminist maternal performance art
PDF
Changing spaces: Machine project, critical pedagogy and reinventing the museum
PDF
The multivalent platforms of alternative art publications as agents of authentic cultural change
PDF
Public art in Houston: administrative structure analysis and artist guidebook
PDF
Art and cultural diplomacy in the international exhibition: documenta 1 and Prospect.1
PDF
Victory Gardens 2007+: making art as if the environment matters
PDF
Sites of production: An examination of Jeremy Deller's It is what it is: Conversations about Iraq
PDF
Performing the collective
PDF
Biennial rising: Prospect.1 New Orleans and the post-disaster arts movement
PDF
From land art to social practice: environmental art projects by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Bonnie Ora Sherk, Mel Chin, Fritz Haeg, and Fallen Fruit
PDF
Fostering vital places: public art and the revitalization of the Los Angeles River
PDF
Sustainability through participation: public art projects by Fritz Haeg, Futurefarmers, and Fallen Fruit
Asset Metadata
Creator
Ansert, Rebecca Allisyn
(author)
Core Title
Four women, four public art projects, four decades: exploring socially conscious public art and social change
School
School of Fine Arts
Degree
Master of Public Art Studies
Degree Program
Public Art Studies
Publication Date
06/15/2008
Defense Date
05/01/2008
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
community healing,Dialogue,feminist artists,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,participation,public art,relevance to site,socially conscious
Place Name
Los Angeles
(city or populated place)
Language
English
Advisor
Moss, Karen (
committee chair
), Decter, Joshua (
committee member
), Gray, Susan (
committee member
)
Creator Email
rebeccaansert@gmail.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1273
Unique identifier
UC1202524
Identifier
etd-Ansert-20080615 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-69265 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1273 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Ansert-20080615.pdf
Dmrecord
69265
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Ansert, Rebecca Allisyn
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
Tags
community healing
feminist artists
participation
public art
relevance to site
socially conscious