West of the West

Scorched Earth , 2006, The Broad Mark Bradford   has made abstraction , that most abstruse of styles, postmodern, through his “social abstractions” that bring the real world of South Central Los Angeles into his paintings not by illustration or narration, but by making humble non-art detritus the very material of his work. Bradford’s medium is paper. He collects fragments of his urban environment—billboards, magazines, merchant posters advertising everything from foreclosure

Buster , 1962, San Diego MOCA Billy Al Bengston--former stuntman , surfer, motorcycle racer and bon vivant who appeared at black-tie events in Hawaiian-print pants--was a central figure of L.A.’s 1960s Cool School, the Ferus Gallery art bros who put SoCal on the American art map. Appropriating the aesthetics, materials, and attitude of Californian “Kustom Kar” and motorcycle culture (celebrated by Tom Wolfe in a 1963 Esquire  magazine article), Bengston used high-gloss spray

'56 Chrysler , 1956, Oakland Museum of California Robert Bechtle is something of a sleight-of-hand artist. As a noted photorealist, he paints, in an extraordinarily precise style, scenes of contemporary, middle-class California life: families, neighborhoods, and cars—the Gran Torinos, Pontiacs, Buicks and T-Birds of suburbia. He works from the kind of undistinguished snapshots that, as he said, make terrible photos but good paintings when painted at large scale. Only close up

Permanent installation, de Young Museum They use the repetitive rhythm of basketry to create delicate, sinuous forms that were, at first, considered as mere craftwork. Today, no one doubts that these are works of art—they’re in museum collections, command impressive sums at auction, and have been featured on US postage stamps. Of course, they are the wire sculptures of Ruth Asawa. Ruth Asawa was born in Norwalk in 1926, where her Japanese immigrant parents raised fruit and v

California Artist , 1982, SFMOMA Who better to define the California artist than the man who made California Artist ? This wacky, cheeky, totally chill ceramic “pot flung in the face of the public” appeared in 1982 in response to a scathing review of Arneson’s work by New York critic Hilton Kramer, who said Arneson showed the "impoverished sensibility of the provincial cultural life of California." Harsh! Arneson responded with this self-portrait in denim jacket (with “Arnes

City Life , 1932, Coit Tower Heady days in San Francisco: in May 1934, the Longshoremen’s Union organized an 83-day strike that closed all West Coast waterfronts, followed by a four-day g eneral strike . John Steinbeck was there, taking notes for his strike novel, In Dubious Battle . Artists painting the labor-themed murals in Coit Tower downed brushes to protest the “premeditated art murder” of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural in New York. Leading the pack was the te

Feathered basket , 1976, Santa Rosa Junior College Multicultural Museum Once upon a time, techniques like weaving, metalwork, ceramics, or glassblowing—especially the ones practiced mainly by women—were denied the name of art. Those bad old days are gone, and we now acknowledge that California indigenous craftspeople used one of the most humble, most practical crafts of them all—basketry—to make stunning works of art. California tribes are considered the best American basket

Mirage , Desert X, 2017 Growing up in Redondo Beach , Doug Aitken was constantly aware of the ocean, that vast, rippling expanse that ends suddenly at the horizon. The horizon and beyond: an inspiration for this most experimental, eclectic artist whose works provoke unexpected and profound responses. Trained in illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Aitken has explored photography, video, sculpture, and installations, or happenings, in a mind-boggling c

Arroyo Seco Bridge , 1912, UCI Langson Institute and Museum of California Art After immigrating to the US in 1885, Vienna-trained ceramicist Franz Bischoff found the American dream. Moving from New York to Philadelphia to Detroit, where he established his own studio, Bischoff had such a flourishing career as a ceramicist and china decorator that he was known throughout the country as the king of the rose painters. But apparently wanderlust  was in his soul. He visited Califor

Untitled, 2018, SFMOMA The multi-lingual and multi-cultural visual artist , poet, and essayist Etel Adnan was at home in many places—but she became a painter in California. Born in Beirut, Lebanon and trained as a philosopher in Paris, Adnan came to Dominican College in San Rafael in 1958 to teach aesthetics. Here, at age 34, she began painting, in dialogue with poets, musicians, and playwrights in Ann O’Hanlon’s Perception Workshops in Mill Valley in the 1960s. Working with

Velasquez Family, 1961, Crocker Museum Among the crowd of out-there painters , poets, scene makers and scene stealers of San Francisco’s 1950s Beat era, Bernice Bing stood out for her obvious cool. She reputedly couldn’t walk down the street without being greeted. With a studio above the Old Spaghetti Factory, Bing was “a fiery presence,” according to Jay DeFeo. But unlike DeFeo and Joan Brown, Bing faded from the annals of California art. But she has come back in a blaze of

Untitled (Ocean), 1975, MOCA Los Angeles Vija Celmins says that her task as an artist is “to document another surface and sort of translate it” in an act of both invention and fidelity. Coming of age artistically in 1960s Los Angeles, she had a Pop interest in the mundane; she painted studio objects, such as a desk lamp, a fan, and a heater, not in the splashy colors of Pop, but in monochromatic gray tones. In Venice, California, she resisted the siren song of color and ligh

Barns on Cass Street, 1925, Monterey Museum of Art File this story under the archaeology of art history—the rediscovery of an artist celebrated in her day who faded from view as tastes changed. This lovely work, Barns on Cass St , was painted by Margaret Bruton, a woman at the center of the NorCal interwar art world. She knew Frida and Diego, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and met Henri Matisse when he visited San Francisco in 1930. And she had two equally talented siblings—the

Wrong , 1967, LACMA John Baldessari’s wide-ranging art practice includes printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography—everything but painting. He once painted as a young artist and art teacher, of course. But by 1970 he had grown so disillusioned with the very idea of painting that he took all his canvases to a San Diego funeral home and cremated them. In 1949, David Park took his abstract works to the Berkeley Dump and began the adventure that was the B

Angel-Go-Round , 1996, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art David Ireland was a latecomer to art. According to local legend, when an art student borrowed a taxidermied elephant’s foot from his African imports store for an installation, Ireland was so inspired that he enrolled at SFAI and threw himself into The City’s conceptual art scene. Perhaps this wasn’t such a radical gesture for a man who had already been an architectural draftsman, a carpenter, and an African safari gu

Waterfall , 1922, Dallas Museum of Art Los Angeles modernist Henrietta Shore refused to confine herself to a style or movement. In her lifetime, Shore’s powerful, honest interpretations of nature were well appreciated, and like her SoCal contemporary Agnes Pelton, Shore was regarded as an important American modernist. For both women, however, social and personal attitudes conspired against lasting success, and Shore died destitute and virtually unknown. But in 2020, the Whit

First War Winter, 1939-40, SFMOMA Brown-shingle Berkeley has been home to many artists, and at the dawn of the 20 th century, a whole family of them lived on Ridge Road. Imagine the dinner conversation when the Howard clan gathered—father John Galen Howard, architect of UC Berkeley; his wife Mary, a noted watercolorist; and sons Henry, John Langley, and Robert—all artists married to artists. Perhaps hoping to distinguish himself, son Charles opted for journalism. But in Ca

Hatton Ranch , 1920, Monterey Museum of Art Although the turn of the 20 th  century was an era of expanding opportunities for women, Euphemia (she preferred Effie) Charlton Fortune was neither the first nor the last woman artist to disguise her gender.  Her style, which moved from Impressionist softness to a harder-edged, geometric style highlighting the bright colors of California, was naturally praised as “masculine;” early reviewers of her work may not have been aware tha

Continuum Basket: Pivat (Tobacco), 2018, Palm Springs Art Museum Gerald Clarke is a cowboy , UC Riverside Ethnic Studies professor, tribal leader, artist, and (his preferred identity) Indian. He works a cattle ranch in the Anza Valley, as his father, grandfather, and other Cahuilla tribal members have done since the Spanish Colonial period. Though Clarke is inspired by the history and beauty of the Cahuilla coiled basketry tradition, his eclectic art takes that heritage in ma

From The Great Wall of Los Angeles , 1976-84 It’s over 90 on a summer day in LA. Below street level, in a concrete flood control channel in the Valley, eighty at-risk kids of different ethnicities struggle with the unfamiliar tools of the mural trade—lots of paint gets splashed around—but under the direction of Judy Baca and a team of artists, in that summer of 1976 they completed 1,000 feet of the most remarkable mural in a city famous for them: The Great Wall of Los Angele