South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
ISBN: 9780822374169
Platform/Publisher: e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection / Duke University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: unlimited; Download: chapter
Subjects: African American Studies; Art History & Criticism; Cultural Studies;

Art historian and curator Jones (EyeMinded) delivers an invigorating and illuminating cultural history of the black arts scene in Los Angeles during the 1960s and '70s. Jones shows how the paintings, sculptures, collages, and mixed-media artistry of Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, David Hammonds, and a host of others articulated the strivings of black people who came to Los Angeles via the western leg of the Great Migration, and how their art "speaks to the dislocations and cultural reinvention of migration, its materials of loss and of possibility, and sense of reinscription of the new in style and practice." Jones notes that assemblage was a metaphor for the kind of social change that found its fullest expression during the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the black arts movement, as well as how artists created their own performance spaces and veered from civil rights as a subject to more abstract modes of expression. With over 90 illustrations, this thoroughly researched work sheds much-needed light on this West Coast renaissance. B&w photos. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kellie Jones, a 2016 recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," is Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University and the author of several books, including EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art , also published by Duke University Press. Jones has curated numerous national and international exhibitions, including Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties .

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