Crossing generations

Artist John Outterbridge, 70, stands at the top of a ladder, looking down at long ropes of colorful knotted rags that stretch from ceiling to floor. At the bottom of the ladder is his artistic collaborator, a 33-year-old woman with a fountain of wavy golden-brown hair who uses the single name Castillo as her professional name -- looking up.

“It’s about how wasteful we are,” says Outterbridge of the castoff materials used to create their art installation at the Craft and Folk Art Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. “It’s a social, almost sociopolitical comment. It gives some credibility to something that is usually thrown away.”

In the same way that they occupy the top and bottom of one ladder at the gallery as their work takes shape, Outterbridge and Castillo represent two ends of the multigenerational spectrum of artists whose work will appear in “African American Artists in Los Angeles, A Survey Exhibition.”

The one-year, three-part retrospective of art from 1930 to the present is organized by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department in partnership with the Harriet and Charles Luckman Fine Arts Complex at Cal State Los Angeles.

Part one of the exhibition, titled “Fade,” features works from 1990 to the present. All of the locations, which opened “Fade” to the public on Saturday, continue their shows through February.

Part two, scheduled for July 10-Aug. 22, will feature works from 1960 through 1989, and will be curated by Dale Brockman Davis, who with his brother Alonzo established the Brockman Gallery, the city’s first gallery dedicated to showing the work of African American artists. Part two is already scheduled to place artworks and hold community and educational events in the Watts Towers Arts Center, the William Grant Still Arts Center and the Museum of African American Art. Part three, on display Jan. 15-March 31, 2005, covers 1930-1959; a curator has not yet been chosen.

Clifford D. Harper, executive director of the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, spearheaded the event. He said organizers at first planned to do a single exhibition for Black History Month, but they found the territory was just too enormous. “I didn’t realize that there had been so much work over the years,” Harper says.

The list of artists for the upcoming exhibitions is still being determined; the list of some 50 “Fade” artists includes Adia Millett, Kerry James Marshall, Senga Nengudi, Rufus Snoddy and Riua Akinshegun.

Outterbridge, a former director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, jokes that he is among the artists who will probably be on view in more than one portion “because I’m so old.” The list of “Fade” artists also includes veteran artists Betye Saar, now in her late 70s, and 59-year-old Charles Gaines, whose career began in the 1970s. As an instructor at CalArts, Gaines has taught some of the younger “Fade” artists, including Mark Bradford, 41,a former Los Angeles hairstylist who often borrows from his roots, so to speak, by incorporating such materials as perm wrappers into abstract paintings.

The curator of “Fade” can certainly cite the influence of Charles Gaines on his career -- he is the artist’s 30-year-old-son. Malik Gaines -- who along with being a curator is a writer and art critic -- says that curating an exhibition of the most recent decade of African American artists has required an effort to reconcile differing generational attitudes about that categorization. “Fade” was assembled both through submissions to the Cultural Affairs Department and soliciting work from the city’s better-known artists.

The first step, he says, was to change the original plan to call it an exhibition of “African American art,” to “African American artists,” inclusive of whatever style or medium in which those artists have chosen to work.

“I thought right away, this is not something that can be done as a sort of aesthetic principle: ‘What is black art?’ It had to be a historical category,” Malik Gaines says. “There is a huge variety of work; artists who are famous to one group who have never been heard of by another. This has been a lot of fun -- one day we would be in Inglewood, the second in a nice house in Baldwin Hills, then in Altadena and down at UC Irvine. That was telling you that there isn’t any ‘black space,’ really.

“From my point of view, race is something that is really complicated,” he continues. “Today a ‘black artist’ might be some-mixed race kid who just got out of UC Irvine and says, ‘Why do I need to pigeonhole myself into that? ...

“But these are the kinds of debates that are always going on in black institutions,” he adds. “Those of us who have worked in these institutions are used to that, and see that as a way to keep moving forward.”

Artists featured in the exhibition seem to feel the same way. Castillo, a native Angeleno who is of mixed heritage including African, Filipino and Spanish, says she can feel comfortable with the “African American artist” label and at the same time realize a need to move beyond it. “With every pattern, there is a natural order that becomes predictable, then something comes along that throws it off,” Castillo says. “I think I might be the element that throws it off. I kind of enjoy that.”

Artist Bradford, who waited until he was in his 30s to study at CalArts, jokes: “I never felt so black until I got in the art world.” Still, he welcomes an exhibition of African American artists as a “space for negotiation.” At 6-foot-8, Bradford is used to sticking out in a crowd.

“I did a video for ‘Fade.’ I’m dressed in a Lakers dress -- I made this dress out of a Lakers uniform, with a hoop skirt, antebellum. I went to the basketball court with a very simple goal, to play basketball, but I set up so many cumbersome obstacles that I’m stumbling and I’m falling,” Bradford says. “It’s sort of comical, but it makes the point that there may be obstacles, but you negotiate. It’s way I look at race, gender, everything.”

Curator Gaines said he did note a trend in art from 1990 to the present that might also characterize younger artists as a whole. “The sort of connective tissue is that everybody is hybridizing traditional forms in order to come up with something new,” he observes. “Sometimes their depictions of race are ironic; sometimes they’re sincere but they’re using new media, so you don’t find a lot of work that is traditional drawing, painting, sculpture, landscape.

“Adia Millett does needlepoint, and dollhouses that are ghettos. There are no people in them, but there are sort of signs of blackness placed around, sort of ironically, or satirically,” he says. “People are still interested in how black representation works, even if they’re not using black faces.”

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‘African American Artists in Los Angeles’

What: African American Artists in Los Angeles, A Survey Exhibition: Fade (1990-present)

Where: Craft and Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Wednesdays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: Feb. 29

Price: $3.50 general, $2.50 students and seniors, children free

Contact: (323) 937-4230

Also

Where: Luckman Gallery and University Fine Arts Gallery, Cal State L.A. campus, 5151 State University Drive

When: Mondays-Thursdays, noon-5 p.m., Saturdays noon-5 p.m., closed Fridays and Sundays

Ends: Feb. 29

Price: Free

Contact: (323) 343-6604