Leslie Labowitz-Starus

Last updated
Leslie Labowitz-Starus
Born (1946-08-28) August 28, 1946 (age 77)
Education Otis College of Art and Design
Notable work Three Weeks in May (1977)

Leslie Labowitz-Starus is an American performance artist and urban farmer based in Los Angeles.

Contents

Leslie Labowitz-Starus' work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum and has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Getty Museum. [1]

Background and education

Born on August 28, 1946, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Labowitz-Starus is the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor. She earned her MFA from Otis in 1972, then moved to Düsseldorf, Germany, as a Fulbright Scholar. In Düsseldorf, Labowitz-Starus attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where she briefly interacted with Joseph Beuys (he was dismissed from his position the semester she arrived). [2]

Performance Art, 1977-1980

When she returned to Los Angeles in 1977, Labowitz-Starus worked at the Woman's Building, a cultural center just east of Chinatown in downtown Los Angeles devoted to feminist art and cultural change. [3]

From 1977 to 1980, Labowitz-Starus and Suzanne Lacy collaborated on a series of large-scale performances that often took place in public settings. Their first collaboration was In Mourning and in Rage . [4] Together they founded ARIADNE: A Social Art Network, a support system for women artists. [5] [6] [7] In 1977, Labowitz-Starus and Lacy created Three Weeks in May, an extended performance work designed to increase visibility and start conversations about sexual violence against women. Created in response to the Hillside Strangler murders in Los Angeles, the 21-day project involved more than 30 events, including demonstrations, news media interviews, and self-defense classes. [8] One documented performance event which was a part of this project was "In Mourning and In Rage". [9] The artists updated a map with reports from the Los Angeles Police Department, printing the word "rape" on spots on a map of the greater Los Angeles area wherever a rape was reported. This performance art activist piece took place on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall and garnered major media attention. [10] [11]

In November 1978, Labowitz-Starus and Lacy organized a Take Back the Night march in San Francisco that attracted 3,000 participants. Marchers walked arched alongside a two-sided float with a Madonna on one side (which Labowitz-Starus created) and a skinned lamb on the other side (created by Lacy). [12]

In 1979 Labowitz performed "Record Companies Drag Their Feet", a feminist analysis of music album covers. [9]

Sproutime and Sprout Installations, 1979-1992

Starting in 1979 Labowitz-Starus increasingly began to think of growing sprouts by the terms of performance art. In the early 1980s, Labowitz-Starus created two ephemeral installations in New York City with the walls covered in sprouts. The artist began to grow and sell sprouts at local farmers markets. Labowitz-Starus decided to educate herself about business, learned bookkeeping, hired employees and by 1987, her company Sproutime grew 3,000 pounds of 50 varieties of lettuce and 25 spicy salad. After several years of working from her back yard in Venice, she bought a farm in a residential/agricultural area of Canoga Park. Between 1988 and 1992, Sproutime grew at a rate of 20 percent a year. [13] Labowitz-Starus regularly employs artists, and considers Sproutime to be a work of interactive art whose participants include her co-workers and her customers. [14]

Pacific Time Installation, 2012

In 2012 as part of the Getty Foundation funded Pacific Standard Time initiative, Labowitz-Starus and Lacy invited Elana Mann and Audrey Chan to re-perform "Myths of Rape." [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hard-edge painting</span> Movement in painting

Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas often consist of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.

Ariadne was a figure in Greek mythology.

The Woman's Building was a non-profit arts and education center located in Los Angeles, California. The Woman's Building focused on feminist art and served as a venue for the women's movement and was spearheaded by artist Judy Chicago, graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven. The center was open from 1973 until 1991. During its existence, the Los Angeles Times called the Woman's Building a "feminist mecca."

Suzanne Lacy is an American artist, educator, writer, and professor at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. She has worked in a variety of media, including installation, video, performance, public art, photography, and art books, in which she focuses on "social themes and urban issues." She served in the education cabinet of Jerry Brown, then mayor of Oakland, California, and as arts commissioner for the city. She designed multiple educational programs beginning with her role as performance faculty at the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

Cheri Gaulke is a visual artist and filmmaker most known for her role in the Feminist Art Movement in southern California in the 1970s and her work on gay and lesbian families.

Jerri Allyn is an American feminist performance, installation artist and educator based in Los Angeles, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Feminist art movement in the United States</span> Promoting the study, creation, understanding, and promotion of womens art, began in 1970s

The feminist art movement in the United States began in the early 1970s and sought to promote the study, creation, understanding and promotion of women's art. First-generation feminist artists include Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Suzanne Lacy, Judith Bernstein, Sheila de Bretteville, Mary Beth Edelson, Carolee Schneeman, Rachel Rosenthal, and many other women. They were part of the Feminist art movement in the United States in the early 1970s to develop feminist writing and art. The movement spread quickly through museum protests in both New York and Los Angeles, via an early network called W.E.B. that disseminated news of feminist art activities from 1971 to 1973 in a nationally circulated newsletter, and at conferences such as the West Coast Women's Artists Conference held at California Institute of the Arts and the Conference of Women in the Visual Arts, at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C..

Meg Linton is an American curator of contemporary art and a writer. Her curatorial efforts have ranged from historical investigations such as "Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building", "The Los Angeles School: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin", and "In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" to showcasing the work of single artists who are stylistically different such as "Alison Saar: STILL.. .", "Robert Williams: Through Prehensile Eye," and "Joan Tanner: On Tenderhook" to group exhibitions such as "Mexicali Biennial 2010," "Do It Now: Live Green!" and "Tapping the Third Realm."

Roy Dowell is an American contemporary visual artist, based in California.

Nancy Angelo is an organizational psychologist and formerly a performance and video artist who took part in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles. As an artist, she is best known for co-founding the collaborative performance art group The Feminist Art Workers in 1976 with Candace Compton, Cheri Gaulke, and Laurel Klick.

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:

Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.

Scott Grieger is an American artist based in Los Angeles. He attended Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, California and received a B.F.A. from California State University, Northridge in 1971. His work has been exhibited internationally for over 40 years. He is a Professor and Program Director of Painting in the Fine Arts program at Otis College of Art and Design.

Elana Mann is a contemporary artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her artwork is a commentary on social issues and politics related to gender, power and nationality.

<i>Three Weeks in May</i> 1977 work of performance art and activism by Suzanne Lacy

Three Weeks in May: Speaking Out On Rape, A Political Art Piece was an extended work of performance art and activism by Suzanne Lacy. The piece took place in Los Angeles, California from May 8 to May 24, 1977.

Susan E. King is an American artist, educator, and writer who is best known for her artist's books.

Audrey Chan is a Chinese-American Los Angeles–based artist, writer, and educator known for her research-based projects that articulate political and cultural identities through her allegorical narrative and the feminist construct of "the personal is political." Her works include paintings, digital compositions, installation, video, public performance, murals and symposiums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Suzanne Jackson (artist)</span> American visual artist

Suzanne Jackson is an American visual artist, gallery owner, poet, dancer, educator, and set designer; with a career spanning five decades. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world. Since the late 1960s, Jackson has dedicated her life to studio art with additional participation in theatre, teaching, arts administration, community life, and social activism. Jackson's oeuvre includes poetry, dance, theater, costume design, paintings, prints, and drawings.

In Mourning and in Rage was a work of performance art and activism by Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz. The performance took place in Los Angeles, California in 1977 as a response to the rapes and murders covered by the media in the "Hillside Strangler" case."As if the horror of these crimes wasn't enough, the press coverage of the events sensationalized the sexual nature of the crimes. For feminist activists in Los Angeles involved in the movement to end violence against women, this analysis was unacceptable."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ginger Wolfe-Suarez</span> American artist and writer (b. 1980)

Ginger Wolfe-Suarez is an American artist, writer, and curator who has worked out of Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Atlanta. Her practice includes installation art, sculpture, drawings, and artist books. She has been featured in exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and throughout the United States, at venues including Silverman Gallery, Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Southern Exposure, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and High Desert Test Sites. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sculpture, Art Papers and Art Practical, among other publications. Wolfe-Suarez draws on the traditions of feminist sculpture, Latin American installation art, conceptualism, and minimalism in works that function phenomenologically to explore the perception of space and materials, body-object relationships, ephemerality, and negotiations of memory. Artforum reviewer Annie Buckley described her show at Ltd Los Angeles as one in which "the cerebral [was] incidental to the sensory," with subtle images, fleeting reflections and lingering scents indicating the intangible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lynn Aldrich</span> American sculptor

Lynn Aldrich is an American sculptor whose diverse works draw on a wide range of high and low cultural influences and materials. Her work can range from what art writers describe as "slyly Minimalist meditations" on color, light and space to whimsical "Home Depot Pop" that reveals and critiques the excesses—visual, formal and material—of unbridled consumption. Critics Leah Ollman and Claudine Ise of the Los Angeles Times have described Aldrich's art, respectively, as a "consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition" and a "witty and inventive brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism" LA Weekly critic Doug Harvey calls her "one of the most under-recognized sculptors in L.A.," whose hallmarks are the poetic transformation of found/appropriated materials, formal inventiveness and restless eclecticism. Aldrich has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum, Santa Monica Museum of Art, and venues throughout the United States and Europe. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014) and public art collection acquisitions by LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles and the Portland Art Museum, among others.

References

  1. Ng, David (12 December 2012). "Hammer Museum acquires 'Three Weeks in May' by Suzanne Lacy". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 15 March 2016.
  2. Sharon Irish, Suzanne Lacy: Spaces between (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 203.
  3. Ciotti, Paul (10 July 1992). "Sprout Sensation : Shifting her focus from confrontational works, performance artist Leslie Labowitz-Starus turns to farming". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 15 March 2016.
  4. Chadwick, Whitney (2012-01-01). Women, art, and society. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN   9780500204054. OCLC   930389708.
  5. "ARIADNE". ARIADNE. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
  6. J. Paul Getty Museum (2011). Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980. Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum. p. 259. ISBN   978-1-60606-072-8.
  7. "Leslie Labowitz-Starus » Pacific Standard Time at the Getty". getty.edu.
  8. Karen Rosenberg (March 28, 2008). "Turning Stereotypes Into Artistic Strengths". New York Times.
  9. 1 2 Fromsite tovision : the Woman's Building in contemporary culture. Hale, Sondra., Wolverton, Terry., Maltz Gallery., Otis College of Art and Design., Pacific Standard Time (Exhibition). Los Angeles, CA: Ben Maltz Gallery, Otis College of Art and Design. 2011. ISBN   978-0930209230. OCLC   757387784.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  10. Nicolas Lampert (13 December 2013). A People's Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements . New Press. p.  299. ISBN   978-1-59558-931-6.
  11. "In Mourning and In Rage (1977) Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz". Early Works. Suzanne Lacy. Retrieved 15 March 2016.
  12. "Oral history interview with Suzanne Lacy, 1990 Mar. 16-Sept. 27". Archives of American Art. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 15 March 2016.
  13. "Sprout Sensation : Shifting her focus from confrontational works, performance artist Leslie Labowitz-Starus turns to farming". Los Angeles Times. 10 July 1992.
  14. "New Crop of Growers Sprouts as Southland Keeps Crowding Out Traditional Agriculture : URBAN FARMING". Los Angeles Times. 2 November 1987.
  15. "Myths of Rape - Suzanne Lacy & Leslie Labowitz-Starus - Interview : Christine Palma : KXLU Los Angeles 88.9 FM". Internet Archive.