"War Babies"
In 1961, Miyashiro was one of four artists who appeared in "War Babies," an exhibition curated by Henry Hopkins at the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles. [6] The exhibition's poster, which featured Miyashiro, Bell, Goode and Bereal eating foods stereotypically associated with their respective ethnicities, attracted controversy and criticism from sources as diverse as the John Birch Society on the right (for the poster's alleged desecration of the American flag) and from voices on the left decrying its use of stereotypes. [7] Miyashiro's work at the time consisted of paintings and elegant, small-scale charcoal drawings that were, according to Henry Hopkins, "very black and very dark drawings of vaginal shapes, very rich oily, charcoal things. There would be a kind of slit in the middle." [5]
Miyashiro later moved to New York where, facing financial difficulties, he returned to jewelry making as a way of making ends meet, while continuing to work as an artist in other mediums. [8]
In 2022, Marian Goodman Gallery featured historical work from the exhibition in their Paris bookstore, Librairie Marian Goodman, in the exhibition War Babies and the Studs. [9] [10]
Exhibitions
Miyashiro's work has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, and has been included in several high-profile group exhibitions devoted to art in Los Angeles in the 1960s. In 1988, he was featured in Lost and Found in California : Four Decades of Assemblage Art, published in conjunction with a series of exhibitions organized by James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica. [11]
In 2010, Miyashiro participated in "circa 1962," a two-person show at Cardwell Jimmerson gallery in Culver City in 2010, alongside the work of Jim Eller. [12]
In 2011, Miyashiro's work was included in the group exhibition "Now Dig This! Art in Black Los Angeles 1960-1980" at UCLA's Hammer Museum [13] alongside works by Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, Melvin Edwards, Betye Saar, Charles White as well as other non-African American artists including Mark di Suvero, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Gordon Wagner and others. [14]
Odilon Redon was a French Symbolist artist.
The Chouinard Art Institute was a professional art school founded in 1921 by Nelbert Murphy Chouinard (1879–1969) in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. In 1961, Walt and Roy Disney guided the merger of the Chouinard Art Institute and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music to establish the California Institute of the Arts. Chouinard continued to operate until the new campus opened in 1970.
Edward Ralph Kienholz was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and fifth wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, and film. He is also noted for creating several artist's books. Ruscha lives and works in Culver City, California.
Events from the year 1961 in art.
The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".
Joe Goode is an American artist who attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1959–1961. Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Goode made a name for himself in Los Angeles through his cloud imagery and milk bottle paintings which were associated with the Pop Art movement. The artist is also closely associated with Light and Space, a West coast movement of the early 1960s. He currently creates and resides in Los Angeles, California.
Maxwell Hendler is an American painter. In 1975, he became the first contemporary artist to have pictures in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Frederick S. Wight was a multi-talented cultural leader who played a significant role in transforming Los Angeles into a major art center. An influential educator at the University of California, Los Angeles, who presented museum-quality exhibitions at the campus gallery later named the Wight Art Gallery, Wight was also a highly accomplished painter and writer. In his final years he concentrated on his painting, producing radiant landscapes that appear to be animated by mysterious, spiritual forces.
Virginia Dwan was an American art collector, art patron, philanthropist, and founder of the Dwan Light Sanctuary in Montezuma, New Mexico. She was the former owner and executive director of Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1959–1967) and Dwan Gallery New York (1965–1971), a contemporary art gallery closely identified with the American movements of Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Earthworks.
Noah S. Purifoy was an African-American visual artist and sculptor, co-founder of the Watts Towers Art Center, and creator of the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. He lived and worked most of his life in Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California.
Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
Mary Corse is an American artist who lives and works in Topanga, California. Fascinated with perceptual phenomena and the idea that light itself can serve as both subject and material in art, Corse's practice can be seen as existing at an crossroads between American Abstract Expressionism and American Minimalism. She is often associated with the male-dominated Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, although her role has only been fully recognized in recent years. She is best known for her experimentation with radiant surfaces in minimalist painting, incorporating materials that reflect light such as glass microspheres. Corse initially attended University of California, Santa Barbara starting in 1963. She later moved on to study at Chouinard Art Institute, earning her B.F.A. in 1968.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Patricia Anne Smith, known professionally as Alexis Smith, was an American visual artist. She worked in collage and installation.
The Huysman Gallery was an art gallery in Los Angeles, California that operated from December 1960 to summer 1961. It was located at 740 North La Cienega Boulevard, across the street from the noted Ferus Gallery. Curator Henry Hopkins, who founded the gallery, named it after the French decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. The gallery showcased the works of several young artists who later had great success, including Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Bell.
Ed Bereal is an American artist best known for his work in assemblage and for his participation in exhibitions and performances that addressed political issues and racial stereotypes from the 1960s onward. In 1961, his work was included in the controversial exhibition War Babies at the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles, along with work by Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ron Miyashiro. In the 1960s he and other artists like Vija Selmins, Craig Kauffman, and Robert Irwin taught at the new campus of the University of California, Irvine in the Fine Arts department.
Dale Brockman Davis is a Los Angeles–based African-American artist, gallerist and educator best known for his assemblage sculpture and ceramic work that addresses themes of African American history and music, especially jazz. Along with his brother, artist Alonzo Davis, he co-founded Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park. Through the gallery and his broader community work, Davis became an important promoter of African-American artists in Los Angeles.
Merion Estes is a Los Angeles-based painter. She earned a B.F.A. at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, and an M.F.A. at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Estes was raised in San Diego from the age of four. She moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and first showed her work at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles. As a founding member of Grandview 1 & 2, she was involved in the beginnings of Los Angeles feminist art organizations including Womanspace, and the feminist arts group "Double X," along with artists Judy Chicago, Nancy Buchanan, Faith Wilding, and Nancy Youdelman. In 2014, Un-Natural, which was shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Los Angeles and included Estes' work, was named one of the best shows in a non-profit institution in the United States by the International Association of Art Critics.
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.
