Alicia Bay Laurel

Last updated

Alicia Bay Laurel (born Alice Carla Kaufman, May 14, 1949 in Hollywood, California) is an American artist, author, and musician. [1] Laurel is best known for her 1970 book Living On The Earth, a notable guide for participants in the American back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s. [2]

Laurel grew up exposed to the arts, intellectual ideas and political activism. Her mother, Verna Lebow, was a sculptor and her father, Paul Kaufman, was a doctor. [3] She briefly attended the Otis Art Institute, San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Fashion Institute before seeking her own course driven by these influences. She studied music as well, and learned open-tuned guitar improvisation from John Fahey, who at the time was married to her cousin Janet Lebow.

Laurel lived on Wheeler Ranch near Occidental, California, in Sonoma County in the early 1970s, where she wrote her book, Living on the Earth. Designed to be a guide for others at the commune, the book was first published by The Bookworks in Berkeley, California, in 1970 and sold out the first printing. [4] It was picked up by Random House in 1971 and sold more than 350,000 copies. It appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list. [5] Laurel's distinctive drawing style is featured also in Home Comfort: Life on Total Loss Farm, and in this book, income from Living on the Earth is cited as one source of support for that southern Vermont commune.

Moving to Maui in 1974, she had many professions, including underwater photographer, elementary school teacher, musician and businesswoman. She updated Living on the Earth in 2000, and traveled the US, presenting 75 performances of her one-woman autobiographical comedy and original music show, "Living on the Earth: The Musical." [6]

Since 2000, Alicia Bay Laurel has released eight music albums as a guitarist/singer/songwriter/record producer, and made 11 Japan concert tours, as well as concerts in the US and in Spain. She produces commissioned drawings and licenses her existing drawings for reproduction on fashion clothing and other merchandise, and shows her drawings and paintings in gallery exhibitions. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alma Guillermoprieto</span> Mexican journalist

Alma Guillermoprieto is a Mexican journalist. She has written extensively about Latin America for the British and American press, especially The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Her writings have also been widely disseminated within the Spanish-speaking world and she has published eight books in both English and Spanish, and been translated into several more languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alvin Ailey</span> American dancer and activist (1931–1989)

Alvin Ailey Jr. was an American dancer, director, choreographer, and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT). He created AAADT and its affiliated Alvin Ailey American Dance Center as havens for nurturing Black artists and expressing the universality of the African-American experience through dance.

Uncle Moishy and the Mitzvah Men is a Jewish American children's educational entertainment group based in New York City, featured in audio and video releases, as well as appearing live in concert. Their tapes, CDs and videos are sold in most Jewish music and Judaica stores.

Mercedes Yvette Scelba-Shorte, also known as Mercedes Yvette, is an American fashion model and actress. She was a contestant on Cycle 2 of America's Next Top Model. During the show, Scelba-Shorte revealed that she has lupus, an autoimmune disease.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gail Sheehy</span> American writer

Gail Sheehy was an American author, journalist, and lecturer. She was the author of seventeen books and numerous high-profile articles for magazines such as New York and Vanity Fair. Sheehy played a part in the movement Tom Wolfe called the New Journalism, sometimes known as creative nonfiction, in which journalists and essayists experimented with adopting a variety of literary techniques such as scene setting, dialogue, status details to denote social class, and getting inside the story and sometimes reporting the thoughts of a central character.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ramón Sender (composer)</span> Spanish and American composer (born 1934)

Ramón Sender Barayón is a composer, visual artist and writer. He was the co-founder with Morton Subotnick of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1962. He is the son of Spanish writer Ramón J. Sender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nina García</span> Colombian American fashion journalist and reality TV judge

Ninotchka "Nina" García is a Colombian-American fashion journalist, the editor-in-chief of Elle, author, and a judge on the Bravo/Lifetime reality television program Project Runway since its first season.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothea Church</span> American fashion model

Dorothea Towles Church was the first successful black fashion model in Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rebecca Luker</span> American actress (1961–2020)

Rebecca Luker was an American actress, singer, and recording artist, noted for her "crystal clear operatic soprano" and for maintaining long runs in Broadway musicals over the course of her three-decade-long career. The New York Times compared her to actresses such as Barbara Cook and Julie Andrews.

Ruth Stafford Peale was an American writer, editor, and speaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clara Clemens</span> American; daughter of Mark Twain; opera singer

Clara Langhorne Clemens Samossoud, formerly Clara Langhorne Clemens Gabrilowitsch, was a daughter of Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain. She was a contralto concert singer and she managed his estate and guarded his legacy after his death as his only surviving child. She was married first to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then to Jacques Samossoud after Gabrilowitsch's death. She wrote biographies of Gabrilowitsch and of her father. In her later life, she became a Christian Scientist.

Kelly Cutrone is an American publicist, television personality and author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maya Beiser</span> American musician

Maya Beiser is an American musician, cellist, performing artist and producer who lives in New York City. Beiser was raised on a kibbutz in Israel by her French mother and Argentine father, and graduated from Yale University School of Music. She has been described by the Boston Globe as "a force of nature", "a cello goddess" by The New Yorker and "the reigning queen of the avant-garde cello" by The Washington Post. Beiser is a 2015 United States Artists Distinguished Music Fellow and the Inaugural Mellon Distinguished Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amy Davis</span> American singer

Amy Davis is an American fashion illustrator, actress, filmmaker, and lo-fi musician. Her illustrations have been in shows all over the world, as well as published in magazines and books. She is married to filmmaker Jon Moritsugu, and helps run his film production company, Apathy Productions.

Alicia McCarthy is an American painter. She is a member of San Francisco's Mission School art movement. Her work is considered to have Naïve or Folk character, and often uses unconventional media like housepaint, graphite, or other found materials. She is currently based in Oakland, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Hastreiter</span> American journalist

Kim Hastreiter is an American journalist, editor, publisher, and curator who co-founded Paper magazine. She served as co-Editor-in-Chief from its inception until 2017, when she and partner David Hershkovits sold the company. In her column of 32 years, "Note From Kim", Hastreiter observed and articulated cultural movements and trends that she saw forming, deciphering the transforming zeitgeist. She currently resides in Greenwich Village, New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fatima Farheen Mirza</span> American author

Fatima Farheen Mirza is an American novelist best known for her novel A Place for Us (2018), which was a New York Times Best Seller. She was also honored by the National Book Award Foundation as a "5 Under 35" Honoree in 2020.

The USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance is a private dance school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The school offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and minors in dance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Moore (arts administrator)</span> American arts administrator

Rachel S. Moore is an American arts administrator. She is the president and CEO of the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, which operates the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Ahmanson Theater, the Mark Taper Forum, and Grand Park. A former ballet dancer, she was the executive director and CEO of American Ballet Theatre (ABT) from 2004 to 2015.

Kathryn "Katie" McCamant is an American architect and author based in Nevada City, California. She is known for her work developing the concept of cohousing in the United States, including authoring two books on the topic. She and her partner Charles Durrett designed more than 55 cohousing communities across the United States.

References

  1. 1 2 "Bio". Alicia Bay Laurel. 2006-01-11. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  2. Mungo, Raymond (1971-03-21). "Cooking and carpentry and sewing and astrology (Published 1971)". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2021-03-11.
  3. "Her Hymn to Nature Is a Guidebook for the Simplest of Lives (Published 1971)". The New York Times. 1971-03-26. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2021-03-11.
  4. "What, Why, How: Alicia Bay Laurel". Linda K Sienkiewicz. 2019-01-21. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  5. "Alicia Bay Laurel:Biography". 11 January 2006. Archived from the original on 15 October 2006. Retrieved November 15, 2006.
  6. Kam, Nadine (November 17, 2000). "Alicia Bay Laurel has lived through 30 years of transformation to stay forever hippie". archives.starbulletin.com. Archived from the original on 2012-02-14. Retrieved 2021-03-11.