Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s

Before the city’s first dedicated contemporary art museum was established, Los Angeles was home to disparate, heterogeneous art scenes with artists forming different nodes and establishing tight networks throughout the city—from Venice to East LA, and from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the north to the Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park. Artists utilized unconventional contexts including the street, the studio, the art school, and other public spaces to show and present their art while embracing performative and ephemeral actions to engage the public in more immediate ways. In doing so, artists were responding to the possibilities of a burgeoning art scene and the urban sprawl and dispersed landscape of LA.

 

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