Rebels in Paradise Read Free Page A

that went on tour the following year as 66 Signs of Neon.)
    Though sparked by the arrest of a black drunk driver, Marquette Frye, by white LAPD officer Lee Minikus, who insisted on impounding the car rather than letting the driver’s brother take it home, the racial and class tension that fueled the riot had been accumulating for years. In the 1940s and ’50s, the area around southeast and central Los Angeles had been home to a thriving community of African Americans, with jazz clubs, hotels, restaurants, and churches. Unemployment and poverty rose dramatically as white veterans returned from World War II and were given any available jobs. After two decades, addiction and alcoholism had contributed to the general neglect. Residents of Watts, like blacks all across the country, had been listening to Martin Luther King Jr. and reading about the marches in Selma, Alabama, and the rise of the civil rights movement. The previous year, Proposition 14, backed by the California Real Estate Association, repealed the state’s Rumford Fair Housing Act, which had prohibited discrimination by landlords who refused to rent to blacks, Latinos, and others. This further inflamed the sense of injustice felt by the community.
    Furthermore, L.A. police chief William Parker was perceived as biased against blacks, a feeling not lessened by his characterization of the rioters as monkeys in a zoo. His justification of the use of extreme force, along with the deployment of National Guard troops, was met with anger and exasperation.
    Opinion throughout the city was polarized, but artists were on the side of the black community. Dennis Hopper powered his Corvair convertible, with the top down, through the flames and smoke to take photographs. Rudi Gernreich staged a fashion shoot with his models posing in front of the Watts Towers to draw attention to their surreal beauty. Ed Bereal, the African American artist included in the 1961 War Babies show, had just returned to Los Angeles after three years in San Francisco. Dwan had put him on retainer for a show at her gallery. All that changed when he opened his door on August 14, 1965, at nine in the morning and found himself surrounded by nine National Guardsmen with guns. He was not harmed, but he was scared. Speculating on what might have happened if any of them had pulled the trigger, Bereal wrote, “My current series of sculptures is suddenly questionable. If I could put all the articles written about my work between me and that bullet … none of it would have stopped that bullet!” 1 A traumatized Bereal stopped making sculptures in order to pursue performance art and drama to better express his increasingly politicized outlook.
    Up until the midsixties, the contemporary art scene in Los Angeles, as elsewhere, was largely the realm of white men. A handful of African American artists struggled to find places to show apart from the Watts Towers summer arts festival. In 1967, Alonzo and Dale Davis opened Brockman Gallery for African American artists, and two years later, Suzanne Jackson opened Gallery 32 in her apartment in the Granada Building near MacArthur Park. David Hammons, Betye Saar, Melvin Edwards, and John Outterbridge were among those who started to get attention.
    Female artists were being taken more seriously, but not at Ferus, where the previous year’s group show was unapologetically titled Studs. The gallery was, as Price put it, “the all kings stable.” 2 Bengston and others jeered at aspiring female artists but, in truth, other galleries were not much better.
    Shirley Hopps said, “I think a lot of that role-playing and machoness and complimenting each other came from the fact that what they were doing was so far-out, not working from the past, just working from themselves and avoiding confrontation with nothingness. There was competitiveness but mostly loneliness and fear.” 3
    Nonetheless, it was a square-jawed woman of twenty-seven named