Renaissance & Rebellion - Flipbook - Page 12
CALIFORNIA LOCOS VS. ART HISTORY
–SHANA NYS DAMBROT
LOS ANGELES, 2022
In conventional academia, Art History is taught as a Eurocentric and largely linear
evolution of styles in which metrics of value involve adherence to dominant paradigms. Even
when these hierarchies are disrupted or their relevance disputed—such as in the name of
being deliberately modern, responding to the violence of war and industry, with the rise of
disembodied conceptualism—it’s always diagrammed as an arrow of the natural generational
fits of progress. But most art is made, as most life is lived, outside the clean lanes of theory,
intuitively and locally. But what of those outsider songs? What Art History will exist to honor,
elevate, and seek to truly understand the outlier creative communities forged not by styles or
even ideas, but by personality and fate and lived experience? The expansive and expanding
story of the California Locos is here laying just such a foundation.
For the original generation of Locos, beginning circa 1963 and working right through to
the present—artists Chaz Bojórquez, Dave Tourjé, John Van Hamersveld, Norton Wisdom,
Gary Wong and their contemporaries—being from LA was everything. A few decades later,
it still is. After the first few Locos curatorial projects, and with the addition of Shepard Fairey,
Mister Cartoon, RETNA, Estevan Oriol, Robert Williams, OG SLICK and others to the
Locos rolls, a renegade movement has finally taken its place in the history books. Deriving
points of view from integral subcultures of surf, skate, graffiti, Lowbrow, high art and punk,
the Locos always represented and continue to represent a line of resistance against the shiny,
shallow, sunkissed pipe dreams of the LA caricature.
SHANA NYS DAMBROT
Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in Downtown
LA. She is the Arts Editor for the L.A. Weekly, and a contributor to Flaunt, Art
& Cake, and Artillery. She studied Art History at Vassar College, writes book
and catalog essays, curates and juries exhibitions, is a dedicated Instagram
photographer and is the author of the experimental novella Zen Psychosis
(2020, Griffith Moon). She speaks at galleries, schools, and cultural institutions
nationally, and is a Co-Chair of ArtTable's SoCal Chapter, is an award-winning
member of the LA Press Club, a recipient of the MOZAIK 2022 Future Art
Writers Prize, and sits on the Board of Art Share-LA the Advisory Council of
Building Bridges Art Exchange.
CALIFORNIA
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LOCOS
While their stylistic gamut runs from post-tribal to ritualistic abstraction, jazzy expressionism
to cinematic poetry, personal and political exegesis, and joyful, anti-institutionalist anarchy, they
did and do share something much more fundamental—the determination to make art that pushes
itself to be raw, honest, alive, and above all, well and truly local. Their transgressive mixed media
and interdisciplinary impulses combine perfectly with the various skill sets that come from a trade
or a school and/or the fierce energy of the self-taught and irregular. Everything was applied to new
ideas during a rather tumultuous but prolific and fruitful period of LA culture, the lasting influences
of which have now been seriously investigated in their prolific body of exhibitions. All of this will
be even more deeply explored in upcoming projects, including their unique art and culture brand
which leverages one of the hippest canvases upon which one can apply fine art—the skateboard.
As new generations indelibly impacted by the Locos vision come into their own, this
period and these artists continue to grow in recognition of how, when they needed one,
instead of worrying about institutional conventions they just built their own lane—right
down the middle of the art world.
RENAISSANCE
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REBELLION
