John Outterbridge, Rag and Bag Idiom I, 2012. Mixed media. 14 x 15 x 3 inches. The Eileen Harris Norton Collection. | Image: Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, New York.
It's a bit strange to think of artists who started changing the game in the mid-1960s as finally having their moment now, but when it comes to the historically monumental contributions of such icons-of-a-certain-age as Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, Charles Gaines -- and, of course, the inimitable John Outterbridge -- that is pretty much the situation. While well-known to most curious local art audiences, it really has only been in the past five to 10 years that these artists and their peers, along with the story of the Watts and Leimert Park neighborhoods where much of their activity centered, have enjoyed the depth of gallery attention and institutional scholarship they deserve.
Outterbridge especially is an interesting case, since so much of his artistic legacy is bound up in his nearly 20 legendary years (1975-1992) as director of the Watts Towers Art Center; his cofounding of the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton where he was artistic director from 1969 to 1975; and other civic and community education-based roles, which may have stolen the commercial momentum from his otherwise universally beloved, respected, and uniquely innovative fine art practice. Nevertheless, Outterbridge's unmistakably intuitive and complex manner of hand-wrought material transformation, symbolic narrative, tactile and optical juxtaposition of texture and color, and a wittily eerie, sometimes dark and occasionally naughty sense of anthropomorphism became an anchor of one of L.A.'s most innovative and influential art movements.
John, Noah Purifoy and I, photographer unknown, shot on the occasion of Noah recieving the Herb Alpert Award at the Huntington. | Photo: Courtesy of Mark Steven Greenfield.
Outterbridge's work was prominently featured in several of the 2011 Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, including the Hammer's Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 (which subsequently traveled to NYC to the Studio Museum in Harlem); and a concurrent installation, (until that point, it was his first solo show in Los Angeles since the 1990s) The Rag Factory, at LAXART. Though represented by powerful NYC gallerist Jack Tilton, his recent exhibition Rag Man at Leimert Park's Art Practice (in partnership with the Hammer Museum and curator Anne Ellegood, and slated to travel to the Aspen Art Museum later this year) was the first proper Los Angeles solo show focusing on Outterbridge's recent works, those made since 2000, in his most recognizable style of intimately-scaled sculptural assemblage.
Outterbridge was born in 1933 in Greenville, NC, and moved to Los Angeles in 1963, barely two years before the Watts rebellion of 1965. He had already established his artistic voice in the realm of assemblage, which he has frequently described as a natural outgrowth of his upbringing in an extraordinarily creative household, headed by his father, a handyman and junk-man by trade, and an avid personal collector/salvager/recycler of the most unique and compelling discarded objects and materials he came across. After the events of 1965, Outterbridge and some of his peers were moved to incorporate the detritus that littered the streets into his work, augmenting his existing affection for rags, rubber, and scrap metal with the physical proof and narrative consequence of political and social upheaval and struggle, giving new personal and political and historical depth beyond the formal, stylistic innovation of the nascent California assemblage scene that was beginning to gain traction.
Perhaps it's no accident that in these current headlines of social unrest and societal entropy challenges that assemblage is suddenly very zeitgeisty again with the new kids, for alarmingly similar reasons of resource/economic scarcity, political symbolism, analytical appropriation, and now also, environmentalism. Anyway at that time, it was not only doing that kind of self-expression and community reliquary talisman that appealed to Outterbridge. He also felt called to take direct action within the civic structures of the city.
John Outterbridge: Rag Man, installation view, Art Practice, December 12, 2015-February 27, 2016. | Photo: Josh White.
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Mark Steven Greenfield (an artist himself who began as Watts Towers Art Center director soon after Outterbridge's tenure ended), remembers meeting Outterbridge for the first time at the Watts Summer Festival in 1968 along with Purifoy and Cecil Ferguson. Outterbridge had already attained some notoriety in the Black community, but hadnt received much recognition beyond that. At the time he and Judson Powell were running the Compton Communicative Arts Academy on Magnolia. In 1975 he took charge of WTAC after Purifoy (who had been the director) left for Joshua Tree, and around the same time that the WTAC was turned over to the city of Los Angeles to be administered by the Department of Cultural Affairs. The challenges of running the Towers, remarks Greenfield, demonstrates the lack of compatibility between government and the arts. It's the classic shotgun wedding. Government requires a high degree of accountability, as part of its obligation to the general public, given the support from tax dollars. The temperament of most artists is not well suited to this, because of their sense of responsibility to assess and meet the needs of the immediate community. I found myself at odds with the city on many occasions, as did John.
Nevertheless, Outterbridge, as both the artist and the activist, practitioner and administrator, remains an indispensable figure in the history of the city, no matter one's perspective. Liz Gordon, who owns and operates the Loft at Liz's, an a
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John Outterbridge, Rag and Bag Idiom I, 2012. Mixed media. 14 x 15 x 3 inches. The Eileen Harris Norton Collection. | Image: Courtesy of Tilton Gallery, New York. 
