South of Pico: African-American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

Art historian and curator Jones (EyeMinded) delivers an invigorating and illuminating cultural history of the black arts scene in Los Angeles during the 1960s and ’70s. Jones shows how the paintings, sculptures, collages, and mixed-media artistry of Betye Saar, Noah Purifoy, David Hammonds, and a host of others articulated the strivings of black people who came to Los Angeles via the western leg of the Great Migration, and how their art “speaks to the dislocations and cultural reinvention of migration, its materials of loss and of possibility, and sense of reinscription of the new in style and practice.” Jones notes that assemblage was a metaphor for the kind of social change that found its fullest expression during the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the black arts movement, as well as how artists created their own performance spaces and veered from civil rights as a subject to more abstract modes of expression. With over 90 illustrations, this thoroughly researched work sheds much-needed light on this West Coast renaissance. B&w photos. (Apr.)