A Place To Work

“A Place To Work, A Way To Tell One’s Story” Perched in the eagle’s nest of the northwest, the uniqueness of my home in Los Angeles is easily visible. My summers in the Gulf Islands surrounded by Canadian women writers and artists has given me a perspective on our Southern sprawl of a city and on what is truly American art by contrasts north and south. It is nearly thirty years ago now that three women artists wondered whether art could indeed change our world, and opened in an abandoned police station, the Social and Public Art Resource Center, to provide a place for such experimentation. It was the adage “ It takes only a single spark to create a prairie fire which inspired Christina Schlesinger, an artist and daughter of the great American historian Arthur Schlesinger, to give us the name SPARC when she along with independent filmmaker Donna Deitch and I founded SPARC in 1976. The arts in Los Angeles at that time, were considered secondary to New York and San Francisco, and artistic production was firmly entrenched in a class based division in which the work of women and people of color was considered “inferior”, and “art for arts sake” was favored. It was thought then that art should not challenge, with ethnically diverse aesthetics, political or social content, the wealthy collectors and mainstream institutions. It was our intention as young artists and activists to pursue the transformation of Los Angeles neighborhoods by creating monuments that rose out of the dreams aspirations and issues of the people and to improve the conditions in los Angeles neighborhoods through the arts. I believed then as I do now in the transformative power of ideas as long as they do not become calcified in doctrine. Our SPARC idea did become a prairie fire in thousands of murals city wide, nationwide and internationally. In the early days at SPARC, I was a lucky young women artist who by accident or perhaps providence met up with the likes of Minna Agins, an artist, who by the time I came to know her, was well into the last part of her life. She gave legs to ideas even though she had only one real leg, the other made of plastic she called charley. She was the wife of a black listed doctor and an organizer for the peace movement accustomed to difficult challenges. She came with much experience to activism. A Russian Jewish artist Born in Odessa and trained in Matisse’s workshop in Paris she had organized for social security, marched in the bread lines, organized workers in the 30’s. She carved wooden blocks to make her prints on the issues that so defined her life, all of which essentially, expressed the depth of an individuals capacity for human compassion. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources in the protection of our air, water, and land, women’s rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social

Security - all these were launched as citizen’s movements in which Minna participated along with others of her generation. I met Minna in the studio of another artist, Marvin Grayson, who passed this year, who was her life long friend. I heard the wheels of a walker scraping across the pavement when Minna entered his studio that day with tools clasped in one hand the other on her walker. She would change my life as real mentors do. “These tools need sharpening”, she proclaimed as she walked through the door. Minna had lost her leg to arterial sclerosis and had just come out of rehabilitation at Rancho Los Amigos where she had learned to walk again on a prosthesis. It was a difficult setback for the printmaker, as she could no longer manage the large press in her studio alone and the beginning of our deep friendship. I offered space and help, and shortly thereafter Minna moved her studio to SPARC and was, for the last 15 years of her life, our daily companion. At SPARC she had able-bodied young artists present to help her print who loved to hear her stories. She provided much more to us in those years then our gift of space and able hands provided her. So often the greatest gift to an artist is simply those things; a place to work, a way to tell one’s story. She provided the knowledge of an entire movement for justice that yielded the American Safety net, and the arts role within it. Minna provided us the grounding that was so essential while we at SPARC were beginning a new work for fulfillment of the American social contract for democratic inclusion through the arts during the massive demographic changes of the 70’s-90’s in los Angeles. We too would work alongside a movement for civil rights. This required understanding of the artistic precedents for our work in the artworks of people like Minna Agins, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Siqueiros left the important legacy of the censored mural “America Tropical” in the historic pueblo of los Angeles in 1931. This work recently restored by the Getty Institute will open to the public next year but even as a whitewashed work it lived in our hearts. It is only through the understanding of those who proceeded us that true innovation can occur. In the last year of her life Minna worked with another women well into her nineties, the great poet of the plains Mary del LeSuer on a series of works called “We keep our tenderness alive” the title of Mary Del’s poetry series. The two old women labored together to give voice and vision to the ideas that they had worked a life time to support and strengthen. Following the tradition of Los Tres Grandes the great Mexican muralists of this century, SPARC ‘s first project was the half mile long Great wall of Los Angeles mural painted on the ethnic history of los Angeles on an endless wall provided by a site which was a scar where there river once ran. In the los Angeles flood control channel in the san Fernando valley, 400young people labored over a twelve year period under my direction with 40 artists representing the rich diversity of our city participating. Like a tattoo on a scar we made a place for

our stories to be told and taught compassion by teaching the children to hear and value them and each other. Now the children of the great wall are grown and a new generation begins interpreting their history on a virtual wall broadcast on the internet. The walls legacy continues first as proposed mural on the internet and then as a painted mural continued on the site by the children of the Great Wall. Our dream is to watch as the longest mural is continued by the next generation of youth and artists interpreting history. The Great Wall youth still connected to the project can speak with insight of adults about their experience working on the giant monument to interracial harmony 27yrs later. The California community foundation provided support for the restoration of the first sections of the never vandalized wall now in need of repair from the sun and weather just as they helped support its initial production so many year ago. The Great wall productions spurned another production in the citywide murals of SPARC’s Great walls program: entitled the Neighborhood pride program, which concluded this year with its 109th mural. These murals speak to the multi ethnic, multi faith multicentered aspects of the our city “ people often decry the lack of heart in the city of los angels but Los Angeles has many heart beating simultaneously an inexhaustibly “Pete Galindo Sparc Neighborhood Pride Public art director. Through Pete never met Minna he is the benefactor of her gifts as we each in turn mentor the next generation of leadership in the arts. This is also the important work of the California community foundation making mentor ship possible. Philanthropy is about hopefulness and the belief that we can create a better world. This is what the funding of the arts at the California Community foundation is doing when it gives the gift to an artist of “a place to work, a way to tell one’s story” through it granting programs. In doing this they pass on the possibility of continuing mentorship’s and provide the sparks that can become prairie fires Because through the arts we can hear each others stories And it is through hearing these stories and making them matter that “we keep our tenderness alive”.

El fin

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Their must be places where the bottom line is not the amount of money we make but hearing each others stories and making them matter. Where else but los Angeles could a young women artist embarking on the production of the longest mural in the world form a partnership with Minna

gains , Christina Schlesinger the daughter of the historian who pressed us to read the works of the WPA and pr