Public Art at the Global Crossroads: The Politics of Place in 1930s Los Angeles

Abstract

The relationship of art to place is pronounced in Los Angeles, a world center for the production and projection of visual culture. The historical pursuit of a unifying civic identity grounded in both the arts and assumptions of white Anglo homogeneity led to a fraught public art history as excluded cultural groups fought for a vital stake in Los Angeles's self-representation. As an era when civic resources were challenged and the Federal Arts Project infused new life into public culture, the decade of the 1930s provides an especially ripe opportunity to examine the clash between a conservative, booster vision of Los Angeles and the city as imagined by foreign, ethnic and immigrant artists. This article focuses on artworks by David Siqueiros, Myer Shaffer, and Sabato Rodia and argues that in trying to project a specific (and narrow) image of Los Angeles globally, civic elites ultimately provoked these artists into fundamentally reinterpreting the local. Localized art meant something valuable and they resisted a flawed and false separation of art from place. In laying bare the significance of local places and local histories, these artists produced, in effect, poignant monuments to radical visions of social equality, economic justice, and cultural diversity.