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THE L.A. ART SCENE THROUGH THE YEARS

Pacific Standard Time curator Andrew Perchuk shares 10 of the city's watershed creative moments.

1921
Walter and Louise Arensberg move their collection of Dada and Surrealism to Hollywood, subsequently schooling a generation of local artists and curators in modern art.

1945
Editor John Entenza founds the Case Study House program, recruiting architects like the Eameses, Richard Neutra, and Pierre Koenig to design visionary modern homes.



Black Girl's Window, 1969, Betye Saar

1954
The Watts Towers are completed, establishing Southern California as a hub for assemblage art; noteworthy practitioners over the ensuing decades will include Edward Kienholz, Bruce Conner, Wallace Berman, and Betye Saar.

1962
Los Angeles' Ferus Gallery is the first to give Andy Warhol—who will later say, "The further west we drove, the more Pop everything looked"—a venue to exhibit his iconic Campbell's soup cans.

1970
John Baldessari founds the Post Studio course at Cal Arts, where he teaches David Salle, Jack Goldstein, James Welling, and others who will later move to SoHo and participate in New York's eighties art boom.



Judy Chicago in the first Feminist Studio Workshop brochure, 1973

1972
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro open Womanhouse, a Hollywood mansion in which 17 female artists receive rooms to do what they want with, turning L.A. into a mecca for feminist art.

1974
To critique the assumption that all Mexican-American artists are muralists, members of the performance-art collective Asco create an "instant mural" by taping themselves to the exterior of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

1979
Robert Williams coins the term lowbrow art to describe L.A. skate and surf culture's mix of graffiti, cartooning, illustration, tattoo art, and custom car painting, later founding Juxtapoz magazine to celebrate it.



It Terrifies Me. . ., 1980, Raymond Pettibon

1992
The Museum of Contemporary Art's sex-and-violence-filled "Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s" transforms the city's sunny reputation, making stars of Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley, and Charles Ray.

2003
Heavyweight dealers Blum & Poe open on La Cienega Boulevard, signaling the arrival of Culver City as a major arts center.

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