Activism and Assemblage

Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, John Outterbridge, Dale Brockman Davis,and Betye Saar, whose works are on view nearby, were part of a Black activist movement in art that began in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Johnson, working during the height of the Civil Rights movement, used symbolic materials like mouse traps and wire fencing along with other found and fabricated materials. Edwards used nails, chains, and padlocks in his work to communicate a sense of urgency about ongoing subjugation. Davis signaled his opposition to the Vietnam War--which had a disproportionately negative impact on Black men of his generation--through his ceramic-and-found-object sculpture, and Saar scoured Southern California for secondhand materials to create assemblages that reference spirituality and magic, amulets for a campaign of self-determination and resistance. In the large adjacent gallery, art that responds to racism and violence includes the mural-sized painting by Matta, Burn, Baby, Burn (L’escalade), which captures a sense of apocalypse as the artist was moved by the war in Vietnam and the violence in Los Angeles.