
“Until 30 years ago, it was routine practice to keep contemporary art and ‘ethnic’ art in separate categories,” New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote in a recent review of Hunter Drohojowska-Philp’s history of the contemporary art scene in 1960s L.A., Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s. Mr. Cotter continued, “Those days are over, or should be, but they linger on in this book, which ignores entire cultures while meticulously cataloging the marital mishaps and bad-boy pranks of a few Establishment ‘rebels.’”
Aiming to provide a counterbalance, Mr. Cotter pointed to L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints, a magisterial new volume on African-American artists in Los Angeles that has just been published by the Tilton Gallery.
The book is a beauty. It is also, for a writer whose knowledge of the L.A. scene has long revolved around a superficial knowledge of the activities of the era’s storied Ferus Gallery (which held shows with emerging stars like Ed Keinholz, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha), a deeply unsettling read.
~ Andrew Russeth, New York Observer