March 28, 2024

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Art Is Experience

John Outterbridge, a Central L.A. assemblage artist and educator, dies at 87

John Outterbridge, a central determine in the Black assemblage arts motion and former director of the Watts Towers Arts Middle, has died in Los Angeles. He was 87.

Outterbridge died of purely natural causes, stated his daughter Tami, who was at his aspect.

The artist was recognized for his evocative sculptures made from located or discarded products which include cloth, containers and steel. Some of his most celebrated operate contains a series of doll figures, stitched from rags, hair and wooden scraps, that reference the black custom, group and folklore.

Born March 12,1933, in Melancholy-era Greenville, N.C., Outterbridge grew up surrounded by creative imagination. His mom wrote poetry and performed piano his uncles and cousins were being musicians. Outterbridge arrived to know assemblage through his handyman father, an avid salvager who loaded his family’s yard with items from the junk trade.

“Castoffs, what was junk to some others, grew to become source, conversion, meaningful compound,” Outterbridge recalled in a 2015 job interview with The Situations. “Images of that yard museum continue to dance in my head. They enjoy out in my feelings and in my operate.”

Following attending an agricultural and technological college or university in Greensboro, N.C., to study engineering, Outterbridge enrolled in the Army and served in Germany through the Korean War. He grew to become a thing of a armed forces artist, portray murals in American large universities in Germany and officers’ clubs.

When his assistance finished, he enrolled in the American Academy of Artwork in Chicago while functioning as a bus driver on the aspect. It was there that he grew to become fascinated with fabric scraps and rags, a single of his trademark products.

“I’d normally see the ragmen, who collected rags for a residing,” he stated in a 1992 job interview with The Situations. “They’d go all-around, contacting up to people today in apartment structures for rags, and they could mail their young children to college or university on what they made. Rags grew to become a thing I normally required to use.”

In 1963, two yrs ahead of the Watts riots, Outterbridge moved to L.A. He befriended artist Noah Purifoy, co-founder of the Watts Towers Arts Middle and father of the Black assemblage motion.

In the 1960s and seventies, assemblage — the exercise of creating artwork from discarded items — gave Black L.A. artists the possibility to reclaim their group while contacting out the indignities they faced. Outterbridge and other artists which include Betye Saar and Melvin Edwards were being central figures in the motion who located inspiration for their operate from the 1965 Watts riots.

Outterbridge typically spoke to politics in his operate — these as the use of American flag imagery in the 1971 assemblage “Jive Ass Fowl.”

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Situations)

A single these operate is his 1969 “Containment Series,” a assortment of rectangular pieces made of tin cans, rusted nails and other cast-off products checking out the strategy of constraint. Another operate, “About Martin,” which characteristics a teeny go well with jacket and a laundry receipt made out to Martin Luther King Jr. inside a wooden cabinet, is Outterbridge’s 1975 homage to the civil rights chief.

Despite the fact that he was a gifted artist, a great deal of Outterbridge’s profession was devoted to arts administration, education and learning and activism.

He was a founding director of the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton from 1969 to 1975. In a 2016 job interview with KCET, Outterbridge explained the academy as a collecting place for the group. “It was a vivid, colorful put that we raised up on the other aspect of the educate tracks and where we raised the roof with songs and plays and new music and actions that did not occur any place else in the town,” he stated.

In 1975, Outterbridge grew to become director of the Watts Towers Arts Middle, a group facility next to Simon Rodia’s landmark spires in South-Central L.A. Following almost seventeen yrs, he retired from the posture in 1992 to devote a lot more time to his artwork exercise.

Two yrs afterwards, Outterbridge represented the U.S. along with Saar in the 22nd Brazil Bienal, a biannual exhibition that featured operate by 206 artists from 71 nations.

He ongoing to develop through his afterwards yrs, creating operate which include 2002’s “Remnants of an Apron Lost,” which remodeled a wood paddle into an African-motivated fetish determine, and 2009’s “Hooked,” a claw made from bits of wooden.

But it was only in the previous ten years that Outterbridge gained common recognition for his operate, with his pieces shown at the Whitney Museum of American Artwork and the Venice Biennale.

His operate was featured in many of the 2011 Pacific Normal Time exhibitions. His 2011 display “The Rag Factory” at LAXART in 2011 marked his 1st solo exhibition in Los Angeles considering that 1996. And in 2012, the California African American Museum honored Outterbridge with a life span achievement award along with actor and director Sidney Poitier.

Outterbridge’s artwork is in the collections of museums which include the California African American Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork and the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York.

John Otterbridge sits with a creation at the African American Doll Exhibition

John Otterbridge’s finely thorough creations were being on exhibit at the African American Doll Exhibition in 1980.

(Larry Davis / Los Angeles Situations)