Bunker Hill, Los Angeles | 1934 – 1976
The Annales School of mid-20th century France sought to write social histories that would illustrate a lifeworld at every level, from high culture to the raw, material facts of a given historical period—What would it look like to write such a history for the City of Los Angeles?
Intended to be the first in a series of pieces, Bunker Hill, Los Angeles (1934-1976) follows the dreams and charts the actions of the artists and suits who dared to envision downtown Los Angeles as the City of the Future, the society of tomorrow. Angelenos, and indeed the world, witnessed the frenzied sacrifice of the Bunker Hill neighborhood on the alter of progress. In this tragic story, as the future arrived, skyscraper by skyscraper, the residents of Bunker Hill were increasingly excluded from this high-minded dream, left to languish in a present too impoverished to book a room at the Bonaventure Hotel or take in a Rothko at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Bunker Hill, Los Angeles (1934 – 1976) was created using colored pencil and alcohol solvent on watercolor paper.
American Tragedies Portrait Series
The 20th century is gone and dead, but its rotting, putrefied corpse is stinking up the damn place—Turing’s algorithm, Teller’s bomb, Hofmann’s acid, are the limbs, arms, and feet reaching out, zombie-like, from the past into our present. We are still accustomed to dream wildly, but the nightmares of the last century make belief in any meaningful future seem impossible. What would it mean to have a proper burial for what is sure to be remembered as one of the most remarkable centuries in human history?
The American Tragedies Portrait Series is an attempt to look back with fresh eyes on the long, utopian 20th century in all its glory and its horror, with a particular focus on citizens and non-citizens of the empire that dictated the life and times of this peculiar period. The Series examines eight American figures who serve as allegories for various aspects of the human condition: Robert Moses (Order), Chief Looking Glass (Being), Aurora Vargas (Sacrifice), Hannah Arendt (Belonging), Malcom X (Unity), Ted Kaczynski (Rebellion), Septima Clark (Power), and ‘Big’ Bill Haywood (Labor).
The Series does not seek to glorify nor demonize the figures featured, but to provide eight lenses through which we might better understand these times, through the lives of individuals embedded at various points in the long American 20th century. Some personalities may be more familiar than others in this series, but all dreamt beyond the confines of their time, their dreams suffering tragic ends that demand recompense in our present.
The work featured in the American Tragedies Portrait Series was created using colored pencil and alcohol solvent on bristol paper.
Other Colored Pencil Work
The work featured below was created using colored pencil on bristol paper.