J. V. Decemvirale

Building on scholarship that expands the cultural topography of Los Angeles, this dissertation investigates a constellation of arts organizations founded and managed by people of color in the city from 1968 to the present. Working in the shadow of the city’s central cultural institutions, these arts associations and grassroots art spaces have formed the networks of apprenticeship, instruction, and affiliation for much of the black and Latino artistic production in Los Angeles. Protesting their exclusion from the city’s main museums, these organizations turned churches, houses, and hospitals into temporary exhibition spaces. Through community-oriented programming and exhibition making, they generated large membership constituencies and attracted audiences that reached into the thousands. By reformatting the dominant culture’s products, these groups made art applicable and meaningful to demographic groups that the museum as an institution continues to neglect, ignore, and misunderstand. Analyzed as a series of case studies, these arts organizations provide insights into the popular uses and rereadings of the spaces, frameworks, and alliances by which art has traditionally been activated, curated, exhibited, and received.

This fellowship received Federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center.