Tuesday,
September 26, 2006
Simon Rodia's
"
The
ANNOTICO Report
Seymour
Rosen life's work was to document "a
magical world created from what most other people would consider junk".
The
urban art that inspired his life's work Simon Rodia's
Decades after first seeing the sculptures in 1952, Rosen remembered the moment
quite simply: "I had fallen in love."
Rosen was on the committee that saved the towers from demolition in the late
1950s and later spent six months photographing the landmark. The results were
exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the early 1960s and have
appeared in many other major museums.
Rosen, an early champion of environmental folk art, would spend the rest of his
life trying to preserve and gain respect for work by untrained artists.
"He was the great American chronicler of this work," "Nobody in
By
Valerie J. Nelson
Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
Captivated by the roadside tableaux of
The intent was to document "a magical world created from what most other
people would consider junk," Seymour Rosen said.
Rosen, an early champion of environmental folk art, would spend the rest of his
life trying to preserve and gain respect for work by untrained artists.
A longtime resident of the
"He was the great American chronicler of this work," Rebecca Hoffberger, director of the
The urban art that inspired his life's work Simon Rodia's
Decades after first seeing the sculptures in 1952, Rosen remembered the moment
quite simply: "I had fallen in love."
Rosen was on the committee that saved the towers from demolition in the late
1950s and later spent six months photographing the landmark. The results were
exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the early 1960s and have
appeared in many other major museums.
To formalize his rescue of grass-roots works, Rosen started a foundation in 1978
called SPACES, Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments. He
remained its driving force for nearly 30 years.
In 1981, the foundation nominated 11 environments for California State Landmark
status.
Among the more famous are Grandma Prisbrey's
Those who disdained creations such as
"In building it, Grandma has made tangible the kind of spirit that allows
people to go ahead with a dream, to create," he told The Times in 1994.
"It's an incredible monument to the human spirit."
When Art Beal spent nearly 50 years building and embellishing Nitt Witt Ridge, he was tolerated as a local eccentric.
To Rosen, Beal and other self-taught artists were innovators, comparable to
those who created environmental works but were considered serious artists, such
as American installation artist Edward Kienholz, a
friend who died in 1994.
"
As a photographer-artist, Rosen also pushed for wider cultural acceptance of
unrecognized art forms.
In a 1966 show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Rosen filled shipping
crates with found items including a smashed can, bread, lightbulb
filaments and a National Geographic magazine opened to a story on cave
drawings. He called the exhibition "I Am Alive."
A show of Rosen's photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was
considered groundbreaking in 1976 because it "really had not been done
before," said Henry Hopkins, who was then the museum's director.
"Nobody else was that interested in non-mainstream art,"
Among the hundreds of images in the exhibit were tattoos, costumes, souped-up cars, a Mexican restaurant shaped like a tamale, graffiti and the treasured folk-art enviro! nments.
The seeming randomness of it all was enough to make a teacher leading students
through the exhibit furious, Rosen recalled in the 1979 book "In
Celebration of Ourselves" that showcased photographs from the show.
"It was the frame she was looking for," he wrote. "The
frame, the label, the pedestal. Take that away and you've taken away the
'art.' We've forgotten how to see things for ourselves."
Rosen had no such problem. Friends described him as a soft-spoken man who
always made his feelings known, an irascible character who could be cranky, a wonderful person with a generous spirit who delighted in
his reputation as the king of thrift.
At the core of SPACES were the 15,000 to 20,000 slides that Rosen had taken
over half a century and a trove of information that he spent the last several
years cataloging. He ran the foundation out of an apartment in a four-unit
building he owned in
"He was passionately committed to this fie! ld,"
said Jo Farb Hernandez, a
"He felt strongly that part of his mission was to make people understand
that this was a defined genre rather than some strange person's idiosyncratic
building."
Rosen was born Feb. 10, 1935, in
At 13, Rosen received a camera from his parents but had no formal training as a
photographer.
After high school, he worked as a freelance photographer, documenting exhibits
at Kienholz's cutting-edge Ferus
Gallery and shooting the Case Study Houses. Drafted into the Army in 1958,
Rosen served in a photographic unit near
For several years he worked at Barnsdall Art Park and
built the darkroom there, friends said, but Rosen spent most of his time
working to preserve environment! al art. Income from
his apartment building and a nominal salary from the foundation, which was
funded by occasional grants, helped him pay the bills.
As of 10 years ago, the foundation had documented more than 700 folk-art
environments around the country. Most were begun before strict building codes
discouraged eccentricity without the aid of blueprints.
"Most people, if not all, had no particular plans in the building of these
things," Rosen told National Public Radio in 1996. "The magic is that
somebody in a world of throwaways spent this much time working on something
that made them happy."
valerie.nelson@latimes.com
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