The LA Art District on Fire

Henry Taylor’s, Los Angeles

March 5-April 2, 2017

About a year ago, Henry [Taylor] told me about a project space he was opening in his downtown loft, and asked would I like to do something there. I said I’d give it some thought. Most of my work regards a place or situation; sometimes it is designed for one.

For a while, I had wanted to give Henry an artwork, but not sure what it should be. After we talked about doing an exhibition, something came to mind - a photograph of Huey Newton holding a Bob Dylan LP that Henry had turned me on to, an image that signified some shared identification, the intersection of our own personal histories. So I decided to make a drawing based on that photograph, and would develop the exhibition from there.

The loft at 810 East 3rd is smack in the middle of the LA Arts District; diagonally across from Hauser, Wirth and Schimmel, a complex of renovated 19th and early 20th century buildings that take up an entire block - some 116,000 square feet of exhibition space, a book store, restaurant and courtyard - what once had been an old flour mill. During a visit, Henry walked me around its entire perimeter.

A few blocks away lies Skid Row, an area of Downtown Los Angeles that has been a habitat to a transient population since the 1880s. By the 1930s, about 10,000 homeless people resided there. The folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a song about it in 1939, describing Skid Row as embodying “the forces of an unbalanced social order.” Today it is one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in the United States. Visible are hundreds of tents and makeshift shelters that line its sidewalks. How close, the LA Arts District and Skid Row. In fact, they overlap.

My show at Henry’s would have to reflect these contrasting realities in some way. I decided to make a large mural based on Ed Ruscha’s 1965-68 painting, “The Los Angeles Country Museum on Fire.” I call my picture, “The LA Arts District on Fire.” This, and the Huey Newton drawing I made for Henry comprise the exhibition. I’ve pondered for months, the relationship between these two images and the histories they represent.

— Stephan Pascher, February 2017