Thrift Store Movies XMAS

Just a heads up on one upcoming curatorial project:

The Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation – Southern California Chapter and the Echo Park Film Center are proud to present
A Thrift Store Movie Xmas
Inoculate yourself for the holiday season with a burst of vernacular surrealism from the CCCP-SCC. Drawing from found films, thrift store discoveries, ephemeral oddities, and oddball cult classics, the CCCP-SCC has assembled a spectacular mosaic of cartoons, television specials, musical numbers, and feature film excerpts that explore the weird side of Yuletide. Highlights include “Santa Claus” a dubbed Mexican kiddie film from 1960 in which Santa battles the Devil, the infamous “lost” Star Wars Holiday special, local glam evangelist Miss Velma, cable access musical performances, and Christmas adventures from Benji, the Mirthworms, HeMan & SheRa, and Garfield, and much more. As always, special refreshments and amazing door prizes will abound. Join the festivities!

Saturday December 15th at 8 PM at the Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado Street (@ Sunset Blvd)
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Somehow It All Makes Sense

I have a lot of catching up to do here, and stuff to promote. Recent writing, Thrift Store Movies Xmas, the upcoming 3rd LA Weekly Annual Biennial. I should start with my review of Lari Pittman's recent show at Regen Projects Dos.

The first time I saw the work of Lari Pittman was at the multiple-careers-making “Helter Skelter” show at MOCA in 1992, and I didn’t care for it. This was the era of his menacing sexualized owls, meticulously built-up psychedelic reliefs of dripping white candles, and circus-font repetitions of the number 69. In spite of their obvious craftsmanship and manifest fluency with a wide swath of the history of visual culture, the paintings’ sense of contained (if provocative) energies — not to mention the unironic deployment of such a conventional medium as acrylic and enamel on rectangular mahogany panels — made them seem out of step with such eruptive gestures as Paul McCarthy’s tree-fucking robot and Nancy Rubins’ roof-high mushroom-cloud tangle of trailers and hot-water heaters. Pittman’s work seemed a quirky vestige of the previous decade’s Reaganomic love affair with “New Image” painting, not the shape of things to come. Continued Here.

Dogstar Dogstar (Laikalaikalaika)

In a full-page full-color story the Sunday New York Times outed my spouse M.A. Peers as the artist responsible for the space dog paintings at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. You can access the story online here or check the comments. M.A.'s first show of new work in a few years is scheduled for May at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Top photo by Tull, bottom by Bastian.

Bike Pathologies Tonight

In a CCCP-SCC peripheral curation, treasurer Erik Knutzen has put together a stellar program of vintage educational films for tonight!

Head on down to the Echo Park Film Center on Sunday November 4th for an evening of vintage bicycle safety films from the 50s, 60s and 70s in this special benefit screening for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Watch as little Jane and Johnny take to the streets for the first time to learn the rules of the road. But bring your motoring friends as well, since we’ll also serve up a selection of classic driver’s safety films. We’ll round out the evening with a few bicycle related shorts and oddities from the world of educational films.

The Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (LACBC) is a membership based advocacy organization working to improve the bicycling environment and quality of life in Los Angeles County through advocacy and education. The LACBC envisions a Los Angeles County that is a great place for everyday, year-round cycling with bicycles accepted as an integral part of our transportation system, culture, and communities.

Admission is $10 with all proceeds going to support the LACBC.

Sunday November 4th
Two screenings: 7:30 pm and 9:30 pm
The Echo Park Film Center is located at 1200 North Alvarado Street @ Sunset Blvd.

Licorice Allsorts... of the Mind!

"The elegant Portal paintings seem to offer a bittersweet passage to a less cluttered realm. Details are sketchy – the bullseye of the spiral’s center is an unknowable threshold of zero dimensions, but it’s clear that all baggage has to be discarded on this side of the equation. What a surprise to find all your familiar acquaintances waiting for you on the other side! Ay, there’s the rub. The deliverance offered in bridging the event horizon of a black hole is as likely to be the inescapable psychodrama of Solaris as it is to be the high amniotic indifference of 2001. Or perhaps it’s a Cabaret, old chum.

Mark Dutcher’s 2007 suite of Black Paintings seem to offer a speculative simulation of this very Far Side of our sensual and phenomenological constraints. Suddenly we confront De Selby’s ultimate accumulation of “black air,” a torrent of matériel noir that inverts our figure/ground understanding in an equally binary optical value reversal. In a variety of tableaux that recall freeze-frames of various vintage Big Reveals – particularly the withdrawal of curtains to expose the theatrical stage or cinematic screen – Dutcher delivers a best guess at second sight. Will there be a new way of seeing in the Kingdom of Heaven? Or is this it? Through a glass darkly, or infinity in a grain of sand? Or the contents of a gumball machine dumped in a cauldron of squid ink at full boil?"

from my catalog essay "Sugar in the Dark: Mark Dutcher’s Black Paintings"
published in conjunction with "Curtains", his exhibit at

High Energy Constructs
990 N. Hill Street, Suite 180
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Opening tonight, October 20 2007 from 6 - 9
On view through December 01 2007

Mark also has a spectacular survey show running concurrently at the Huntington Beach Art Center

Mark Dutcher's Shelf Life
538 Main St.
Huntington Beach Art Center
Huntington Beach, CA 92648
On view through December 16 2007

Above 'Cinema'
Below 'A Year in the Theater'

Let's Paint Fireworks for Spoiled Children

Art Garage Rock band Fireworks will be doing their thing with John Kilduff of cable access' Let's Paint TV fame at 8 PM on Thursday Oct 18th at the USC Grad Art Gallery at 3001 South Flower Street, LA, 90007 - just off the 110 freeway.

Oh Canaday!

"A case in point is his recent body of Noir hot rod paintings, a sort-of darkly macho Thanatos corollary to his longer-running pageant of full-frontal suburban Willendorfian Veneres (which themselves allude to often-Eros-tinted 70s airbrush figuration à la Alan Aldridge and Peter Saul). Employing the same backdrop of abstracted industrial domination -- Canaday hails from Detroit, site of some of the bleakest post-globalization urban landscapes in America -- as found in earlier studies of the female figure in the landscape such as Fudge Rammers in Their Pajamers (2005), the similarities end there – Canaday’s car paintings are utterly devoid of overt sexual content.


Instead, these remarkable works propose an equivalency between Ad Reinhart and “Big Daddy” Roth – between the chromatically minimal tail end of the existentialism-tinged Abstract Expressionist school and the more truly subversive eruption of the Grotesque which was occurring throughout American popular culture over the same period. The geometric complexity in a piece like Burnin’ (2007) is almost as compelling as the outlaw imagery it encodes. Drawing substantively from the automotive outsiders of Roth Studios (including Roth himself, Robert Williams - whose comic-book advertisements for Rat Fink tee-shirts bear a resemblance in wit and graphic complexity to Reinhart’s How to Look collage strips - and Dave Mann, later of Easyriders fame), Canaday’s painterly hot rods posit a plausible integration of the transcendental geometry and improvisational materiality of the church of Abex with the post-Jungian pop mythology of EC horror comics."

- from my catalog essay 'Motor City Badness: Steve Canaday’s American Graffiti'

published in conjunction with Canaday's shows at Black Dragon Society (closing October 20th) and Baronian-Francey in Brussels (opening in November). The book should be available at Black Dragon any day now. The Black Dragon show only includes one of the car paintings, but they may be still up in the auxillary space, and there'll be a chance to see at least one more before the new year.



Dough on the Go! reader Jacques de Beaufort put in his two cents in an insightful essay on his own blog and documented the openingto boot.

Now, set the doom machine against the imperial space station itself!

Writing is a lonely calling, so it is especially gratifying when one learns that not one but two of one's blog readers have taken the plunge and rented STARCRASH solely on the basis of one's blog entry recommendation. One such was Steve Roden who may have been stunned into permanent silence, though reliable intelligence says he may be reworking the haunting theme music for his October 23rd gig at the Hammer. The other is Daniel Mendel-Black, who immediately folded the complex STARCRASH cosmology into his own ongoing sci-fi political allegory at his Kulturedrome blog. Let's try and keep this going, people!

Hot Diggity Smog

We did not allow our automotive woes to interfere with our attendance of Bill Callahan's appearance in the Echoplex grotto last night. Accompanied by fiddle, bass, and percussion, he drew heavily from his most recent album "Woke on a Whale Heart"- the first issued under his real name instead of as "Smog"



The album is awesome and has a great cover by one of the best artists from the Providence scene, Joe Grillo (of the dearraindrop consortium)



I've seen Smog a few times, and while he always had a mesmerizing stage presence, he usually just sat there - but this Bill guy seems to have brought some slinky body consciousness along with him, as he kept busting mutant Elvis moves and breaking out the old softshoe.



The opening act was virtuosic Sun City Girls alum Sir Richard Bishop. I didn't get any good shots of him, though, so here's one more of Mr. Bill.

The Ironing is Delicious

Some one caused some deep wrinklage to our "new" car (the '91 Accord) at 2 AM this morning. According to a coupon left by the police, it was the work of one "Neva Grout." Now, assuming this was not the principal of a Catholic school in British Columbia, my google search turned up this improbable gem. Neva is signator #116. Stay tuned for insurance horror stories.

"They all, without any exception are AGAINST, I say, are AGAINST what I am doing."

I was uploading this anyway, so in case anyone's interested, here's a 8 1/2 minute sound piece I made about 10 years ago for a show at the refusalon. 'Spitting Out Our Medication' includes a soliloquy from a tape recorded by Wilhelm Reich in Orgonon just before he was put in prison, an homage to Spike Jones, samples from a 70's radio program on the anti-psychiatry movement, and so much more.

The original audio tape is still available from the Wilhelm Reich Museum at Orgonon, where you can also purchase reproductions of Reich's paintings (below, 'Swirl' 1951) or rent a cottage, in addition to a wealth of resources detailing Reich's theories and research - much of it unavailable elsewhere.

Last Chance for Griffinity

Sunday September 30th is the last chance to view "Heart & Torch: Rick Griffin's Transcendence" at Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach. The show (shamefully) won't travel, and many of the pieces included will probably disappear forever back into private collections after it closes. The awesome catalog is almost sold out, as are the vintage limited edition silk-screen reproductions of classic Griffin psychedelic posters and 4 different tee-shirts produced by Hurley specifically for the show. Be there or be everywhere.

Above: Griffin paints the bus 'Motorskill' in John Severson's classic "Pacific Vibrations"

Below: Rick's mystic eye.

The Mists of Abalone

"While Spence deploys his signature post-photorealist airbrush technique to its full fuzzy luminosity in the new works, they have grown significantly in scale. And the recombinant mash-ups of “Afterlife” have been distilled into their discrete constituent ingredients. Almost every one of the large canvases consists of a single misty photographic re-reproduction, some found, some altered, some staged with models. A couple of these depict the kind of totemic handcrafted figurative sculptures commonly arising out of a clinical art-therapy session — the wonky cardboard toilet-paper-tube family of 'Gaggle' and the (deliberately) awkwardly installed, strangely Magritte-like 'Figure', which the artist copied as a sculpture from an art-therapy book before rephotographing it for its eventual transubstantiation into Real Art."

My latest LA Weekly piece looks at "Art Therapy," the current show by LA painter Brad Spence at Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

Above: 'Boundary'; below: 'Remedy'

Some One Needs To Do This In Chinatown... Bubbles

The 4th annual Soundwalk was held in downtown Long Beach last weekend, organized by the artist collective FLOOD. It was great to see such a complex event being pulled together with almost no money, and so many different people checking out experimental music and sound art. There were something like 50 artists providing performances, installations, sound sculptures, etc. spread over 4 blocks. I did a few recording tours and edited together a 13-minute virtual experience.
To the best of my ability I've figured out who made what sounds on here - anyone with further info or corrections please share it in a comment. Sorry for the crappy sound. But I dig crappy sound.

1. Midnight Gardeners' lovely drones in the Dome Room of the Lafayette (pictured above)
2. Unidentified (and unseen) blues guitarist on corner of Linden & Broadway
3. Doug Pearsall's funk on the opposite corner
4. Lewis Keller's robot drumming orchestra in a vacant storefront
5. Daniel Corral's amazing meta-musicboxes in the Lafayette kitchen
6. Robert Strong's mutant kettle drum in another room of the Lafayette kitchen
7. Miha Ciglar's video feedback sound in the Dome Room
8. Adam Overton's touch-activated human ensemble on Koo's stage
9. Christiaan Cruz's shrubbery shrouded installation - I didn't get a chance to inspect it closely but I liked the racket.
10. Mike Chang & Allie Bogle's open access FOR SALE piano in a flowershop entrance and unidentified roving horn ensemble
11. MLuM's fig leaf & veil extravaganza in the Cooper Arms
12. Gary Raymond's very popular feedback delay shipping crate on the corner of Linden & First
13. Markle & Strauss's ouija board electronics in the back of an art gallery
14. Fluorescent Grey's dense loopy collage in the Dome Room
15. Mannlicher Carcano's dense loopy collage in the Dome Room (with live cell-phone air couple from Canada)
16. Tom Skelly's random recombinant sampledelic jukebox on the street in front of the Best Western.

Tom Skelly (pictured below) creates an awesome live sound collage radio program every Sunday from 7 - 10 at www.kspc.org when not bringing art to the prisons.

Mannlicher Carcano Live Saturday Night

Mannlicher Carcano are participating in this year's SOUNDWALK festival in Long Beach CA. Porter Hall and Gogo Godot will be participating from Canada via telephone. Really Happening, Herr Schurdt, and whoever else shows up will hold down the fort at this end.

Mannlicher's set (entitled 'Bong Leach Wound Sock') will run from 9 - 10 PM in The Dome Room of The Lafayette at 528 E. Broadway

On September 22, 2007, the Long Beach artist group, FLOOD, will present SoundWalk2007, featuring artists from the Southland and the international scene. This event operates under the concept of a one-night aural/visual experience as provided by a walking-tour of sound installations and soundmarks located in various indoor and outdoor spaces situated throughout the East Village Arts District in Downtown Long Beach. The artworks will combine in multiple ways a wide range of visual, performative and audio components. There will be sculptures, environments, installations and performances. More details can be found at www.soundwalk.org



Also, those in search of great deals on all kinds of fabulous film and video equipment, supplies, resources, VHS rarities and inexplicable knicknacks should be sure to check out the Echo Park Film Center's ANNUAL RUMMAGE SALE! – Saturday, Sept 22 – 11AM – 5PM. Here is a picture of Nigel and EPFC svengali Paolo D contemplating one of the last category of objects. What the hell is that thing?!

"It's times like this that I'm glad to be a robot."

Truer words were never spoken. The Coalition for Cinematic Conservation and Preservation - Southern California Chapter (CCCP-SCC) is the umbrella organization under whose aegis the Thrift Store Movie screenings at the the Hammer and numerous programs at The Echo Park Film Center (including Mormon Media and Wienergeist 1: The Cinema of the Hot Dog) are organized. On occasion our organization will endorse a film of not particularly ephemeral or educational nature. One such film is 'Starcrash' (original title: 'Scontri Stellari Oltre la Terza Dimensione'), a 1979 Roger Corman-produced Italian Star Wars ripoff that was found on VHS in a thrift store in Oroville.

Starring Marjoe Gortner, Hammer beauty Caroline Munro, permanently beleagured Christopher Plummer, and featuring the screen debut of David Hasselhoff, 'Starcrash' has been reissued on DVD and developed a considerable cult following, as evidenced by this dissertation on salon.com, this page featuring downloadable sound samples and stills as well as a tart but glowing review, and this over-the-top fansite. All questions of condescending "so bad its good" critiques aside, some of the visuals in this film are transcendent in their beautiousness. And I'm an art critic. (And I think I'm getting an idea for my next curatorial project... Omaggio a Armando Valcauda!)

Gortner's B-movie career was kicked off by the Oscar-winning documentary 'Marjoe' which followed the former Pentecostal child evangelist in his ambivalent attempt to reconcile his youthful experiences with his adult counterculture worldview through an awkward return to the revival tent circuit. His last role to date was as a preacher in Walter Hill's 'Wild Bill' (1995). He was briefly married to Candy Clark, on whom David Bowie vomited in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth'. Most recently Gortner has been sponsoring charity golf tournaments.



The Great John Barry - who was tricked into scoring 'Starcrash' - later reused the haunting theme music for 'Out of Africa', which earned him an Oscar. All roads lead to the Academy.

Out-Sourcing Inner Work

"On August 25, 1975, former Sunset Strip restaurateur Jim Baker launched himself off a 1,300-foot-high cliff on the easternmost shore of Oahu. Although he had never hang-glided before — or even trained for it — he was confident his instincts would kick in and allow him to negotiate the notoriously tempestuous thermal trade winds off the mountainous coastline. And they may well have, except for a sudden calm that caused him to immediately plummet downward hundreds of feet. He recovered control and managed to glide out over the Pacific for 10 minutes before navigating back to crash-land on the beachfront Waimalano campground. Although he appeared to have no serious injuries, Baker was unable to move and was taken home, where he died some nine hours later. He was survived by his 13 wives and 140 or so sons and daughters."

Spiritual Sons and Daughters that is. Read the rest of my LA WEEKLY piece on 70's LA cult The Source Family here. Then buy the book from which I cribbed it all:
The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13 and the Source Family. Above is author Isis Aquarian in silhouette during the slideshow portion of the book launch salon at the Process/Feral House Hobbit Compound.

Basil Wolverton's First Museum Retrospective Opens Saturday!

"As Spacehawk was losing altitude, Wolverton took a freelance assignment that required him to create a humor feature. The first result was a sci-fi parody called Splash Morgan. Within a year, the artist had developed three comical features – including his most popular and influential series, Powerhouse Pepper – and by the time Spacehawk folded, he was getting so much humor work that he abandoned his “serious” style for almost a decade.



Powerhouse Pepper – published in various Timely Comics (which later became Marvel) and edited by Stan Lee – lasted in various forms from 1942 through 1948 and took the kind of ridiculous wordplay and corny sight gags common to prewar humor strips to a level of meta-absurdity, clogging panels with joke signage and props and speech balloons and captions with baroque tongue-twisting verbiage riddled with rhyme, permeated with puns, and characterized by rampant alliteration. It is not so far-fetched to consider the linguistic innovations in Wolverton’s comedic scripts in the light of modernist literature by authors James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hugo Ball, Alfred Jarry, and perhaps most consonantly, Raymond Roussel.

Roussel, a next-door neighbor to Marcel Proust, had a similar passion for the improbable and a love of wordplay. He took special delight in exposing the hypocrisy of authority by affecting a mock highfalutin tone and exaggerating it into absurdity. Roussel played a pivotal role in the foundation of modern art when the 1911 theatrical version of his proto-surrealist novel, Impressions of Africa, inspired epiphanies in Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Apollinaire. The dadaists and surrealists were notoriously fond of American comics -- Duchamp and Man Ray even reprinted a Rube Goldberg contraption in their 1921 New York Dada journal.

(See hi-res scans of the rest of this Pepper story & more here)

While Goldberg, Wolverton, and other purveyors of pop-cultural absurdities were skeptical – if not outright hostile – toward their adoption by the avant-garde, their attitude probably had more to do with the fact that America’s elite class fetishized European culture even when it was fundamentally at odds with Yankee Nouveau Riche postures of privilege and authority. Regardless of the conceptual discomfort, the overlap between Wolverton and the “moderns” is considerable. Probably the most striking consistency lies in the realm of Grotesque caricature -- a recurring motif in fine art from the Renaissance on and made central to Modernism by the Expressionist, Dada, and Surrealist artists. Wolverton began to explore this territory extensively during the 1940s and eventually laid indisputable claim to it."

from my essay 'The Closer You Look, the Prettier It Ain’t: Basil Wolverton’s Microscopic Grotesque'
The Original Art of Basil Wolverton published by Grand Central Press and Last Gasp Publishing in conjunction with the exhibit.


The Original Art of Basil Wolverton
from the Collection of Glenn Bray
September 1 - November 11, 2007

Opening Reception: September 1, 7-10 p.m.

Grand Central Art Center
125 N. Broadway,
Santa Ana, CA 92701
General Phone: 714.567.7233
www.grandcentralartcenter.com

Spooky Al Just Before He Kicked the Bucket

I Can't Believe They Kept My Title

Excuse my intermittent diaristic impulses - I guess I'm not a real journalist after all. At least when I have nothing to say I shut the fuck up. But now I have to play catch up again. So here's the most recently published LA WEEKLY article - about the Getty Research Institute's hosting the audio archives of Paul McCarthy and John Duncan's experimental "Close Radio" broadcasts from the 70's. Above is a photo of McCarthy and Mike Kelley performing on Bastille Day as part of Extended Organ in a downtown warehouse studio space. Out of the shot: Tom Recchion, Joe Potts, and Joseph Hammer (channeling Fredrik Nilsen). You can hear and download most of the Close Radio programs here at the GRI site.

The Halliburton SurvivaBall (TM)

The Yes Men on Bill Moyer's Journal

R.I.P. Al Gordon, C.D.

Albert had been bummed out since Reyna died last week, and last night he had a respiratory attack. He'd been getting these when he overheated but this time it didn't pass. We took him to the Emergency Animal Clinic in Studio City where he died around 2 AM. Later, Aligator.

Mannlicher Carcano's Greatest Hits

I've uploaded the entire 2 CD preview version of the Mannlicher Carcano anthology "Trouble Comes in Threes" including liner notes and covers to megaupload. Share it with some one you love.

Pour Down Like Silver

Ghanian/Nigerian sculptor El Anatsui garnered much praise at this year's Venice Biennale. Here's my take on his travelling survey show, currently at the UCLA Fowler Museum. This is a detail from "Skin of Earth," one of the artist's signature pieces assembled from thousands of flattened aluminum liquor bottle caps.

Burn Kunsthogskollen Burn!

I realize I've been remiss in my postings here - I haven't even linked my last three LA Weekly columns. So I'll start with that. First, the always amazing Jeffrey Vallance's exhibit of autohagiographical reliquaries at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana... a good trip to combine with a visit to Laguna for the Griffin retrospective! This is a picture I took of jeffrey in Umea Sweden on Walpurgisnacht 2000!

R.I.P. Reyna

Our oldest greyhound Reyna passed on at home this Wednesday afternoon with the help of Dr. Liz Friedman. She had had a rough couple of days, but it was a very comfortable transition. Reyna was 15 1/2 and had outlived the rest of her abandoned litter, even though the folks at Hemopet thought she might be too far gone to rescue. She showed them.

When we first got Reyna, she was terrified of flags, automatic gates, stairs, etc. but she got more and more confident, eventually becoming adept at many competition obedience exercises. Although she never competed, she attended Mary Fry's legendary classes for 5 years, and supported Albert in his successful pursuit of his CD obedience title. She continued her obedience work right up into the last week of her life.

Among Reyna's other accomplishments were: donating blood to Hemopet for her year of post-rescue socialization; catching (and, with some encouragement, releasing) two wild rats while walking on lead when we lived on 7th Street in downtown LA; and appearing in a number of artworks, including posing (with Albert) for a 3D photographic tableaux vivant superimposed on the Vision of St. Eustace diorama in the Athanaseus Kircher exhibit at the museum of Jurassic Technology.

She was ethereally beautiful with frequently disgusting table manners, and kept her smarts and wicked sense of humor until her body gave out. She'll be missed very much.

Sorry For the Delay

The cord for my digital camera fell down. But I found it.

Lee & Tito

Fat Angel Reclining with Loot

Original art for Rick Griffin's ultra-rare poster for Cass Elliott's disastrous appearance at Caesar's Palace in Vegas in October 1968. Holly Myer's review of the Griffin show in the LA Times. More soon.

Griffinity Now!

Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence
June 24, 2007 – September 30, 2007

Opening reception
Awesome live DJ. (Rendering my mix redundant)
An In-N-Out truck will serve up burgers outside.

Saturday, June 23 2007, 7:00pm to 10:00pm

Price: $15 non-members (or see me for a coupon)

Laguna Art Museum
307 Cliff Drive
Laguna Beach, CA 92651

(949) 494-8971




Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence, the artist’s first major retrospective and solo museum exhibition, opens on June 24, 2007. A cult figure that set the iconographic terrain for the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, in his art Griffin expressed idealism and hope along with a darker side that perfectly embodied the contradictions of the era with its mixture of hedonism, politics, and avant-garde expression.

The exhibition, which includes some 140 paintings, drawings, posters, album covers, and artifacts, surveys thirty years of Griffin’s work from the 1960s until his death in 1991. The accompanying 156-page catalogue, published in association with Gingko Press, is the first publication to address Griffin’s impact on the surf, psychedelic rock, and born-again Christian movements.




Heart and Torch is organized for Laguna Art Museum by Susan M. Anderson, and co-curated by guest curators Greg Escalante and Doug Harvey with curatorial consultant Gordon McClelland.

Laguna Art Museum is located in Laguna Beach, Orange County, California, situated approximately 60 minutes south of Los Angeles and 90 minutes north of San Diego. To get to the Museum, take Pacific Coast Highway (PCH, California Highway 1) toward Laguna Beach. The Museum is located on the south-east corner of the crossing of Pacific Coast Highway and Cliff Drive.



Opening Hours and Admission

Laguna Art Museum is open daily from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Museum is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's days.

$10.00 General
$8.00 Seniors, Students, and active duty Military and their dependents.
Free for Children 12 and under
Visa, MasterCard, and American Express are accepted