Jenni Sorkin - Art in California

Helen Lundeberg (19081999), Blue Planet, 1965

Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art, working primarily on women artists and underrepresented media. Her publications include Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community, Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women Artists, 19472016, and numerous essays in journals and exhibition catalogs. She was educated at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bard College, and received her PhD from Yale University. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Craft.

Californias rich and varied artistic production is the subject of this book, which offers an introduction to the states distinctive cultural history from the early 20th century to the present moment. With nearly forty million residents, California is the largest and most populous state in the United States, comprising just over twelve percent of the total population. It is also the most racially diverse state, or what is known as minority-majority, in that no single racial group holds a population advantage. It is home to both the highest (Mount Whitney) and lowest (Death Valley) elevation points in the contiguous 48 states. It also houses the oldest (bristlecone pine), tallest (redwood), and stoutest (giant sequoia) trees in the world.

Californias geography is an outsized fact of its global presence: its long Pacific coastline has made it a nexus of transit, conquest, and cultural syncretism, but also vulnerable to the possibilities of overdevelopment and environmental degradation. In recent years, this has taken the form of devastating wildfires, oil spills, and overpopulation. For much of its modern history, California has exceeded its geographical boundaries, becoming an international symbol of aspiration and attainment, signifying the so-called good life: year-round sunshine, and the opportunity for self-actualization and re-invention.

Californias cultural production has been a driver of its economic growth: valuing and bestowing status upon the arts has meant a permanent place on the world stage. Art and California have long been synonymous with Hollywood movie studios and production companies. As a significant export, the global reach of the film industry has eclipsed Californias other art forms. Yet Californias visual art has continued unabated and its history is arguably more radical, steeped in multiculturalism, ethnic identity, and community-belonging from the outset. This book re-orients the reader to what has been hiding in plain sight for a century: all along, California has been a predecessor for the global contemporary, a term that describes the expansive geographical boundaries of the visual arts, in that its cosmopolitanism and diversity has deep roots in its complex history of migration and exchange.

Several historic events set the stage for Californias advanced artistic production. These included the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo between the United States and Mexico, in which Mexico ceded ownership of California and large portions of the West: parts of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Utah, as well as half of New Mexico. Mexicans remaining in these territories received American citizenship or were forced to relocate. During this era, bigoted laws prohibited citizenship for Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. The cosmology of Indigenous Californians was rooted in a spiritual use of the land, which was in direct conflict with white settlers who sought a better life through farming, ranching, and mining. The Gold Rush of the 1850s decimated Californias indigenous population through state-sanctioned genocide: Native peoples were forced off their land, hunted down, and killed, systematically eradicated through settler colonialism, in which a new racial or ethnic group overtakes and occupies indigenous land, creating a permanent structure of sovereignty and control.

Chinese Californians arrived in waves, eventually comprising ninety percent of the workforce that completed the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, joining the West to the eastern rail network, as well as building other crucial infrastructure and manufacturing that established the states economy at the onset of its integration into the federal system. Yet they faced endless persecution due to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a federal law that prohibited immigration by Chinese laborers, and its enforcement via incarceration at the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910 and 1940.

Contemporary artistic culture in California has therefore been shaped by a compelling network of geopolitical influences: pre- and post-colonial indigenous histories, migration and exchange from the Pacific Rim and Mexico, the influx of African Americans after World War II, known as the Second Great Migration, and entry of citizens from around the globe after race and ethnicity-based immigration quotas were lifted in 1965. The aim of this book is to provide a rigorous and intersectional overview of the dynamic modern art history of the state and its outsized influence nationally.

Organized both thematically and chronologically, this volume surveys California from 1916 until the present moment, an era in which an East Coast bias has emanated, credited for nearly everything significant in American art. As a result, California has received scant attention for what is actually its ability to bring many post-war developments to fruition, for instance, cultivating both straight and conceptual photography, the studio craft movement, feminist art, and the early adoption of video art. However, the scope of this volume has been deliberately limited to the visual arts: it will neither address architecture nor film, even forays into experimental cinema, such as the work of Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, or true California originals such as Donna Deitch, Todd Haynes, the film critic B. Ruby Rich, or the creation of Outfest, an LGBTQ+ annual film festival started by two UCLA students in 1979.

The opening year of this book, 1916, marks a series of events. It is the year when the federal government formally annexed Californias state parks, creating a single national system, the Federal Park Service, which paved the way for tourism and recreation. While universal access for all was a principled ideal, in actuality the benefit was historically restricted, excluding non-white racial and ethnic communities, and favoring able-bodied middle-class white people with the means to travel.

1916 also coincides with the death of the noted photographer Carleton Watkins (18291916), who came to seek his fortune in California, pioneering the earliest landscape photography in the Yosemite Valley, prior to its designation as a national park. His were among the first images of the California wilderness that circulated on the East Coast, spurring strong and conflicting interests in the state itself: simultaneously a destination for future conservation, as well as further development.