Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2019 i Journal of Alta California

PO BRONSON “The Planet-Hunting Machine,” page 22 Were you skeptical going into your story about planet hunting that there is other life out there? Not so much skeptical as blind to the very premise. I hadn’t considered it, because I thought outer space was just an infinite scatterfield of inorganic rocks and gases. I thought all the television dramas of my childhood filled with civilizations on other planets was just wishful dreaming. And I’d been taught that the origin of life, here on Earth, was all due to a random event that was extremely unlikely to ever happen more than once. EMILY UNDERWOOD “The Old Man and the River” map, page 114 You’ve mapped the L.A. River. Do you visit it much? I love to ride my bike along the…

Marilyn Monroe lived in many different places in L.A., but if you were to rely on the legends that homeowners and real estate agents want you to believe, that number would triple,” says David Silverman with a laugh. “Rudolph Valentino’s name comes up a lot too. Any celebrity connection is a big selling point.” Standing on a quiet, jacaranda-lined street in the flats of Beverly Hills, the author of custom-made books on celebrity homes flips through the pages of one of his earliest creations and points to a house. “But she really did sleep there,” he says, indicating several pictures of a very young Monroe posing on the entrance pathway. Silverman discovered the photos while researching a biography on a white-painted Spanish colonial revival residence next door. That home was…

It was a comment made to fill the kind of conversational vacuum unique to dentist offices, when both parties fall into a silence prompted by whining tools or the dry-mouthed difficulty of speaking through cotton pads. The fact popped into Wayne Fong’s head that 2008 afternoon as he cleaned Roger Glenn’s teeth, and to break the quiet, Fong said: “Hey, did you know the first man in flight on the West Coast came from here?” Fong is an affable dentist with a love of trivia, and his office on the edge of Oakland’s Chinatown is adorned with the usual neutral-toned carpet and stack of waiting-room magazines. His family has lived in the neighborhood for three generations; his grandparents owned the barbershop that served as the center of Chinatown social life…

I land in Santa Fe at dusk. The sun is falling behind the Jemez Mountains, casting a glow of cotton candy pink and blood-red orange on the scrubby hills with their adobe houses and cottonwood trees. The Navajo Nation and Jicarilla Apache land are to the northwest, and somewhere in that direction, past the Rio Grande and into the Rockies, lies the jackpot: Forrest Fenn’s treasure chest. It’s a small box. Less than a foot long and a foot wide. Cast in bronze in a Romanesque style, the hidden chest contains an estimated $2 million in gold coins; placer nuggets; a pair of golden frogs; a dragon bracelet with ruby eyes and many diamonds; 254 rubies, six emeralds, two Ceylon sapphires, and more diamonds; numerous other artifacts; and, perhaps most…

The typical way to write about Gary Snyder is to note his status as a poet and Zen Buddhist associated with the San Francisco Renaissance. I’m going to skip that part. Not that it’s inaccurate—Snyder, who was born in 1930, has long sat in the company of such writers as Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen. But that perspective obscures Snyder as an American environmentalist—which may well end up being his most lasting influence. Snyder’s essays are the best place to acquaint yourself with his belief that we are all “rooted in nature.” Not only because he honors such “fundamental all-time values of our species” as sharing, humility, cooperation, hunter success, love for children, respect for others, and responsibility for community—but also because he reminds us that contemporary human beings are…

Every place is shaped by dreams, and California perhaps particularly so. Nick Neely grew up in Portola Valley, and, like a lot of us, he’s wondering what to hold on to as the golden dream proves unsustainable. At the opening of his beautifully written Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, a Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State, he rightly argues that he could hike the wilderness to seek out the place’s essence but that would be avoiding a confrontation. “In ‘wilderness areas,’ signs of former human habitation have been scrubbed to preserve the myth of an untouched, more ‘authentic’ landscape,” he writes, “and this fiction encourages us to overlook and neglect where we actually live.” Taking a hard look at “where we actually live” is an…

Joan Didion has been one of California’s most acute observers since the early 1960s; in such books as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, she lays bare both the aspirations and the hypocrisies of the state. This fall, Library of America will publish Joan Didion: The 1960s & 70s (950 pages, $39.95), the first in a multivolume set of her collected works. Edited by David L. Ulin (Alta’s books editor), The 1960s & 70s gathers three novels and two works of nonfiction and focuses on Didion’s early iconic work. Among the essays included is her astonishing “On the Morning After the Sixties,” which concludes with these pointed paragraphs: At Berkeley in the Fifties no one was surprised by anything at all, a donnée which tended to render discourse less…

The day Los Angeles went ablaze in 1992, the wretched verdict acquitting four LAPD officers of the there-for-the-whole-world-to-see beating of Rodney King wasn’t the sole fuel for the rage that would leave 63 people dead, thousands wounded, and many more witnesses to the fires and the tumult forever altered. There had been other cases of police abuse and miscarriages of justice—including the slaying of Latasha Harlins, who in 1991 went to a liquor deli to buy orange juice, only to be shot in the back of the head by the store’s owner, Soon Ja Du. “The whole thing was caught on video, and Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter,” Steph Cha writes in the author’s note to her riveting new novel, Your House Will Pay. “She received no jail time.”…

One condition of life is that we all must hide. Even a “good” marriage demands that we keep certain discontents and dreams locked away. Or so it has generally been assumed by the novel and its practitioners. But what happens in an era of self-declaration, when silence may be viewed as an outgrowth of oppression? What might it mean for the art of the novel if women were to fully know themselves and refuse to constrict their expressions of desire? Oakland writer Carolina De Robertis’s fourth novel, Cantoras, in many ways offers a response to those questions. Set in Uruguay and beginning in 1977, several years after the country’s fall to a dictatorship, the book takes women’s ecstatic, insuppressible love for one another as its subject. At the center of…

JIM HARRISON: THE ESSENTIAL POEMS Edited by Joseph Bednarik Copper Canyon Press, 200 pages, $18 Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit. He was a master of the novella (Legends of the Fall) and a gourmand whose nonfiction books about eating (The Raw and the Cooked) out-Bourdain Anthony Bourdain. Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful, as in this line from “Ghazals”: “When it rains I want to go north into the taiga, and before I freeze in the arid cold…

One of the first spreads in The Family Acid: California, a new collection of old snapshots culled from Roger Steffens’s archive, shows the photographer and his wife, Mary, their profiles double-exposed against the craggy hills of Big Sur, where they lived in an A-frame cabin during the summer of 1978. Shot in golden light, during a golden era of the Golden State, their silhouettes appear as cameos striated by sun-soaked trees and canyon ridges, the people inextricable from the place. These twinned portraits, like nearly every photograph in these pages, feel both familiar and distant. The double exposure intensifies the double vision of past and present, of longing for a California so thoroughly mythologized that it has become, in some ways, more recognizable than the one in which we live.…

Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. At medieval universities, there were two parts to the curriculum: the trivium, concerning the arts, and the quadrivium, generally covering the sciences. The notion was to define and impart to students the essential thinking skills of a classical education. Alta has a less grand ambition. Our editorial perspective celebrates originality and creativity. The people who migrated to California and the West, and their descendants who prefer to live and work here, have been equally inspired by achievement in the arts and by advances in science. So we…

Kerry Brougher remembers watching The Wizard of Oz on a black-and-white TV as a kid and missing the vibrant Technicolor beauty of the classic 1939 film. The new museum he has been overseeing will make up for what he—and others—missed. When the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district next year, the first exhibit that visitors encounter, in the lobby and an adjoining room, will offer a startling contrast. “You’ll walk through Dorothy’s Kansas house all in sepia,” says founding director Brougher, “and then come out into the gallery, which will be a partial re-creation of Munchkinland.” “It’s a bit of a metaphor for the whole museum,” says Brougher. “It’s about this little girl who travels from reality into a dreamscape. She goes through adventures…

When Paula West steps onto a stage, it’s as if she’s sneaking up on the spotlight. Inside the SFJazz Center’s Miner Auditorium, West was the last of three vocalists performing one night this spring. Patiently weaving her way around pianist Tammy Hall and stepping past a seated Angela Davis, the petite singer finally settled at the microphone. West doesn’t do grand entrances, but you feel her presence. The sold-out event was part of a four-night residency put together by bassist-composer Marcus Shelby. This evening was a tribute to Davis, the legendary writer and political activist, with a program centered on her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. In it, Davis argues that early blues songs of genre giants Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday represented an emerging “black feminist…

Landscapes are notoriously easy to paint but exceedingly difficult to paint well. For Russell Chatham, the challenge was impossible to resist. There was no other way. Chatham is the grandson of San Francisco muralist Gottardo Piazzoni, and before he turned 20, he had found his calling in painting nature. In a career that has spanned half a century, Chatham became famous for capturing Montana’s rugged vistas and California’s golden hillsides through an approach that seems to combine a muted, idealized reality and the stuff of dreams. His collectors include Hollywood names like Jessica Lange, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Redford. Along the way, he’s been married three times, and he’s made a fortune from his paintings, book publishing, and running a restaurant—only to lose it all. As he approaches 80, Chatham…

THE WAY MY FATHER TELLS IT, THE STORY BEGINS WITH A WIRY AND WHITE-HAIRED MAN named Tom Frost hitting a painful crossroads in his early 60s—heart attack, divorce. Like a lot of middle-aged people in hard times, Frost decided to save himself by returning to youthful sources of strength and happiness. Like few people of any age, however, Frost had been a key player during the golden age of Yosemite climbing, a near-mythic time in the 1950s and ’60s when Frost and other young men, including Royal Robbins and Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, spent months at a time in a scruffy Yosemite campground called Camp 4. Climbing all day and talking late into the night, they pioneered new hardware and techniques and made dramatic first ascents of extremely difficult climbs…

On a chilly afternoon in the spring of 1967, David Harris stood before an audience of nearly 60,000 in San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium. Clad in a denim jacket against the cold, the 21-year-old sported muttonchops and a prodigious mustache, and his six-foot-three frame seemed too large for the simple lectern. Speaking with an inexplicable New England accent, he preached that “the brutality in Vietnam is simply a reflection of the brutality of American life” and warned that “you will do her murdering [until America is] confronted by young men who will not murder!” The crowd roared in approval, and he urged the men in the audience to return their draft cards and to refuse military conscription. But on this afternoon in the spring of 2019, Harris, 73 and recently diagnosed…

IT STARTED CURLED UP IN A LITTLE STORY I OVERHEARD: the one about being on drugs out in the woods and finding a disabled kid and bringing him back to your camp and feeding him, believing in your altered state the kid was a gnome. Well, I believed in it and told the story to my husband and his friends on more than one occasion. I kept telling it. I clearly loved to. I couldn’t tell you why. I found out several months later that it was an urban legend and felt the fool, unsure of whether I should tell them this or not. You know a story’s good when it will not abide its end, when it feels like a secret you might keep from your husband and your…

If Americans have learned to live with the unacceptable, what is the answer? To not walk away from hard things. If we choose “to stay with the troubles,” we begin to feel again what it means to be human in relationship to the life around us—even if that emotion is grief. Grief is love. Can the damage to the environment be undone? Yes, but it will take an uncommon resolve. The question becomes “How serious are we?” What’s the most effective way to fight back? Beauty is its own resistance. It is easy to forget where the source of our power lies when we are only focused on “the fight” or our anger. Rage will only take us so far. If we can learn to respect each other, perhaps we…

DREAMERS AND SCHEMERS By Barry Siegel University of California Press, 272 pages, $29.95 Dreamers and Schemers: How an Improbable Bid for the 1932 Olympics Transformed Los Angeles from Dusty Outpost to Global Metropolis offers a dual history of the 1932 Summer Olympics and the rise of Los Angeles in the 1920s, and it is at its best when those narratives coincide. Meticulously researched, the book chronicles real estate magnate Billy Garland’s campaign to win the Games for a city that barely registered on the international map. Barry Siegel writes well, but he leaves us wanting more stories about Garland and his city and less dutiful documentation. Still, Siegel’s tone poem to his hometown brings to life an improbable sports spectacular in a city on the cusp. —MIRIAM PAWEL IN THE…

Téa Obreht’s second novel, Inland, an epic tale of love and loss that offers an alternative view of the foundations of the American West, is built around a little-known chapter in history. Camels, purchased in the Middle East and Mediterranean and tied down in boats to cross the ocean, were used in place of mules or horses to pack materials to army forts in San Antonio and other locations across the expanding U.S. territories. In 1857, under the direction of Mexican-American War veteran General Edward Beale, a group of camels, soldiers, and two camel drivers embarked on a War Department–sanctioned trek across deserts, plains, and rivers. One of Inland ’s plotlines involves Lurie, a young orphan befriended by the drivers—the drawn-from-life George and Jolly—and attached to one of the camels.…

Kimi Eisele’s debut novel, The Lightest Object in the Universe, is a love story set against the background of societal apocalypse—which means it is a narrative of hope in the face of despair. Eisele, an author and artist living in Tucson, Arizona, is compelled more by how extreme circumstances bring us together than by how they pry us apart. Here is how the novel begins: At the end of a long and narrow street not far from the sea, right around the time of the spring equinox, the sun rose as a sliver between two skyscrapers. Carson Waller could see it if he stepped out onto the tiny balcony of his apartment at precisely the right time. One morning in mid-March, he woke just as the light was shifting, the…

In Why Poetry, you recall John Ashbery “asking something different of me, a different kind of attention.” What does that mean to you? Allowing ideas to connect in a more intuitive and associative way, I discover all sorts of things. But for me just sitting and thinking doesn’t really work. I have to write to discover it. What about criticism of poetry? So much criticism overemphasizes the meaning of the poem without addressing why it’s a poem. Good criticism is good because it clarifies. Wordsworth has that line “We murder to dissect.” But poetry is pretty strong. It can handle a little analysis. And the line between personal and political? I’ve learned to fly close to the sun of content without destroying the poem. You can get close to the…

What does it take for you to find, as Teju Cole says, “the thing behind the thing”? Acid gives a penetrating vision. You see—and feel—the stirrings that underlie everything. The juxtapositions are stunning. The experiments continue through today. How has California changed? When I look at shots I took of the L.A. skyline in 1975, when my wife, Mary, and I moved here, it looks like Peoria, Illinois. Today, it’s begun to bulk up, though still not what you’d expect in a world-class city. What do you wish more people understood about California? California is the Great Accepter. It’s a state of outlaws, freethinkers, innovators, corrupters, eccentrics, wild folk. So if you’re thinking of coming here, leave your prejudices behind.…

Music: Ken Burns and the Bakersfield Sound • Food & Drink: The Boonville Hotel • Dance: Benjamin Millepied and LADP • Art: Betye Saar: Call and Response • Screens: David Thomson on Streaming • Tools: Romal Reins These days, when you ask Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry how he’s doing, he deadpans, “I’m 90.” His response, however, is worth more than a chuckle: it recalls a story about a nonagenarian who, when asked why he was planting saplings, answered, “For the next generation.” Gehry is planting a sapling of his own, and it’s a big one. In the middle of the sprawling Los Angeles Basin, just north and south of the confluence of the Los Angeles River and the Rio Hondo, he is planning to build a series of wide…

It boggles the mind, defies logic, and perplexes dance aficionados throughout the West: for years, America’s second-largest city has lacked a world-class dance company. Sure, luminaries like Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Lester Horton, Eugene Loring, George Balanchine, and Alvin Ailey have been coming to Los Angeles and finding inspiration and work since the early 20th century. Yet despite their presence, and the determined efforts of others, no dance group of national or international significance called L.A. home for more than a quarter of a century. John Clifford’s Los Angeles Ballet closed in 1985 after a troubled decade of existence. Even the Joffrey Ballet’s part-time residency didn’t last. But in 2012, hope came to Southern California in the form of a dazzling and talented Frenchman: Benjamin Millepied. Seven years later,…

Though the tradition of chopping down a tree in the forest for the Christmas holidays went out of style in the 19th century, the problem of what to do, post-yuletide, with the ones we buy off lots or at tree farms persists. We tug their dried-out carcasses to the curb, but then what happens? Do they really get recycled? And when it comes to trees, what does that even mean? Wood chips? To avoid this waste of natural resources, many people opt for a fake tree. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, 27.4 million Americans purchased real Christmas trees in 2017, while 21.1 million chose an artificial alternative. However, studies show that a tree made of steel or PVC is far from environmentally friendly. So San Francisco’s Friends of…

The story line was always simple: Snow White travels the globe in search of Prince Charming and meets assorted mythical, political, and pop culture figures along the way; hilarity (and big, splashy musical numbers) ensues. But what the cast and crew of Beach Blanket Babylon did with that bare-bones premise has become the stuff of San Francisco—and theater—legend: The ever-changing cast of guest characters, from Darth Vader to Taylor Swift. The royalty in the audience, from Queen Elizabeth to Sidney Poitier. And the hats, those glorious, gravity-defying toppers, adorned with everything from tropical fruit to city skylines. This New Year’s Eve at Club Fugazi, after more than 17,000 performances seen by a total of 6.5 million attendees, the show is ending its 45-year run. Here, seven veterans recall what it…

The Mojave Desert begins less than an hour from where I live on the edge of Los Angeles. When the wind blows out of the northeast, pushing back the ocean’s influence, the Mojave arrives in my yard. The garden crackles with fallen leaves, and the humidity plunges into the single digits. You can smell the plants drying in the heat. I like those days. Because Southern California is as much about the desert as it is the Pacific, and the breezes remind me of the arid lands outside town that connect L.A. to the American outback. When I arrived in Southern California 30 years ago, the first trip I took was out to the Mojave. Retracing that route now, we drop from State Route 14 into the Antelope Valley. The…

The sun rises over the Oakland hillsThe sky is hues of pink, yellow,orange, gold, and blueScattered clouds linger from stormsThe Blues Note Bird sings his song“C, C, A-flat”His voice stands outamongst the other chirping birdsCrows call from telephone wiresand from trees on the adjacent streetCanadian geese honkas they fly over the housetowards Lake MerrittPeople honk their horns as if to answer Neighbors rush out of their housesfor work and schoolThey climb into cars and on busesand squeeze onto BARTThe noises of cars, buses, and BARTon Market Street and MLKcan be heard from my bedroom windowGarbage trucks shake the house each Thursdaybefore the sun comes up The neighbors’ Border Collie-Australian Shepherd mix barksas the dog walker picks her upFat calico cats and black catsguard leftover Halloween pumpkinson the porch of the…

If the world is torn to pieces,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in her explosive and unflinching new collection, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, “I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation.” Written over seven years and exploring the erosion of home, land, self, the human body, and the body politic, the book begins by asking the most difficult and pressing questions of our time: “How do we survive our grief in the midst of so many losses in the living world…? How do we hold ourselves to account over our inescapable complicity in a fossil fuel economy…? And how do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?” Williams offers no easy answers, only layers of explorations, as in the essay…

Reading Alex Espinoza’s Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime, I checked off certain of his experiences as reflective of my own: being treated as an exotic at predominantly white gay clubs, being cruised by older men as early as age 15, and experiencing cruising as a confirmation of sexuality that was impossible to lie one’s way out of. And in general, I found a story of him that I was very moved by: that of a disabled Latinx gay boy finding himself through cruising and coming to recognize it as a place that was more welcoming to him, his sexuality and his personhood, than any of the organized gay cultural landscapes he could find or afford. Much of gay male culture is a capitalist proposition. But not cruising.…

In early 2016, a couple of dozen armed Mormon cowboy ranchers took over a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service installation in eastern Oregon. In Shadowlands: Fear and Freedom at the Oregon Standoff, Anthony McCann offers a nuanced account of the 41-day occupation of the Malheur (“bad luck”) National Wildlife Refuge. McCann has a sharp eye for detail, he knows the historical and natural settings, and he also understands how to get out of the way of his characters. Zealots of the sovereign movement, these occupiers argued that the federal government had no authority to own or govern public lands; some even insisted that the government was entirely illegitimate, justifying their beliefs by citing the Constitution, the very document that legitimized the federal government and defined its powers. There is a…

THE WORST KIND OF WANT By Liska Jacobs Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD, 224 pages, $26 Liska Jacobs’s work captivates in the present because it reflects the trauma of the past. Take Pricilla Messing, who narrates Jacobs’s second novel, The Worst Kind of Want. She’s 43, single and childless, and faced with her mother’s declining health. But when Pricilla flies to Italy to look after her teenage niece, Hannah, the specter of death—evoked by the ruins of Rome, as well as the absence of her sister, Emily, Hannah’s late mother—unmoors her. As she becomes entangled with Hannah’s 17-year-old neighbor Donato, Pricilla’s past, which includes her own underage relationship with an older family friend, crowds the present. Jacobs takes us on a wrenching journey into the catacombs. —JULIA INGALLS A PECULIAR KIND…

How does your work in other disciplines inform your writing? There’s a movement practice I’ve done for years called compositional improvisation. It’s very experimental. It’s a good reminder that the space of creating is just a laboratory. Many apocalyptic novels traffic in hysteria, but yours is rooted in hope. What was your inspiration? I was tired of doomsday scenarios packed with violence and mentalities of scarcity. We’ll be better off if we help rather than harm one another while we work to survive. What was important about Carson’s journey to Beatrix? That in the event of a major calamity, we might rise to the occasion and find ways to lend a hand, trust, improve someone’s situation. Maybe that is the flip side of the American dream.…

What dream was I born into / and what will happen / when the dreamer wakes,’’ Matthew Zapruder asks in his eloquent new collection, Father’s Day. It’s a cri de coeur about the times in which we live and the complex issues of patrimony, including the difficult emotions he and his wife had to confront after their son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Zapruder’s talents are already on display in four earlier poetry volumes, as well as in Why Poetry, a book-length argument against the obstacles that deter us from understanding and enjoying verse. Anyone familiar with his work—he’s the former poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine and an associate professor in the creative writing MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California—knows he’s not…

WHEN I REMEMBER I SEE RED Edited by Frank LaPena, Mark Dean Johnson, and Kristina Perea Gilmore University of California Press, 176 pages, $50 In June, Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for the state-sponsored genocide that by 1900 had eradicated 90 percent of California’s Native Americans. But since the 1960s, Native Californian artists have grappled with this erasure in their work. When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California, edited by Frank LaPena, Mark Dean Johnson, and Kristina Perea Gilmore to accompany a show at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, doesn’t obscure the state’s sordid history. From LaPena’s lithograph “History of California Indians” to Linda Aguilar’s basket decorated with shells, bingo markers, and cut-up credit cards, the images challenge stereotypes in astonishing ways. —FRANCES DINKELSPIEL THE ONCE…

The roots of country music are often associated with Appalachian hollers and sharecropper shacks in the Deep South. The uniquely American art form borrowed from European ballad traditions, African banjo music, gospel hymns, and the blues to emerge as a commercial genre known as hillbilly music in the 1920s. As Ken Burns illustrates in his ambitious new eight-part, 16-hour documentary series called—what else?—Country Music, it continued to spread, coming of age in honky-tonks, branching out into Texas swing, and giving rise to a subgenre called bluegrass. Thanks largely to the popular Grand Ole Opry radio broadcast—which spawned booking agencies, management firms, and music publishing houses—the country music industry consolidated in Nashville. It was there, in the 1950s and ’60s, that producers like Chet Atkins smoothed the music’s rough edges and…

The elegant, enigmatic, politically engaged assemblages and installation pieces of Betye Saar have invited individual reflection and public debate on issues of gender, race, and aesthetics for most of her six decades as a working artist. Call and Response, currently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), provides a window on Saar’s creative process and the visual language she has developed over the years to express it—a language blending memorabilia, political slogans, occult symbology, and racist iconography. Call and Response is Saar’s first solo show at her hometown’s premier art institution. The 40 or so works do not constitute a retrospective; nevertheless, they track the arc of her career from the 1970s to the present—culminating in an installation of new work by Saar, who turned 93 this year,…

The Chicano movement of the 1960s and ’70s was the largest and most widespread Mexican American civil rights and empowerment movement up to that time. Los Angeles was a key location, and Raul Ruiz, while still a college student there, became a leader for a generation of Mexican Americans. Together, they directly challenged the American system to live up to its principles of equal rights for all. “The Chicano movement began with no concept of membership. You weren’t a member of the movement; you were an activist in it. Our stress was on building not an organization, but a community-wide social movement,” Ruiz told me when I interviewed him for my book The Chicano Generation: Testimonios of the Movement. As an activist, Ruiz was a Renaissance man. By this I…