Seymour Rosen, Documented Folk Art Pieces, 71
DGH
Seymour Rosen, a longtime resident of the Fairfax district in Los
Angeles, California, died of liver failure Wednesday, September 20,
2006, at Alexandria Care Center in Hollywood, California, friends said,
at the age of 71.
Captivated by the roadside tableaux of California, a young Chicago
transplant started photographing the unorthodox landscape: a ranch
covered with hubcaps, a rock-shop yard with hand-carved dolls, a golf
course punctuated with signs of hand-painted poetry.
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.
"He was the great American chronicler of this work," Rebecca
Hoffberger, director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore,
told The Times. "Nobody in America dedicated themselves to this art for
as long as he did."
The urban art that inspired his life's work - Simon Rodia's Watts
Towers - was among the most celebrated he helped protect.
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 Bottle Village in Simi
Valley and Nitt Witt Ridge, a meandering mock castle in Cambria
sculpted out of castoffs.
Those who disdained creations such as Bottle Village, a whimsical
collection of child-size buildings and sculptures made almost entirely
of junk, didn't understand the work, Rosen said.
"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.
"Seymour had a dream that he followed through on - to document all of
the naive environments. He was very important and totally
under-recognized," said Lyn Kienholz, Edward's wife and collaborator.
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," Hopkins said.
"He was interested in everything and anything with a folk sensibility."
LA Times -- Valerie J. Nelson