Lifestyle in compton la12/16/2023 ![]() Outterbridge and Powell transformed this large space into multi-purpose studios, workshops and a performing arts space. The Arena was a long-vacant skating rink located near Willowbrook Avenue and Palmer Street - currently, the location of a shopping plaza. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles and the Compton Communicative Arts Academy Collection, Special Collections and Archives, John F. The CAA was the soul of art in the up-and-coming black suburb and “ contributed enormously to the rich tapestry of black arts in Southern California,” wrote author Paul Von Blum in “Before and After Watts: Black Art in Los Angeles.”Įlliott Pinkney and John Outterbridge stand at The Arena's doors, which are decorated with assemblage art made of iron, wood, and other materials. ![]() Judson Powell, who worked with artist Noah Purifoy at the Watts Towers Arts Center, and then as an administrator at the Compton-Willowbrook Enterprise Community Action Agency, founded the CAA and brought in artist John Outterbridge as its Director. The city brimmed with local talent - artists and artisans who, like other black artists across the country, reflected the movement for civil rights and racial equity in individual and community-based art practices. His term was followed by Doris Davis, the first black female mayor of a major city in the United States (1973). The city elected its first black city councilman, Douglas Dollarhide, who then became the first black mayor of a major California city in 1969. Black residents had overcome racist housing covenants and a militant white campaign to “ keep the Negroes north of 130 th Street.” Their efforts made Compton the first majority black and majority black-run city west of the Mississippi River. ![]() ![]() The CAA made art in a city destined to capture the world’s imagination.īy the time the CAA started in 1969, Compton represented the West’s premier black city. As a community-based arts nonprofit and artist collective which included Judson Powell, John Outterbridge, Elliott Pinkney, Charles Dickson and Willie Ford, to name a few, they held Compton as canvas and muse, renovated buildings across the city, and transformed vernacular, underutilized structures into venues for and objects of art. During the height of their operation from 1969 to 1975, the CAA invigorated Compton with art inspired by life and possibility in California’s first majority black city. Decades before young rap artists blasted a tough city image onto the world stage, a group of artists in Compton established the Communicative Arts Academy (CAA), a vital arts program in the era of the Black Arts Movement in Southern California in the 1960s and 70s. ![]()
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