For decades, art historical scholarship about Los Angeles has explored how artists engage the city’s distinctive urban landscape. Much of this work, however, has privileged artists situated within a network of galleries and art institutions that represent a fraction of the artist communities housed within the city. My dissertation draws upon this foundation of work in order to expand the geographic scope of Los Angeles art history. Specifically, this dissertation considers how black and Mexican American artists in South Los Angeles developed aesthetic practices grounded in improvisation in order to respond to social and political conditions that are manifested within the built environment. By examining artworks that respond to the deleterious effects of housing segregation, freeway construction, gentrification, and anti-immigrant legislation, I argue that improvisatory aesthetic practices provided artists with a set of tools for enacting egalitarian visions of urban space within sites historically marked by inequality.
The first half of the dissertation argues that artists influenced by jazz improvisation re-envisioned the landscape of South Los Angeles in the decades following the 1965 Watts uprising before expanding on the notion of improvisation as a form of visual expression through an examination of works by Mexican-American artists who integrated conceptual art practice with elements of urban visual culture. By drawing upon social practices that transform urban space on a human scale, such as the collection of detritus, the formation of desire paths, the production of graffiti, and the creation of vernacular urban forms, I contend that the artworks I examine suggest an alternative to monumental scale and subsequent erasure of social, economic, and ethnic difference imposed by the logics of urban planning. By analyzing how artists such as Noah Purifoy, Judson Powell, Maren Hassinger, Daniel J. Martinez, and Mario Ybarra Jr. engage with forms that are localized, spontaneous, and responsive to their environments, this dissertation offers a framework for understanding how improvisatory aesthetic practice can help enact spatial justice within the urban landscape.
