This dissertation begins with Maria Nordman’s early forays into capturing time and space through photography, film, and performance and it arrives at the dozen important room works she constructed between 1969 and 1979. For these spaces in Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Italy, and Germany, the artist manipulated architecture to train sunshine into specific spatial effects. Hard to describe and even harder to illustrate, Nordman’s works elude definition and definitiveness, yet they remain very specific in their conception and depend on precision for their execution. Many of these rooms were constructed within museums, but just as many took place in her studio and in other storefronts in the working-class neighborhoods of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milan, Genoa, Kassel, and Düsseldorf. If not truly outside of the art system then at least on its fringes, these works were premised physically and conceptually on their location in the city.

This project pays particular attention to the relationship between studio and storefront works in Los Angeles vis-à-vis not only their museum-based and international counterparts, but not before exploring Nordman’s earliest films and desert performances to set up fundamental terms, conditions, and themes consistent throughout her oeuvre.

Ultimately, I argue that rather than a “Light and Space” artist, her seemingly exclusively formal and phenomenological room works are actually in close dialogue with Hollywood movie-making, cinematic avant-gardes, and the “post-studio” and feminist art movements. Because the works’ difference is most visibly manifest in their use of space and place and sight, I draw on theories of vision and feminist geography to investigate the cultural, social and political dynamics at play within the work and between its concept and site and to suggest a more intrinsic political reading of Nordman’s works.

This dissertation examines the aesthetic phenomenon of camp in the work of the East Los

Angeles-based art group, Asco. Founded by Harry Gamboa, Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón,

III, and Patssi Valdez in the early 1970s, Asco produced a distinct blend of conceptual

and performance-based art, which they exhibited in alternative art spaces and distributed

as correspondence art. The group’s name, which means “nausea” in Spanish, speaks to

the sensation their often provocative and politically motivated art ostensibly produces.

The basis of this reaction lies in the stark contrast of Asco’s work to established Chicano

art that emerged during the Chicano Movement.

I organize my study through a consideration of each of Asco’s camp targets, or the

objects of their critiques. These include the exploitation and oppression of the Chicano

community, the limitations and liberation in Chicano muralism, and the glamour and

biases of Hollywood. Each of these denote cultures and movements with which the young

artists were enamored as well as alienated from in a complex insider/outsider relationship

that enables camp critique.

Through analysis of Gronk’s proto-Asco performance Caca-Roaches Have No Friends

(1969), I establish a clear foundation for camp that corresponds to Moe Meyer’s assertion

that camp is a specifically queer tactic of disidentification. I refer to the infamously

provocative scene in Gronk's play starring Cyclona (Robert Legorreta) as horror drag to

emphasize the intended camp target: homophobia within the Chicano community.

Through a investigation of Asco’s early street performances and No Movies I further

demonstrate that Asco uses Chicano rasquache and domesticana tactics, as described by

Tomas Ybarra Frausto and Amalia Mesa-Bains respectively, in order to critique Chicano

and Anglo-American cultures. Asco deploys these three aesthetic tactics to challenge

problematizing identifiers of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class.

Starting around 1921, Sabato (Sam) Rodia (1879–1965) began to build an unusual environment in his backyard in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although he had no formal training in art or architecture, Rodia used concrete-covered steel embellished with intricate mosaics of tile, shell, and glass to create a series of elaborate sculptures, including three central towers that rise nearly one hundred feet in height. For over three decades Rodia’s creation received scant public recognition, and in 1954 Rodia left Los Angeles, never to return. The story of how a single individual worked alone to create such a monumental structure is awe-inspiring; however, the life the site took on after Rodia’s departure is equally remarkable.

In the postwar period California’s perceived provinciality relegated it to the fringes of the New York-centered art world. For many artists, the challenges of geographic liminality were compounded by racial discrimination, which systematically excluded them from local cultural institutions. Starting in the 1950s, artists and other cultural workers claimed Rodia’s creation as a potent symbol of art in the margins, making and re-making its meaning as a public monument. In 1959, when the site was threatened by demolition, artists, architects, and writers in the local modernist scene rallied in its defense. They launched a successful preservation campaign, arguing for the value of the “Watts Towers” on the basis of its significance as a public artwork for modern Los Angeles. Then, in August of 1965 an episode of racially motivated police violence sparked an uprising in Watts, as residents took to the streets burning convenience stores and overturning parked cars. In the aftermath of the rebellion the Watts Towers was used as a symbol of an emerging black nationalist movement, and the community arts center at the base of the Towers became the staging ground for a black avant-garde working in assemblage. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s there was a growing revival of widespread interest in the art of untrained makers. In the mid-1970s curators who had been involved in the preservation campaign fifteen years earlier made the Watts Towers an exemplar of a new genre of making—the American folk or visionary art environment—and showcased it in museum exhibitions next to other large-scale backyard sites.

This dissertation examines how and why Rodia’s creation was claimed by multiple cultural movements as an icon of modernist art in California, a landmark of black cultural renaissance, and a paragon of folk and outsider art. I trace the history of the site from its construction starting in the 1920s to its multilayered reception from the 1950s through the 1970s. In doing so, I elucidate not only the remarkable cultural history of this idiosyncratic structure, but also how, in the postwar period, vanguard artists drew from practices they perceived to be “outside” of mainstream fine art in order to expand the limitations concerning who could be an artist, what could be an art object, and where art could take place. These new practices and frameworks spread beyond Southern California, blurring the boundaries that separated high art from popular culture, and modern from folk, contributing to the increasing pluralism of American contemporary art. Yet at the same time, I argue that the incorporation of the Watts Towers into the category of “Art” was intertwined with the structure’s location in the racialized urban landscape of Los Angeles, as well as the histories of colonialism that produced terms like primitive, folk, and outsider. Therefore, my study reveals not only how the recognition of the Watts Towers made the art world more inclusive, but also the racial politics of space that structure the creation and appeal of “outsider art.”

In 1969, artist Howardena Pindell (b. 1943) carted several of her large, abstract paintings uptown to the Studio Museum in Harlem. The recently opened institution, situated in a predominantly black neighborhood, was established to provide quality exhibition space for living African American artists. The director of the museum roundly rejected Pindell, telling her to “go downtown” and “show with the white boys.” “Downtown” was not a viable option for the young artist, as galleries there almost entirely excluded women artists and artists of color from their rosters. Taking the highly politicized, often contradictory artistic imperatives of this period as a starting point, “Mending Abstraction” offers an interdisciplinary examination of how abstract art in the United States changed as a result of the Black Arts Movement and the feminist art movement of the 1970s. The first scholarly monograph on Pindell’s groundbreaking work, it examines her practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s—densely textured paintings, conceptualist works on paper, multimedia photographic experiments, and video work.

Pindell arrived in New York City in 1967, a newly minted graduate of the MFA program in painting at Yale University. Over the course of the following two decades her most enduring contributions to modernisms, I argue, would emerge from an extended, implicit use of the metaphor of mending in her multimedia artistic practice. This textural, hand-worked approach to art-making occurs in Pindell’s oeuvre primarily through collage, tactility, and a textile logic. “Mending” offered Pindell a reparative approach to abstraction, allowing her to find possibilities in the idiom as she navigated the widespread era belief that a black, white-collar woman could not produce meaningful abstract art. The study emphasizes the materiality of her post-minimalist works, examining, for instance, how she wielded labor-intensive processes drawn in part from Nigerian and Ghanaian textiles. It illuminates the scope and significance of Pindell’s abiding contributions as an artist, curator, and art world activist. My analyses are undergirded by black feminist theories and draw extensively on interviews I conducted with the artist and original archival research.

“Mending Abstraction” centers the work of women of color artists and challenges the prevailing historiography of abstraction, showing that the silos it creates—especially black feminist cultural production and modernist abstraction—obscure historically important interactions and innovations. By attending to these blind spots, my dissertation contributes to more complete accounts of how abstract art and ideologies of race and gender have co-developed around issues such as authorship and aesthetic hierarchies. Pindell’s career serves as an ideal springboard for studying neglected interactions between black feminist cultural practices and late modernism because, as I argue, she critically took up the intersections of these terms in her work. This project aims not only to provide a comprehensive account of Pindell’s practice, but more broadly to examine black women’s contributions to post-civil rights era cultural debates. It therefore discusses Pindell in relationship to poet Audre Lorde and artists such as Senga Nengudi and Beverly Buchanan. My research suggests that these black women’s innovations influenced a subsequent generation of artists who investigated how the personal and social converge in even the simplest, most “universal” of forms. “Mending Abstraction” reveals how abstraction both persisted within and changed as a result of post-1960s developments in performance art, video art, and post-minimalist sculpture, and argues that black women figured centrally in these artistic developments that transformed late modernist art.

Ultimately, “Mending Abstraction” traces Pindell’s movements through a variety of artistic institutions in order to expand scholarly understanding of abstraction and of contemporary art more broadly. It offers a reconsideration of how vernacular practices and modernist discourse intersected during this vibrant period in U.S. art history. This research challenges disciplinary assumptions that have mapped artistic ambitions onto artists’ social identities, revealing that women of color artists have intervened in, rather than simply denounced, developments in American modernisms. Through more robust examinations of women of color artists’ contributions to the period’s drastic reconceptualization of art, art historians can better understand how aesthetic practices and social transformations have helped to develop one another.

My dissertation examines the work of the contemporary artist Patricia Belli against the backdrop of inter and postwar Nicaragua. By tending to gendered materialities and themes within the artist's oeuvre, such as the relationship between bodies and textiles, the dissertation considers how Belli’s works mobilize feminized intertextualities and practices of repair that intervene in the aesthetic discourses of this time, including the tenets of modernismo, within visual and literary vanguards. Returning to Nicaragua toward the end of the Sandinista revolutionary project (1979-1990), I situate her work amid social-political transitions. This was a period marked by shifting political ideologies, the fall of the Sandinista party, the victory of the right in the elections of 1990— which saw the first woman president in Nicaragua, Violeta Chamorro (1990-1997)—and the rise of neoliberalism in the country, amplified by Arnoldo Alemán’s presidential term (1997-2002).

Following Belli’s oeuvre, my dissertation focuses on the artist’s commitment to crafting unruly bodies by exploiting the possibilities and conditions of gendered materiality. Through her work, I engage how bodies take on more expansive meanings, exceeding the limits of normative corporeal forms to include political and social bodies. Utilizing mending as a craft-based technique and feminist strategy, I examine how Belli unravels patriarchal discourses and the tenets of national aesthetics by recasting bodies as uncontainable forms. I mobilize mending through multiple registers– mending is both an act of fixing as well as an act of undoing. In the expanded field of Belli’s work, mending is subversively deployed to bring different parts together, dissemble what is whole, and create new parts out of old parts. In this way, mending is both an act of violence as well as a gesture of rehabilitation, renewal, and regeneration.

The dissertation unfolds to reveal critical moments in Belli’s career while situating her work within a larger historiographic, social, and political context. Each chapter examines the evolution of her material and conceptual interests to consider the ways in which her work assembles and disassembles disciplined notions of containable bodies. While taking a monographic approach, the project also places Belli’s work in conversation with other Central American women artists from this period, whose works recodify gendered labor and everyday objects into conceptual, feminist interventions, to consider the rise of feminist formations within contemporary Central American art.