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Los Angeles Times
Seymour Rosen, 71; Documented Folk Art Pieces
By Valerie J. Nelson, Times Staff Writer
September 25, 2006
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.
A longtime resident of the Fairfax district
in Los Angeles, Rosen died of liver failure Wednesday at Alexandria
Care Center in Hollywood, friends said. He was 71.
"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."
Among the hundreds of images in the exhibit
were tattoos, costumes, souped-up cars, a Mexican restaurant
shaped like a tamale, graffiti and the treasured folk-art
environments.
The seeming randomness of it all was enough
to make a teacher leading students through the exhibit furious,
Rosen recalled in the 1979 book "In Celebration of Ourselves"
that showcased photographs from the show.
"It was the frame she was looking for,"
he wrote. "The frame, the label, the pedestal. Take that away
and you've taken away the 'art.' We've forgotten how to see
things for ourselves."
Rosen had no such problem. Friends described
him as a soft-spoken man who always made his feelings known,
an irascible character who could be cranky, a wonderful person
with a generous spirit who delighted in his reputation as
the king of thrift.
At the core of SPACES were the 15,000
to 20,000 slides that Rosen had taken over half a century
and a trove of information that he spent the last several
years cataloging. He ran the foundation out of an apartment
in a four-unit building he owned in Hollywood.
"He was passionately committed to this
field," said Jo Farb Hernandez, a San Jose State University
art gallery director who had worked with Rosen for many years
and who has been named to lead SPACES.
"He felt strongly that part of his mission
was to make people understand that this was a defined genre
rather than some strange person's idiosyncratic building."
Rosen was born Feb. 10, 1935, in Chicago
and moved to Los Angeles when he was 17. A brother, Jerry
Rosen of Rockford, Ill., survives him.
At 13, Rosen received a camera from his
parents but had no formal training as a photographer.
After high school, he worked as a freelance
photographer, documenting exhibits at Kienholz's cutting-edge
Ferus Gallery and shooting the Case Study Houses. Drafted
into the Army in 1958, Rosen served in a photographic unit
near Ft. Ord, Calif.
For several years he worked at Barnsdall
Art Park and built the darkroom there, friends said, but Rosen
spent most of his time working to preserve environmental art.
Income from his apartment building and a nominal salary from
the foundation, which was funded by occasional grants, helped
him pay the bills.
As of 10 years ago, the foundation had
documented more than 700 folk-art environments around the
country. Most were begun before strict building codes discouraged
eccentricity without the aid of blueprints.
"Most people, if not all, had no particular
plans in the building of these things," Rosen told National
Public Radio in 1996. "The magic is that somebody in a world
of throwaways spent this much time working on something that
made them happy."
The complete article can be viewed here.
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