Black Artists in Watts Find an Icon in Former Curator

Cecil Fergerson remembers his “big need” to take what he had learned at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art into Watts after the flames had died and the embers cooled in 1965.

“I was raised in Watts, but I had been gone something like 17 years,” Fergerson recalled, sitting in the studio behind his home in the Pico-Fairfax area. Chuckling, he said some in the community “called me Oreo. They said I worked on the plantation.”

But he said he “wasn’t about to be run away.”

“I had skills that they needed. . . . I saw I could give something back by dealing with the cultural life of the community.”

He began organizing art shows, incorporating African-American music, dance, history, wherever he could find a space--churches, malls, gyms, schools, prisons. He put on the Watts Summer Festival for nearly 10 years, the Festival in Black at MacArthur Park, the Watts Day of the Drum Festival.

In the process, he emerged as an icon and godfather to successive generations of black artists.

“He is always there, always supportive, always knowledgeable and always ready to jump in--no matter what the circumstances--to lend a helping hand,” said Los Angeles painter Varnette Honeywood, who met Fergerson when she was a teen-ager and has known him for 20 years. “When we think we are all alone in the creative or cultural struggle, he reminds us that we have a long history.”

Fergerson has earned the title “community curator” for his work documenting the cultural life of African-Americans.

“One thing about the Ferg, he is a natural historian,” said artist John Outterbridge, director of the Watts Towers Art Center. “He is from the ‘hood, and the brother never forgot anything.”

Outterbridge calls Fergerson the keeper of the flame, a walking reservoir of African-American history.

As if to illustrate his role, Fergerson’s larger-than-life image peers down from a mural sweeping across a wall at the art center.

“That piece was a way of acknowledging someone who came out of that community,” said painter Richard Wyatt, who created the mural with the help of black and Latino youngsters from the neighborhood in 1989. “It pays tribute to Cecil. He would never ask for it.”

Fergerson, “60 going on 30,” went to work as a teen-age janitor at the County Museum of Art in 1948 after graduating from Jordan High School in Watts. The art museum was then the smallest part of the museum complex in Exposition Park. Fergerson readily admits that before the cataclysm in Central Los Angeles, he thought he was “something special.” At the museum, he had been thrown into a “sophisticated” world, and at times found himself at parties in Beverly Hills, albeit “as a servant more or less.”

But those angry, incendiary days in August, 1965, changed all that.

“Whatever was driving me, I became obsessed with being black and finding out my roots,” he said. “The history of black people became very important to me.

“I realized that I knew no black artists. I didn’t know black history. I began to read. ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ and Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’ really changed my life.”

At the museum, he had worked his way up from janitor to a job preparing art for exhibitions, all the while acting as a gadfly challenging museum officials to include black artists in their collection and exhibitions.

“I used to see the faces of the people when they would get so excited about their history or the art,” he said. And he became determined to see the same excitement on the faces of African-Americans viewing black art.

He and a co-worker at the museum, the late Claude V. Booker, organized the Black Arts Council as a support group for black artists.

Fergerson and Booker were part of an “underground concerned about Afro-centric art and culture at the Los Angeles County Art Museum,” said Outterbridge. “We were outsiders. We were just not in the picture in those years.”

Fergerson set out to expand the picture.

Curating a show on blacks in film, he tracked down the papers and files of Fay M. Jackson, a pioneering black journalist who covered Hollywood in the 1920s. Her collection proved a treasure trove.

He was troubled by the perception some blacks had of themselves. On television, he saw a black child reject a black doll for a white one, “and that bothered me. Then I realized some of that kind of stuff had happened in my own life.” That led to his launching a black doll show still held annually at the William Grant Still center.

In organizing the show, he located Caroline Snowden, an ex-chorus girl then in her 80s and now deceased, who had an extensive collection of black dolls.

On a recent morning, he was organizing an exhibit on blacks and Koreans at a local library, and poring over 60 years of photographs from a private collection for a show he is planning.

He retired from the museum in 1985 after 39 years, during which he worked his way up to curator. But he returned two years ago to curate “L.A. Expressions: Culture Shift,” a show of black and Latino artists.

He is now art gallery director at Los Angeles Southwest College, a job he said grew out of the “L.A. Expressions” show and the international attention the mural of him in Watts has attracted.

“I think my biggest asset is that I never changed in terms of my commitment,” he said. “I wore dashikis in 1965. I wear dashikis today.”