Listening to Reasons : O.C. Artist’s Post-Riot Project Gives South-Central Residents a Voice

Mary-Linn Hughes was all set to create a personal installation about intimacy and the like when something happened to topple her well-laid plans: A riot.

“I had to do something (in response), you know?” said Hughes, a Huntington Beach artist who scrapped her first idea, opting instead for a swiftly assembled work addressing Los Angeles’ recent violence. It’s titled “They” and is on view through July 18 at Beyond Baroque in Venice.

Hughes, who is white, immediately asked black artists Reginald Zachary and Satori Shakoor to collaborate. Filled with emotion about the riot--and frustration over the way it had been portrayed on television news--they conceived the piece over breakfast in May.

Inside a cramped, dimly lit, 8-by-8-foot houselike structure, an audiotapeemits ideas, feelings and opinions of South-Central Los Angeles residents, most of them black. These people weren’t heard in most televised riot reports, the artists said recently, but were merely labeled “hoodlums,” “thugs” or “those people,” terms emblazoned in large letters on the outside of the plywood installation.

“There was all this they and them against us “ in TV news accounts, Zachary said.

“Now, every time I hear the word gang, in my mind I see a black male,” Shakoor said. “The media used that word so much in relation to African-Americans, that it’s almost synonymous with young black males living in South-Central.”

Post-riot news programs gave voice to a wider range of people, Hughes said, but initially, it was “terribly painful to watch the TV . . . it was just terribly frustrating.”

Hughes’ work often lets people telltheir own stories. She has led self-portrait photography workshops for people with AIDS and recently exhibited photos of Orange County residents with AIDS beside their comments about having the disease.

In January, she painted a mural of AIDS patients and caretakers for a Los Angeles AIDS clinic with Zachary, a Tustin resident who does performance art. She hadn’t before worked with Shakoor, a Los Angeles performance artist and comedian, but admired her humorous treatment of such issues as sexism and racism.

This project “made me realize that we don’t get many opportunities to talk to people outside our immediate communities,” Hughes said. “It was a wonderful excuse to go do that.”

Driving to South-Central, the artists taped their interviews one weekend after the riots, talking to people playing dominoes in a park or selling goods on street corners. They recorded profound expressions of uncensored anger and feelings of oppression.

“F--- the police,” one man says.

“They have pushed us around and we have to steal to get above,” a woman says. “They did us real real bad. They is the whites. They even smoke coke in the White House.”

“The black and brown, poor Indians and poor whites are still on the bottom, and the foreigners are living the American way,” another man says.

Shakoor said rather than addressing myriad disparate views about the riots, the artists decided to focus the installation on one irksome question she’d repeatedly been asked: Why had blacks burned down their own neighborhoods?

She said one black man told her “We didn’t burn our own neighborhoods” but ignited shops adjacent to black-owned businesses operated by Koreans who “have treated us so nasty.”

People seemed “starved” for expression, she said. “We’d walk up and ask them, ‘Do you want to talk to us?’ Then it was this rush, like ‘I want to talk, I want to talk!’ I don’t think they’re listened to.”

To provoke visitors to think about where they fit into it all, the artists wrote questions into small windowlike openings in the structure’s walls. “What’s wrong? What’s right? Who cares?” one set queries.

Covering the inside walls are comments written in chalk by visitors who offered such observations as “The latest wake up call! Wake up!” and “I don’t even call it a riot, I call it a rebellion.”

Artists hoped to create “an avenue for people to communicate their feelings and beliefs in a safe and secure way without violence,” Zachary said.

Zachary suggested dim lighting for the installation, which has smoke-smeared windows, to focus visitors’ attention on the audio tape and to create a feeling of claustrophobia that comes when “people are economically and socially trapped,” he said.

Now displaced by footsteps, newspapers carpeting the work’s floor were originally opened to advertisements--a reference to the constant assault on readers to buy, buy, buy. That unrelenting pressure explains why looting that took place during the riots “on some level made a lot of sense,” said Hughes, who calls the riots a rebellion (“ Riot doesn’t indicate that there may have been a reason (for the unrest); it just conjures up images of people out of control.”)

“We’re a very consumer-driven society,” she continued, “and all of a sudden we have a situation where people are able to get things that they don’t normally have access to and for which a huge desire is created.”

Yes looting, arson and rioting is illegal, she said, but wrangling over that matter misses the point.

“We could debate this back and forth, but it never really addresses the underlying issues of a huge disparity in this country. We’re talking basically about class issues, the gap between the haves and have-nots. I don’t feel we’re trying to make people into heroes, I think we were interested in hearing what people have to say.”

“They,” an installation by Mary Linn-Hughes, Reginald Zachary and Satori Shakoor, is on view through July 15 at Beyond Baroque, Upstairs Gallery, 681 Venice Blvd., Venice. Hours: Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, noon-5 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (310) 822-3006.

* $1-MILLION GRANT: The Bowers Museum of Cultural Art gets a million-dollar grant. F2