It’s Time to Return to His Art : Watts Tower Center Director Has Left Post, but Vows ‘I’ll Be Around’

John Outterbridge started a new chapter of his life last week when he resigned as director of the Watts Towers Art Center after 16 years of community service. But he was not allowed to turn the page quietly. He was hosted, roasted, celebrated, appreciated and commended in ceremonies staged everywhere from the Los Angeles City Council Chambers to Margarita Jones restaurant.

At a luncheon attended by assorted friends, cultural luminaries and his colleagues in the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, an emotionally drained Outterbridge closed a round of testimonials by whispering into a microphone. “I’ll be around. I’ll be around,” he assured a host of well-wishers.

Indeed he will, as his plans for community-minded activities attest. Outterbridge is currently at work on one of his creations, the Watts Summer Festival, scheduled for its 16th annual session on Sept. 27. His dreams include forming a nonprofit organization to work with city government on cultural events in South-Central L.A. and establishing a community orchestra. It’s not surprising to learn that his new home and studio--an industrial building currently undergoing renovation--will have space for exhibitions and an artist’s residency program.

But Outterbridge, 59, who is above all an artist--known across the country for making poignantly evocative sculpture of found materials--has resigned to get in touch with his primary calling. The toughest challenge he is likely to face is figuring out how to reserve enough time for his own work while performing public service. As his old friend, cultural historian Cecil Ferguson, said last week in an Outterbridge tribute, “Once you are addicted to a community, there’s no way you can kick the habit.”

Outterbridge agrees but confesses, “I’m a little frayed around the edges. I need to get reacquainted with myself as an artist. Unless we have a good grip on who we are, we can’t be very useful.”

He decided to resign several months before the Rodney G. King verdict riots, but that uprising and its aftermath have intensified the soul-destroying problems that plague the community. While the disturbance was multicultural in nature and the Watts Towers Arts Center sustained no damage, “the crisis had an impact on everything and everyone,” Outterbridge said. “It created a hole in terms of neighborhood services to people and an overload of people out of work.”

The most discouraging aspect is the anguish of deja vu, he said. “What happened with Rodney King was not new to us . . . it is symbolic of longstanding dispositions . . . What we call democracy has never occurred, just like the grand plan of communism that was never realized. In the next few years, capitalism as a concept will have to get into a struggle with the notion of democracy. We will have to stay on the cutting edge until things present themselves as more democratic,” Outterbridge said.

“Personally, I was traumatized by the occurrence of April 29, but I really believe that tragedy sometimes is the greatest of teachers,” he said, noting that the lessons have yet to be learned. “I’ve attended meeting after meeting about rebuilding the structure of the community, but I haven’t been to any meeting that addressed how we rebuild and nurture the spirit of the people. We need to be honest with ourselves. We need to tell our children the truth.”

As Outterbridge sets out on his own, he hopes to regain some of the solitude that he treasured as a child who would stay up all night to build model airplanes. But those who have watched him grow into a revered leader of the African-American community since he arrived in Los Angeles nearly 30 years ago need not worry about losing him to artistic privacy. In a wide-ranging interview at his new studio near Slauson Ave. and Main St., Outterbridge spoke of an aesthetic sensibility deeply rooted in family, friends and community.

He was born in 1933 in Greenville, N.C., the second child and oldest son of Olivia and James Ivory Outterbridge. “They were the first artists I knew,” Outterbridge said, describing a lifestyle that was fueled by creativity and resourcefulness. His father, who knew everybody and didn’t want to work for anybody, fed his eight children by acquiring trucks and running a shipping and transport business.

The North Carolina of John Outterbridge’s memories is home to great craft traditions, jazz musicians, gospel choirs and football and basketball teams. Extended families took care of old folks and didn’t allow kids to stray, he said. Indeed the social and cultural benefits of his childhood home were so rich that he probably would be in Greenville today if segregation hadn’t been so limiting and he had been less interested in travel, Outterbridge said. Included in the legacy he has carried with him is the belief that “art can be anything we want it to be or need it to be at any given time” and that “you find your studio environment anywhere you are,” he said.

In his youth Outterbridge distinguished himself as an artist who was called upon for special school projects and won prizes for building complicated model airplanes. When he enrolled at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in 1952, his passions were reading, drawing, painting and airplanes. He joined the Air Force ROTC at A&T; with the hope of going to flight school during the Korean War, but “tight quotas for African-Americans” prevented that, he said. Instead he became a munitions expert in the U.S. Army and was stationed in Germany from 1952-55.

Like many other blacks, Outterbridge worked closely with people of many races during the war. But when he returned to North Carolina, he still had to sit in the back of public buses. “With my military training, I would have been ready material for the Black Panthers,” he said, “but I became an activist artist instead.”

Outterbridge went to Chicago where he studied at the American Academy of Art, worked for the Chicago Transit Authority and helped to form an artists cooperative gallery. In 1960, he married Beverly Marie McKissick, who in 1966 gave birth to their daughter, Tami Lyn, a Los Angeles-based writer. Soon after they were married, a Chicago artist who visited relatives in California and brought back tales of oranges, avocados and palm trees, persuaded the couple to move to a warmer climate.

Arriving in Los Angeles in 1963, Outterbridge began to entrench himself in the art community, first studying at Art Center School of Design on Third Street (the precursor to the college in Pasadena) and producing paintings to order in a commercial studio. Later he taught classes and installed exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum, meeting prominent artists who exhibited their work there and establishing a network with black artists who worked behind the scenes at local museums.

Outterbridge made an auspicious career move in 1969, when he became artistic director of the Communicative Arts Academy, an artist-organized nonprofit corporation that ran programs in a vast building in Compton until 1975.

Meanwhile the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts--which had saved the towers from destruction in 1959, established a Teen Post in an old house on the site and built the Watts Towers Art Center--turned over the historic towers and an adjacent art center to the City of Los Angeles. Kenneth Ross, then director of the Municipal Art Department, persuaded Outterbridge to join civil service and take charge of the historic monument and community art center.

It has been a relentlessly high-stress job that Outterbridge tailored to fit his sense of responsibility. On the one hand, he has dealt with an internationally revered folk art monument that he calls “a cultural ambassador.” On the other, “the audacity of Simon Rodia represents the epitome of human potential,” he said, but it has presented “a real challenge to show how the great Italian’s work relates to a community that was 90% black when I took over and is now about 50% Latino.”

During his 16-year tenure, Outterbridge has had the pain of arguing with militant activists and uninterested bureaucrats who fail to see the value of an art center. But he has had the pleasure of mobilizing the community in a wide variety of programs and classes at the center and in outreach activities at public schools. One major accomplishment has been to use the gallery as a forum for the history of Watts, he said.

“The unspeakables,” his name for the dispiriting experiences of working in a hard-bitten community, have turned his black hair white, Outterbridge said. Operating an art center with an open-door policy in Crips and Bloods gang territory has been traumatic. The “awesome physical chore” of waxing floors before visitors arrive or coming to work at dawn to clear away the rubble of the previous night’s devastation--including stolen cars that are stripped and dumped on the premises--has been exhausting. He cringes at the memory of a vicious rape that took place at the site and registers profound disappointment with people who still telephone and ask if it’s safe to come to the center. “These are things you cannot explain to anyone in city government,” he said.

His memories of the art center are bright, however. Peak experiences--such as hosting groups of Australian Aborigines and Russian artists and packing the center with eager students--mightily outweigh anguishing problems, he said.

“You never knew who would walk in next. One time it would be (visionary architect) Buckminster Fuller. Another time it would be someone interested in art conservation or a group from the State Department,” Outterbridge said. Some distinguished visitors have presented the center with gifts, such as Dr. Joseph Howard’s donation of his folk instrument collection and former Congressman Augustus Hawkins’ gift of a 52-piece collection of African art.

Looking to the future, Outterbridge bases hopes on current plans for developing Watts’ “Cultural Crescent,” including an extensive arts center. “This is a difficult piece of geography, but what we need is a real work house for dance, theater, music, all the arts,” he said. “Instead of the Crips and the Bloods, we could have the Watts Boys Choir.”

But for the moment, he has retreated to prepare for a major exhibition of his work, Aug. 9-Nov. 29, 1993, at the California Afro-American Museum, and to finish his studio. “I think I can do something meaningful here,” he said, looking around the raw space and envisioning a building full of art and people.

‘BRIDGING DIFFERENCES’

Outterbridge is one of six black artists in a Korean Cultural Center exhibit. F7