Art Gallery Offers Blacks a Nostalgic Brush With the Past

Sales of Malcolm X posters and paintings are good lately at Cooper’s Originals, but then, they always have been. “Malcolm has always outsold King,” says gallery owner Dyrus Cooper, pointing out a variety of framed posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Muslim hero.

But neither Malcolm X nor Martin Luther King can compete with the bathtub picture, one of Cooper’s bestsellers. In a homey scene that brings back memories for many--at least of stories Grandpa told--a little girl washes her brother in a galvanized steel tub “like we used to use years ago out in the country,” recalls Cooper, who grew up in Georgia.

Nostalgic Southern family scenes always sell better than anything else, even better than the portraits of African beauties and jazz greats. “A lot of people live in Northern cities but remember their parents’ and grandparents’ homes,” he says. More political images, such as a Last Supper peopled with Marcus Garvey, Adam Clayton Powell, Elijah Muhammed and others, are popular. But African-American Madonna-and-child pictures and images of lively family dinners and church gatherings under trees heavy with Spanish moss are what his customers--many of whom migrated from the South during and after World War II--seem to like best.

There is one picture that evokes modern Los Angeles--complete with graffiti, drug dealers and liquor stores--but it doesn’t sell nearly as well as a peaceful scene of baptism: a woman in a white dress partly immersed in a lake in a Mississippi-like landscape, surrounded by friends and family.

Cooper’s Originals is a familiar landmark to thousands. Its giant outdoor paintings of Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker and Duke Ellington look down on La Brea Avenue just south of Pico Boulevard like benevolent deities, dominating a commercial strip filled with taco stands and auto repair shops.

These giant eyes looked down last April on some people who said they would help Cooper move some of his paintings to safety as parts of the neighborhood began to go up in flames. The helpful strangers put some original paintings worth about $20,000 into a truck--and just kept going.

“There’s always greedy ones,” Cooper sighs. But he hasn’t dwelled on his losses and is glad his store was spared the fire that engulfed a pawnshop just a few doors down. He took advantage of the empty spaces on the walls to spruce up the store a bit.

“I hadn’t painted in years,” he said a few weeks after the riots as he rehung pictures on freshly redone pegboard smelling of latex. “I guess (the thieves) did me a favor,” he said, lifting an eyebrow.

The thieves didn’t steal the Malcolm X and King pictures. Nor the startling collection of historic photos and documents chronicling the bleaker side of black history that Cooper has amassed over the years and displayed in an educational corner with a sign: “Black Holocaust.”

The grisly photos of lynchings, invoices for the sale of slaves, signs that say, “No dogs, Negroes or Mexicans” and framed lists of hundreds of lynching victims surprise some customers who just come in to get a pretty picture to decorate the house. But Cooper says he hopes the display “will educate people. . . . Kids today don’t get black history.” One Santa Monica high school teacher considered the collection significant enough to bring his students here on a field trip.

Cooper’s is more than an art store, and the 74-year-old entrepreneur is not your typical gallery owner. Cooper started this gallery store in 1965 with $350 raised by pawning some furniture. He helped some local black artists, including Ray Batchelor and Alice Patrick, get their starts, lending a hand in marketing their works nationally through reproductions.

Today, supplying about 2,000 stores nationwide with prints is a major part of Cooper’s business, in addition to his two retail stores (the other is in Inglewood). “He gave me my first break,” says Patrick, a painter and muralist. “Cooper’s name is like a household word in the art world. He is really there for black artists.”

Cooper didn’t begin his career in art. For most of his life, he was a shipyard welder. He came to Los Angeles from Georgia by way of Honolulu during World War II, when the American working population was being rescrambled from sea to sea to meet the demands of military production.

The social changes bubbling in that wartime Hawaiian melting pot, full of boys and men thrown together from New Orleans to Boston, still make Cooper--who grew up in segregated schools--chuckle.

White guys from Alabama, unaccustomed to mixed-race mess halls, would move themselves and their trays whenever a black man sat next to them. “One of us would sit down next to him, and he’d move. And then another would sit down, and he’d move, and another. And we’d all be laughing.” But the men all worked together, and many blacks for the first time had the opportunity to gain the same training as whites.

Cooper got himself in trouble, and then into good money, by importing and selling black newspapers, the first in a line of independent enterprises that led to his present art gallery. The military police took him in for “upsetting the minds of the black soldiers.”

But in a conversation with senior officers, he says, he explained that this was the hometown newspaper for black soldiers, since white papers didn’t have any news about their people. That discussion gave sanction to a highly profitable business.

After a stint in the Army in Texas--where there were riots over segregated and unequal living facilities that led to integration, Cooper recalls--he ended up in Los Angeles. He worked as a longshoreman, and then as a welder at Todd Shipyards. In Los Angeles, outside the mostly black Central Avenue district, there were only three restaurants where a black man could eat, Cooper says. But segregation did mean that black businesses had a steady clientele. “Integration lost a lot of business for black places,” Cooper says.

After years at the shipyards, Cooper became frustrated that he was still training wet-behind- the-ears white kids and watching them get the promotions he knew his years of experience deserved. So he brought a grievance under new federal regulations and in 1960 became, he says, Todd Shipyards’ first black foreman. He eventually supervised 200 men.

Looking back on his own life, Cooper has no trouble explaining what happened at the end of April. People nowadays don’t seem to be able to make the kind of progress he did. Despite his lack of a high school degree, Cooper made a first-rate salary at the shipyards. Today, jobs like that are nearly impossible to find. He believes the days when Los Angeles held promise for ambitious migrants like him, ready to work but lacking a college education, are over.

“I like L. A. It’s a nice place,” Cooper can still say. “I make a pretty good living here. But it’s sad, watching all the layoffs. I’m so glad I’m working for myself.”