Inspiring Landscape : Living In and Exploring the Downtown Area Is an Important Issue in This Artist’s Work. Everything Is Colorful and Loud and It’s Impossible for Her to Ignore the Power of the Street.

Being an artist living downtown has been really critical to my work. The language of my art has developed around the urban experience. If I ever moved, I would be concerned about the impact on my work.

One of the most important issues in my work is living in a downtown area and exploring the urban experience and wondering where nature is in relation to me.

Before I came Downtown, I lived in Ohio in a grain silo, canned all my own food and had a garden. I did a craft book on country living. Then suddenly I came to Los Angeles. At first I lived in Topanga Canyon and then within a year and a half I got a studio in Downtown L.A.

A lot happened to my artwork and my vision. That first studio was at 2nd and Broadway in the old Victor Clothing building. It was hard for me to go into the ivory tower of the Victor Clothing building and make ethereal, romantic, layered artwork and then go outdoors and see the harsh beauty of how people have to live on the streets of Downtown.

Outside, everything was colorful and loud and in your face. I couldn’t really ignore the power of what was on the street and what people had to do to exist.

I do installation art, sculpture and photography. I really miss my old studio in the Victor Clothing building because I was able to do a lot of pieces just looking out my window. There is a very vibrant street life on Broadway. I did biographies about the lives of the shoeshine vendors in sculpture.

Then I did a major piece where I tried to photograph north on Broadway looking toward the San Gabriel Mountains. I saw the mountains once on a very clear day and it was pretty breathtaking. So I took a photograph from my fire escape looking north every day until I got a clear view again. It took a year and two months.

The photographs I took in that series had a lot to do with what was occurring on the street as well as trying to locate nature. Broadway is a major parade street, so during the time I took the photos, the Pope went by, there was a Lakers parade and there was the Street Scene festival.

Another time I did a pollution piece where I walked from 2nd and Broadway to the foot of the San Gabriels on the first smog- alert day of the year. It took me about a year to get the courage up to do that. I went as the crow flies. I wore a pedometer, took a compass, went over and under freeways, knocked on doors and went through yards, over barbed wire fences. I took photos every time I made an intersection--even just two paths crossing.

At times there were so many children following me it looked like I was the Pied Piper. At other times mothers would dash out of their houses and say, ‘Honey, you’d better be careful in this neighborhood.’ It took 10 1/2 hours and I walked 16 miles.

That was one of the first times I got to really experience the city. Typically, you observe things from your automobile, along prescribed routes, and you barely get to see a human being. It’s only when you walk or live in your neighborhood for a long time that you get to know what the city is composed of.

My experience has a lot to do with trying to locate my voice in a city and in a bureaucracy where it’s very hard to find a voice. That’s why graffiti is everywhere. My 5-year-old and I drive to day care a lot of times and we see someone doing graffiti. I try to explain that those are just people trying to find their voice.

Kids, particularly, need to locate ways of connecting and of talking to each other. I teach art in the Skid Row area with Para Los Ninos and the Heart Project. As an artist, my participation down here is really strengthened when I can connect with these Skid Row kids.

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After all, it is art that gives us civilized culture. Art used to be the tools that we made and the implements we ate from and the homes we lived in. It wasn’t a separate entity that was observed from outside in a plastic box.

When I leave Downtown, I feel very uncomfortable and unconnected. On the Westside, for example, things seem too tidy to me. When my daughter and I drive to day care along a pretty rough street, we always pick out the house we want to live in. I don’t think you’d find many people from the Westside doing that! They’d be more concerned about whether their windows were up and their doors were locked.

The biggest thing we need is to be talking to each other. If we put our heads into the sand about racism or pollution, nothing good is going to happen.

Art is a perfect connector and conduit for that. When you get into science and social science, it’s too much about numbers. People can’t connect with that in a humanist fashion. Art is a possibility to make a non-vocal connection. Art is hard to explain. It speaks to our souls.