The Story of a City and a Life

An elevated freeway cuts through the middle of a vivid downtown scene, a Los Angeles of a dozen skyscrapers and old buildings throwing bright red shadows across canary yellow city blocks. There are the old and the new, the present and the past all jumbled together, in Frank Romero’s fanciful signature style.

It’s not exactly accurate, but it’s all recognizable and it’s the story of Romero’s--and L.A.’s--life. In the upper left of his painting “Downtown,” there are Dodger Stadium and City Hall, and in the upper right, the three spiraling cones of Watts Towers.

“I single-handedly saved the towers in ‘59,” Romero smilingly boasts, half-serious, half-exaggerating, as he stands in the creative sprawl of his 5,000-square-foot studio just north of downtown. He likes to tell stories.

“I was the teenage kid hired to collect money from people coming by,” he begins, “because they were trying to tear them down--and I helped collect the money to run the tests.” The tests determined that the towers were structurally sound.

These days Romero commutes from his home in Westwood, through downtown, to reach his studio off the 5 Freeway, so the painting is a kind of narrative of his commute. He points to the cartoonish pickup truck barreling down a remarkably empty freeway. “This is my off-white Chevy truck.”

Then there are the less-familiar places. “I grew up in Boyle Heights,” Romero says of an area in the painting’s background. “This is the Breed Street Shul. It’s just a little teeny building in the back. It wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me.”

Then he jumps back 50 years, pointing to a trolley about to run beneath that jam-less freeway. “That’s the P car going down 1st Street,” he says. “I took the P car to go to the movies, and the R car down Whittier Boulevard to go to the Otis Art Institute when I was 16.”

Romero’s “Downtown,” plus a few dozen other recent works, is on view in a rare solo gallery show for Romero, at the DoubleVision Gallery--rare because Romero has avoided commercial galleries, or perhaps they have avoided him.

However, his works have recently been seen in group museum shows. He received a 2002 City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship ($10,000 to create new work), and his large-scale diptych “Fullerton” was in the C.O.L.A. show that just closed at the Japanese American National Museum. One of his best-known paintings, “The Death of Ruben Salazar” (1986), depicting the journalist’s accidental death when a tear-gas canister hit him in a 1970 incident, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s touring “Arte Latino” exhibition.

“I know he hasn’t really exhibited in a commercial gallery in many years,” says Mingfei Gao, director of DoubleVision. They met because of proximity (her gallery is next door to the Craft and Folk Art Museum, where he is a board member) and hit it off. The show was her suggestion. “I wanted people to see his more recent works,” she says. “As he’s gotten older, there’s an ease in his paintings; they’re rather playful.”

When asked why he isn’t shown regularly in local galleries, the artist says he’s just been too busy--he teaches; he has been working on several murals; he does his artwork. Also, he observes, “it’s so hard to get a good dealer--they don’t really look after the artists, artists are at the bottom of the food chain.”

“I’ve been painting since I was 5,” Romero says. “I’m 61 today.” A robust man with a full white beard and a ringing laugh, Romero launches into one anecdote after another about friends, family or bits of social and cultural lore, and how his work relates to it all. He also admits to riding the roller coaster of fame. “I’ve been around so long, I’ve been famous five or six times,” he quips.

As a teenager in the 1950s, he got a PTA scholarship to attend Otis Art Institute, and he went in the evenings, on weekends and during the summer. That was when Millard Sheets was the director and attracted a slew of exciting artists as teachers. “I was privileged to be there,” Romero says. “That was the art school to be at in those days.”

Later, he attended Cal State L.A., worked as a graphics designer in the office of Charles Eames and, eventually, at the encouragement of his friend painter Carlos Almaraz, spent a year in New York. But it was a financial struggle and, he says, “I missed my car!”

Returning to Los Angeles in 1969, Romero met the Chicano movement head on. “The truth is, I’m fluent in English, I’m not fluent in Spanish,” he says. “But I still went home and ate menudo--but I grew up in Boyle Heights, so I also ate sushi.” That was because there was a sizable Japanese American community in his neighborhood.

So Romero had to learn more about his heritage--he had political discussions with his friends, he visited Mexico, and he eventually joined with fellow artists Almaraz, Gilbert Lujan and Roberto de la Rocha as “Los Four,” creating work about Chicano life, including about 20 murals around the city. When LACMA featured them in a major exhibition in 1974--individual works as well as a large mural and an altar they made collectively--Chicano art had finally arrived in a major museum.

In the catalog for the 2000-01 exhibition “Made in California,” Howard N. Fox, curator of Modern and contemporary art at LACMA, called Los Four “unified in their energetic gestural painting, their bold palette, and most of all in their focus on the sights, rhythms and pace of Chicano Los Angeles.”

However, Romero says, commercial success didn’t arrive until 10 years later, in 1984, when he had a one-man show at the Arco Center for the Visual Arts in the former Arco building downtown. “I really began selling works after that,” he says.

The DoubleVision show, “Drawings in the Shower, Paintings in the Car,” focuses on upbeat images, with many variations on palm trees and cars, especially old Chevys, showing up in the paintings, in free-standing cutout sculptures, as well as on a new series of ceramic platters that Romero has been experimenting with.

“In a way, he’s trying to make fun of the stereotypical images of the city,” Gao says.

But the artist insists he is always concerned with politics. He bristles when he recalls being criticized in print for not being as political as the other members of Los Four. Perhaps it takes him longer to process experience onto the canvas. Three of his large paintings about seminal political events in the Chicano community are among his best known--the depiction of Salazar’s death, a work called “The Arrest of the Paleteros,” about the police crackdown on street vendors in the early 1990s, and “The Closing of Whittier Boulevard,” depicting a police response to an antiwar protest in the late 1960s. The works were created as many as 10 years after the incidents.

He pulls a print version of “The Closing of Whittier Boulevard” out of a drawer. In it, L.A. police stand in a confrontational row behind wooden barricades to stop a group of lowrider cars from entering. An officer on horseback holds a spear, a reference to conquistadors.

“That’s part of life in L.A.,” says Romero, who witnessed the event, “this threat of police brutality.”

The original painting was completed in 1984, and when asked about the time lag, Romero explains, “It takes me about 10 years to do a large painting like this. That stuff is hard for me to do, it hurts, it’s frightening.”

He finished his last large political piece, “The History of the Chicano Movimiento,” three years ago, he says; it’s now at the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard. And he says he continues to do sketches and other preparatory work for similar pieces.

His most famous mural, done for the 1984 Olympics, depicts a line of cars, each sprouting a heart overhead, along the 101 Freeway downtown.

This month, he had nearly finished restoring the mural when taggers almost obliterated it. “I’m going to go right back in and redo it,” he vows. Less vulnerable is the 1994 mural he did for the Metro Rail’s Normandie station, which consists of a lively parade of multicultural citizenry.

He shows off one of the new platters, with drawings incised into the glazed surfaces. One he’s especially pleased with features a ’51 Chevy with its bulbous edges, against a turquoise sky.

The same car appears again as a large cutout on the wall (a version is in the storefront window at DoubleVision) and elsewhere as a small painting on board, this time at night under starry skies.

This car has a special significance for Romero, because it is his father’s car. “He used to get up at 7 in the morning to go to work,” Romero says. The rest of the household would be asleep, but he would drive off in his Chevy. “It kind of reminds me of my dad.”

Such personal details are his way of describing life in L.A. “I’m a historian,” Romero says, “in that funny kind of way.”

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“Drawings in the Shower, Paintings in the Car,” Double-Vision Gallery, 5820 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Through Aug. 17. Open Tuesdays-Saturdays, noon-6 p.m. Phone: (323) 936-1553.

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Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.