Issue 10
Women in Art
By Sara Jane SlukePhotos By Morgan Slade
Los Angeles has long been a favorite whipping boy of intelligentsia and hipsters alike. It is an easy target, with its plastic population, smog choked horizon, and lack of hoity toity culture. A closer look, for those who dare peek below the botoxed facade, reveals a swollen underbelly of creative types who live by their own rules-which often means none at all. There is a strong sense of rebellion, a throbbing urge to flip off the over-manufactured faux-perfection and the business of show. This punk mentality has helped cultivate an undeniably rich and strangely unique culture, including-quite notably-art.
L.A. is the motherland of “lowbrow” art, often also called “pop surrealism.” These are catchall labels for a movement that exists contentedly outside the mainstream, in which practically anything goes. The roots of the genre took hold in the 1950s with Big Daddy Roth’s car culture cartoon mascots, then got an adrenaline shot years later thanks to Robert Williams’ and Gary Panter’s underground comic masterpieces. The movement has grown steadily in visibility and popularity, truly coming into its own in the 1990s. The emergence of these artists and their contemporaries were a breath of much needed air in the stuffiest of environments, redefining art itself and paving the way for creative expression outside of what had previously been considered the norm.
Today’s superstars of the scene are as diverse as their art, and women are slicing out their own chunk of the pie in this previously male-dominated world. SWINDLE shines the spotlight on four queens of pop art who live and work in Los Angeles: Camille Rose Garcia, Seonna Hong, Liz McGrath and Adele Mildred. Their unique backgrounds, inimitable styles and hyper-imaginations have raised the bar for all artists-not just for women artists, or Los Angeles artists, or pop artists.