PETER CARR: Artist for Survival
Peter Carr, The Entry of the Ruling Class into Long Beach, California, Acrylic on Canvas, 30 x 40 inches, 1970s
PETER CARR:ARTIST FOR SURVIVAL
Oct 28, 2024 - Dec 20, 2024
RECENT PRESS COVERAGE:
New York Times
Los Angeles Review of Books
Los Angeles Times
ALTA Magazine
ZYZZYVA
Omnium Garerum Quarterly
Citric Acid
Cerritos College Art Gallery is proud to present PETER CARR: Artist for Survival, the first comprehensive art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and
fascinating outsider artist, Peter Carr (1925-1981), featuring a wide range of Carr’s
large-scale paintings, frenetic drawings, and homemade political posters, as well
as his own personal notebooks, intimate sketches and studies, self-published books,
and other biographically-significant ephemera.
Throughout his relatively short life (he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at just
56 years old), Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr created a seemingly endless array of idiosyncratic
images, all constructed using his own distinctively evocative and expressionistic
visual style. Carr would also frequently inscribe his drawings and paintings liberally
with handwritten textual fragments, pulled from his own poetic compositions and meant
to variously imply an internal monologue, overheard conversations, and/or omniscient
narration. As a visual extension of both his acclaimed literary practice and his anti-authoritarian
activist impulses, these images ruminate, often quite intensely, on the same explicitly
political and existential dilemmas that consumed a majority of his waking focus. Not
surprisingly, as a co-founder of the Orange County chapter of the Alliance for Survival
and creator of its local spinoff, Artists for Survival, as well as the posthumous
namesake for the Peter Carr Peace Center at Cal State Long Beach, Carr regularly deployed
his inspired writing, challenging imagery, and satirical wit in the service of much
bigger causes, hoping to engage like-minded creatives on the issues to which he so
dedicated his personal life and professional career. A long-time resident of Laguna
Beach as well, Carr’s visual and poetic compositions employed subtle gestures, both
provocative and profound, to present his own acute social observations on the beauty
and the absurdity of everyday life along the California coast in the 1970s, including
his well-established personal antagonism to the encroachment of the nuclear and military-industrial
complex into the region.
Carr served as a comparative literature professor at Cal State Long Beach for many
years. Following his sudden death in 1981 (with the blessing of his widow and fellow
community activist, Jeanie Bernstein), his massive personal archive of drawings, paintings,
and notebooks passed to his fellow activist and student, Andrew Tonkovich, himself
now a retired UC Irvine lecturer and longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review. For over forty years, these works have gone largely unknown and unseen, with this
major retrospective being the first time that many of these pieces will ever have
been exhibited publicly. In fact, the title of the exhibition, PETER CARR: Artist for Survival, while clearly derived from the name of the activist artist collective that Carr
himself founded, primarily alludes to Carr’s incessant and insatiable drive to create
art as a strategy for personal and communal survival; but, it is also meant to serve
as an acknowledgment of, and expression of gratitude for, the unlikely survival of
this entire archive, almost exclusively through the dogged and dedicated persistence
of Carr’s acolyte and former student, and co-curator of this exhibition, Andrew Tonkovich.
To provide insight into Carr’s singular perspective and uniquely creative vision,
the exhibit as a whole is organized around a number of recurrent themes in his archive,
with individual section titles taken directly from his signature poems, highlighting
the alignment of this visual oeuvre with his more well-known literary output. The
works in the section titled The (Re)Discovery of California, for example, address Carr’s automythographic fascination with the place he called
home, including his speculative understanding of life and culture in this region prior
to the destructive settler colonialism of Manifest Destiny, as well as the ongoing
resource exploitation he saw as endemic to modern corporate capitalism. Along similar
lines, They Were Going That Way, includes works featuring melancholic individuals forever in transit, moving laterally
through the unruly urban sprawl of Southern California or simply waiting indefinitely
in non-places like the bus terminal. In Humans and Other Creatures, the works showcase Carr’s ongoing aspiration for humanity to hold love, affinity,
and communion with each other and the wide variety of living beings with which we
share the natural world. The section How Could It Be, on the other hand, centers the inverse, Carr’s profound ecological despair and the
darker existential concerns that haunted him. The section, I Want to Ask You Some Questions brings together Carr’s most provocative images, with explicit depictions of class
inequality, corporate corruption, and the brutality of both state and racialized violence.
Works in the section Now That We Are Here We Have to Decide What to Do, however, turn that social critique on its head, focusing specifically on the collective
power of communities, both mythological and contemporary, with explicit calls for
active engagement and political solidarity.
RELATED EVENT:
Peter Carr: Author for Survival
Saturday, November 23, 2024
1PM-3PM - Poetry Reading and Documentary Film Screening
3PM-5PM - Visitor's Reception
Readers: Lisa Alvarez (Orange County: A Literary Field Guide), Mary Camarillo (Those People Behind Us), Chris Davidson (Easy Meal), Lorene Delany-Ullman (Camouflage for the Neighborhood), Penelope Moffet (It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You), Andrew Tonkovich (Keeping Tahoe Blue), Rafael Zepeda (Can this Wolf Survive?)
Filmmakers: Kane Le Hong and Brian Nguyen (In the Summer We Go to the Mountains)
Peter Carr, Bang!, Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 48 x 85 inches, 1970s
Harry Lawson "Peter" Carr (1925-1981) was born in Pasadena, served in the US Navy,
earned a PhD in Comparative Mythology from USC, and studied in India on a Fulbright
Fellowship. He co-founded the Department of Comparative Literature at CSULB, where
he was a popular and innovative teacher, and co-founded the grassroots anti-nuclear
organization, the Orange County Alliance for Survival. Carr was the author of many
self-published books and pamphlets, including Aliso Creek and In the Summer We Went to the Mountains, and produced thousands of drawings, paintings, political posters, and illustrations
throughout his life. His work was shown in galleries in Laguna Beach, Long Beach,
Los Angeles, and the Pacific Northwest. He lived for many years in South Laguna with
community activist Jeanie Bernstein and was active with the Laguna Poets. A small
posthumous showing of his work was previously organized by the late Mark Chamberlain
at BC Space in 2016. Both the Jean Bernstein and Peter Carr Papers are held at the
libraries of the University of California, Irvine.
SELECTED IMAGES:
MY NAME IS PETER
This is a record of My Existence. I Have Been Here. I am one of Earth's creatures.
I have consciousness of my separateness of my individuality or my alone-ness which
brings me into one-ness with all the rest of the creatures here.
Peter Carr, I Felt that the World Would End Soon, Colored Pencil and Crayon on Paper, 16.5 x 23 inches, 1970s
I WANT TO ASK YOU SOME QUESTIONS
What will we leave that we used to have in such abundance right here? Yes, even in
Long Beach and Carson and San Pedro.
Peter Carr, You Can Easily See, Ink and Ink Wash on Paper, 19 x 22 inches, 1970s
Prison Camp, Acrylic on Unprimed Cardboard, 44 x 73 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Cop at Scene, Acrylic on Panel, 36 x 44 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Courtroom, Ink, Ink Wash, and Acrylic on Paper, 18.5 x 23.5 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, I Came Back Yesterday, Ink and Pastel Chalk on Paper, 18.5 x 23.5 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Corporate Boardroom, Acrylic on Canvas, 38 x 48 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Place for Poor Men, Ink, Ink Wash, and Colored Pencil on Paper, 30 x 22 inches, 1970s
NOW THAT WE ARE HERE, WE HAVE TO DECIDE WHAT TO DO
The other day I went out to Disneyland and I couldn't find anyone there who would
love me.
The freeways are whizzing along, some gold-plated bird cages are on sale. The Bank
of America is safe.
Peter Carr, No More Weapons for Somoza, Acrylic on Unprimed Cardboard, 43 x 72 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Join the Vigil, Ink and Ink Wash on Paper, 30 x 33 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Survival Sunday II, Poster, 24 x 18 inches, 1979
I FANCIED THERE WERE OTHER CREATURES THERE BESIDES ME
You must touch the world and all the creatures and especially yourself and those you
love.
Peter Carr, Assembly, Ink and Pastel Chalk on Paper, 16 x 22 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Purple Assembly, Acrylic and Ink on Canvas, 16 x 20 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, People with Goat (India), Ink and Ink Wash on Paper, 14.5 x 21.5 inches, 1960s
THEY WERE GOING THAT WAY
The people became dangerous and the planet became polluted.
Business continued as usual.
Peter Carr, Baggage Information Tickets, Acrylic on Canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, OCTD, Ink, Ink Wash, and Iridescnent Acrylic on Paper, 22 x 30 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, From the Hotel Laguna, Acrylic on Canvas, 36 x 48 inches, 1970s
HOW COULD IT BE
But I still don't know why I see all of this and fell it and they don't.
The managers, who don't care that the sea and all my trees are dying.
Where do THEY live anyway?
Peter Carr, Orange Sea (San Onofre), Acrylic on Unprimed Cardboard, 42 x 72 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Orange Eye (San Onofre), Ink and Acrylic on Poster Board, 16 x 22 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Barricades (Jeanie), Acrylic on Unprimed Cardboard, 42 x 72 inches, 1970s
Peter Carr, Sweatshop, Ink and Gesso on Newsprint, 36 x 24 inches, 1960s
THE 'DISCOVERY' OF CALIFORNIA
Down by my ocean, down by my river and sea, where the pelican lives and the great
grey whale and sea lion and all the fishes used to be. I lived and face everything
that all creatures face - the wind, the spray, the leaves moving on the trees, the
animals that eat each other up, the beetles and bugs and crawling flying creatures
from virus to me, from me to virus to bacillary beast.
Peter Carr, On Saturday Afternoons, Ink and Ink Wash on Paper, 22 x 30 inches, 1970s
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