The Watts Towers from Eyesore to Icon: Race and the Spaces of Outsider Art

Starting around 1921, Sabato (Sam) Rodia (1879–1965) began to build an unusual environment in his backyard in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Although he had no formal training in art or architecture, Rodia used concrete-covered steel embellished with intricate mosaics of tile, shell, and glass to create a series of elaborate sculptures, including three central towers that rise nearly one hundred feet in height. For over three decades Rodia’s creation received scant public recognition, and in 1954 Rodia left Los Angeles, never to return. The story of how a single individual worked alone to create such a monumental structure is awe-inspiring; however, the life the site took on after Rodia’s departure is equally remarkable. In the postwar period California’s perceived provinciality relegated it to the fringes of the New York-centered art world. For many artists, the challenges of geographic liminality were compounded by racial discrimination, which systematically excluded them from local cultural institutions. Starting in the 1950s, artists and other cultural workers claimed Rodia’s creation as a potent symbol of art in the margins, making and re-making its meaning as a public monument. In 1959, when the site was threatened by demolition, artists, architects, and writers in the local modernist scene rallied in its defense. They launched a successful preservation campaign, arguing for the value of the “Watts Towers” on the basis of its significance as a public artwork for modern Los Angeles. Then, in August of 1965 an episode of racially motivated police violence sparked an uprising in Watts, as residents took to the streets burning convenience stores and overturning parked cars. In the aftermath of the rebellion the Watts Towers was used as a symbol of an emerging black nationalist movement, and the community arts center at the base of the Towers became the staging ground for a black avant-garde working in assemblage. Meanwhile, in the late 1960s there was a growing revival of widespread interest in the art of untrained makers. In the mid-1970s curators who had been involved in the preservation campaign fifteen years earlier made the Watts Towers an exemplar of a new genre of making—the American folk or visionary art environment—and showcased it in museum exhibitions next to other large-scale backyard sites.This dissertation examines how and why Rodia’s creation was claimed by multiple cultural movements as an icon of modernist art in California, a landmark of black cultural renaissance, and a paragon of folk and outsider art. I trace the history of the site from its construction starting in the 1920s to its multilayered reception from the 1950s through the 1970s. In doing so, I elucidate not only the remarkable cultural history of this idiosyncratic structure, but also how, in the postwar period, vanguard artists drew from practices they perceived to be “outside” of mainstream fine art in order to expand the limitations concerning who could be an artist, what could be an art object, and where art could take place. These new practices and frameworks spread beyond Southern California, blurring the boundaries that separated high art from popular culture, and modern from folk, contributing to the increasing pluralism of American contemporary art. Yet at the same time, I argue that the incorporation of the Watts Towers into the category of “Art” was intertwined with the structure’s location in the racialized urban landscape of Los Angeles, as well as the histories of colonialism that produced terms like primitive, folk, and outsider. Therefore, my study reveals not only how the recognition of the Watts Towers made the art world more inclusive, but also the racial politics of space that structure the creation and appeal of “outsider art.