Autumn 2009 ORAL HISTORY 49

Through more than a half-century of demo-graphic change, Watts has remained home forsuccessive waves of low-income, poorlyeducated workers who migrated to Californiabecause their labour was needed in agricultureand manufacturing. Prior to the Second WorldWar, the community had a large Mexican popu-lation, many of whom came to Los Angeles towork on the railroads. During the SecondWorld War, large numbers of southerners cameto California to work in a rapidly expandingindustrial sector. Watts, one of the few districtsin the city without racial restrictions, becameoverwhelmingly African America. In August1965, long-standing resentments over poverty,police brutality, and racial discriminationerupted into a major urban rebellion. Thirty-four people died over six days of fighting, and

a thousand buildings were damaged ordestroyed. Watts has also long been a centre ofa community-based arts movement. It is thesite of the Watts Towers, an unusual site-specific assemblage work built by an Italianimmigrant between 1921 and 1955 that is nowa national historic monument. In the aftermathof the Watts rebellion, the Watts Towers ArtsCenter expanded its activities and exploredhow the arts might better serve the needs ofpoor and working-class communities. Thisarticle looks at the work of Sam Rodia, thebuilder of the Watts Towers, and Noah Purifoy,the founding director of the Watts Towers ArtsCenter, to explore the ideas motivating theirwork and the broader implications of theiractivity for understanding what promotescommunity creativity.

LEARNING FROM WATTS TOWERS:

ASSEMBLAGE ANDCOMMUNITY-BASED ART IN CALIFORNIA

ABSTRACT

KEY WORDS: Community art;Watts Towers;Noah Purifoy;AfricanAmerican;California

In the 1920s, Sam Rodia, an Italian labourer and tile-setter, started work onelaborate assemblage construction in the backyard of his home in Watts, Cali-fornia. He called the piece ‘Nuestro Pueblo’, Spanish for ‘Our Town’, but mostpeople know the work simply as the Watts Towers. This paper will look at theassemblage form as a medium broadly used in California for expressing criti-cal ideas of US society and the efforts of Noah Purifoy, founding director of theWatts Towers Arts Center and an influential African American artist, to developa people- and community-based approach to art that challenged artists toaddress their work to a broader community.

by Richard Cándida Smith1

50 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2009

Sabato Rodia, born in 1878 in a smallpeasant community east of Naples, migrated tothe United States at the age of fourteen andsettled in central Pennsylvania, where his olderbrother worked as a coal miner. In his late teensRodia moved to the West Coast, working overthe years as a migrant labourer in railroad andlumber camps before settling in Los Angeleswhere he worked as a tile setter. In 1921 Rodia,estranged from his wife and children, purchaseda large triangular lot in the working-classcommunity of Watts, some eight miles south ofdowntown Los Angeles. He began to work on alarge assemblage structure that he called‘Nuestro Pueblo’, Spanish for ‘our town.’ Deco-rated masonry walls enclosed seven towers, thetallest nearly one hundred feet high, constructedwith steel rods and reinforced cement. Next tohis house, he put a gazebo-arbour, fountains,birdbaths, and benches. He decorated his struc-tures with mosaics made from tile shards,broken dishes, seashells, and pieces of bottles.The walls are covered with impressions ofhands, work tools, automobile parts, corncobs,wheat stalks, and various types of fruit.2 Formost of the thirty-three years he lived in Watts,Rodia encouraged his neighbors to visit and usehis project. Weddings and baptisms were cele-brated under the towers. As festive as these usesmight be, Nuestro Pueblo offered no escapefrom urban reality. The towers suggest both

church spires and modern skyscrapers; primevalstalagmite formations punctuating the site recallboth cactus gardens and apartment buildings;the arbour with its incised designs speaks inter-changeably of parks, the industrial world ofautomobile parts and construction tools, agri-cultural products, and of pure purposelessbeauty. The major Long Beach/Los Angelescommuter railroad, the most heavily used rail-road in the County of Los Angeles at the time,passed right by Rodia’s site. 35,000 to 50,000people passed by his artwork every working dayuntil the railroad closed in 1953.

By the mid-1930s, journalists began writingabout him and his unusual project. Rodia toldWilliam Hale, who did a documentary film onthe towers in 1952, ‘I was going to do somethingbig, and I did.’ He wanted to leave a monument:‘You have to be good good or bad bad to beremembered.’ His heroes were Copernicus,Galileo, and Columbus. ‘Poor class of people,today,’ he insisted, ‘they blind. When the manlookin’ for a job, he’s no free and they thinkin’they free. Woman, too. Woman no free. Womanget a job in the store. You got to do what theboss want, wrong or no wrong.’3

Preservation of the towers was almost acci-dental. In 1959, two young experimental filmmakers, both under the age of twenty-five, wentout to Watts after seeing Hale’s film on Rodia’sTowers. When they learned that the city planned

Above: Sam Rodiaat his Nuestro Pueblo(Watts Towers),1953. Above right:Watts Towers, Watts,California.

Autumn 2009 ORAL HISTORY 51

to demolish the site as a public safety hazard,they raised $3,000 from other young artists tobuy the property and formed the Committee forSimon Rodia’s Towers in Watts.4 The commit-tee included no major art patrons or represen-tatives from major art institutions, nor were thecity’s cultural leaders supportive of the effort toturn the towers into a cultural heritage monu-ment. City and state officials, relying on theconsidered judgment of more senior experts inthe arts, doubted that Rodia’s site was signifi-cant enough to warrant the expense of restora-tion or maintenance. The California Departmentof Parks and Recreation studied the project andconcluded that it was ‘a sort of bizarre art form’of such limited popular interest that the stateshould not acquire or maintain the property forpublic recreation purposes.5

For younger artists during the so-called beatera, Rodia’s work provided Californians withtheir own indigenous synthesis of popular andmodernist culture. It bridged the gap betweenart and life that Picasso, Schwitters, Picabia andothers in the pre-Second World War Europeanmodern arts movements had tried to suturethrough the incorporation of found objects intopaintings, collages, and sculptures.6 In 1962, theCommittee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Wattsformed the Watts Tower Cultural Center to offerclasses and organise exhibits. The committeehoped the new effort would develop communitysupport for their project in a neighborhood thathad become overwhelmingly African Americanin the years following the Second World War.Difficulties between the committee, organisedand led by young whites who all lived in otherparts of Los Angeles, and the local communitycontinued until 1964 when the committee hiredNoah Purifoy, an African American artist, to bethe cultural centre’s first director.

Purifoy had grown up in Alabama. Hisparents had been sharecroppers, and his earliestmemories were of trailing behind his parentsand twelve siblings as the whole family workedhot, humid summer days picking cotton. Whenhe returned home after the Second World War,he used his veterans benefits to get a masters insocial work degree but he then decided to go toart school. After graduating he worked as adepartment store window dresser, and his homewas a centre for the African American modernart community developing in Los Angeles.Becoming an artist had allowed him to have asomewhat privileged life, but in going to theWatts Towers, Purifoy found himself at groundzero of the nation’s urban disaster. The artscentre was only three blocks away from theheaviest fighting during the August 1965 rebel-lion. Standing at the back door, Purifoy and hisstudents saw people from ‘the community

making Molotov cocktails and throwing them atthe police. They were buying nails and tacksfrom the hardware store and strewing them onthe street to prevent the police from coming intothe area.’7

After the shooting and burning stopped,Purifoy led a group of students into the commu-nity to salvage objects from the rubble. Purifoyand his students constructed assemblages fromthe debris that they had collected. Purifoywanted to believe that art could contribute to ahealing process. The lessons learned at the artscentre had little to do with formal characteris-tics of art objects and had everything to do withthe images a person formed of herself and herworld. As art allowed a person to work with andtransform those images, new types of knowledgewere acquired:

We believed that an art experience wastransferable to other areas of their activityand so forth and that if they could come to

Noah Purifoy atWatts Towers ArtsCenter, ca. 1965.

52 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2009

the [Watts] Towers and have a good experi-ence, a positive experience, they could takethis experience with them wherever they go.It improved their self-image, and this wouldmake a great deal of difference in terms oftheir ability and capacity to grasp whatevertheir objectives were, whether it was inschool or out of school.8

He concluded that:

Within [each person] there’s a creativeprocess going on all the time, and it’s merelyexpressed in an object called art. One’s lifeshould also encompass the creative process.We were trying to experiment with how youdo that, how you tie the art process in withexistence.9

By ‘creative process,’ Purifoy was thinkingabout forms of learning involving manual andperformative knowledge, activities that usuallywere not theorised but which grew throughprocesses of trial and error. Manual knowledgedepends upon habit and the acquisition ofparticular sets of muscular motions. Manualknowledge is closely connected to ‘experience’and leads to an intensely subjective form of

knowing that is literally incorporated into thenervous system. As anyone knows who haslearned to play a musical instrument, a partic-ular style of dancing or acting, or skills such asauto repair or sewing, body-knowledge neednot be intellectualised, if by that we meantaught with verbal concepts. Imitation andpractice may be the best ways to learn, so thatperformance does not require any linguisticloops and the self-consciousness that verbalreflection privileges. As a performative, ratherthan logical discipline, manual knowledge haslong been highly developed in the fine arts, inwhich the final product emerged through aprocess of learning through building, takingapart, and rebuilding.10

Artists could fill a gap, Purifoy suspected,by developing strengths that people in thecommunity already possessed, applying themto activities that were more interpretive thanutilitarian, and then helping them make a leapfrom art practice as a specific form of manualand performative knowledge to reflecting onhow the objects created synthesise ideas andfeelings about important relationships. Thetechnique artists imparted would not belimited by preconceived understandingsbecause ultimately language remains external

Noah Purifoy,Sudden Encounter,mixed media, 1965.Photograph courtesyNoah Purifoy.

Autumn 2009 ORAL HISTORY 53

to its operations, even if what is done and theknow-how that is acquired can be discussed.The object produced documented a problem-solving thought process that was applicable toa wide range of personal and community prob-lems.

‘Sixty-six Signs of Neon,’ the show Purifoyput together of work built out of the debris ofthe Watts riot toured the United States andwestern Europe. Despite the attention and hisown success and enhanced standing as a profes-sional artist, he grew convinced that art as aninstitution occupying a definite place in modernsociety was in fact distinct from, and even anti-thetical to, the creative process that he believedwas inherent to the human condition. Art, hethought, spoke only to relatively small groups ofprivileged people. In particular the art world,even when it recognised African Americanartists, still largely excluded most blacks andmost poor people:

Art is a product of the creative process. Youmake a picture. It’s a mere product. Thecreative process has all the steps and theguidelines to enable the artist to paint apicture or make art. The creative processanswers all the questions regarding what theartist should do to end up with a picture thatsomebody would find value in. So the errorwe make is never looking at the creativeprocess, but looking at the product, which isart. Now, my theory is that it is not art that’sapplicable; it is the creative process that’sapplicable.11

He believed that the professional model waswounded from its inception: an inscription ofboundaries that replicated the elitism of USsociety. Art should be a locus for aspirations forfree subjectivity, but the life of contemporaryartists kept folding back into itself and separat-ing from the social forces that would deepentheir vision:

‘Art’’s been crammed down our throats bythe elite for all of our lives, for centuries onend. For what reason, I’m not clear on yet,except that art was so mysterious that theywanted to set it aside only for the elite. … Iwanted to tell the world that this is untrue;that we are blinded by this concept and thattherefore no one would try to analyse thecreative process – note the word analyse –the creative process in terms of its applica-bility to something else.12

In 1976, his concerns about the relation ofart to the community took a new form whenGovernor Edmund G. ‘Jerry’ Brown, Jr.,

appointed Purifoy to the California ArtsCouncil, a new state agency run by and forworking creative people. Only one of the ninefounding council members Brown appointedinitially was a businessperson and arts patron.13

Other original council members included thepoet Gary Snyder, who served as the first chair;Luis Valdez, director of the Teatro Campesino;and the actor Peter Coyote.

Purifoy served as chair of the committee oneducation. He convinced Governor Brown tofund a pilot art-in-education program, Califor-nia Learning Design, initiated in nine schoolsacross the state. Artists and teachers werepaired across different subject areas to developnew ways of presenting the curriculum.14 Theexperiment developed into an artist-in-schoolsprogramme that provided creative artists withfull-time salaries for working twenty hours aweek in schools, sometimes teaching specialclasses, sometimes working collaboratively withteachers to experiment with how art couldenhance the teaching of traditional subjectmatter, and sometimes working with a smallnumber of student-apprentices on their ownprojects. The federal National Endowment forthe Arts had launched artist-in-schoolprogrammes in 1966, and most state arts coun-cils had applied for federal funding to startprogrammes for their states. In theseprogrammes, students were taken from schoolto a neighbourhood community centre whereartists would demonstrate their crafts andstudents would occasionally have a chance towork with the artists in a workshop situation.Musicians came to school to perform. The newCalifornia programme developed more inten-sive connection between an artist and a commu-nity. Artists went into one school for a full year.Close interpersonal relationships betweenartists and students were a stated goal of theprogramme.15

The success of the artists-in-schoolsprogramme led to additional programmes thatplaced artists in community groups, senior citi-zens’ centres, hospitals, prisons, and otherpublic facilities. Artists in residence performedand displayed their creative work, but the grantsstipulated that traditional artist/audience rela-tions were less important than interaction thatstimulated the creativity of the people withwhom the artist worked. The goal of theprogramme was for artists to convey theirunique way of thinking to others throughdemonstrations, lessons, and discussions.16

Approximately two hundred artists were placedin communities around the state each year forthe next decade.17 The Arts Council’s summaryof its art-in-communities programmes provideda succinct version of Purifoy’s vision:

54 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2009

Whenever artists engage with their mater-ial, they initiate a process, consciously orunconsciously, which amounts to basicproblem solving techniques. From the firststroke on a blank canvas, relative colorvalues, advance, retreat, etc. Each stroke isa step toward a solution, instantly evaluated;accepted, rejected, or adjusted as a processof completing the work. There is a state ofmind concomitant with these decisions:attentive, fluid, relaxed and totally absorbed.It synthesises the apparent opposites of logicand intuition.… We maintain that thecreative process can be applied to anyproblem, whether aesthetic or social, andthat artists may be the best people aroundto demonstrate that process, and to createsituations in which it can be learned.18

Many established arts groups complainedthat the Arts Council was hostile to their inter-ests, particularly because the council refused tosubsidise overhead and administrative salariesfor large symphonies, museums, and operacompanies. However, the new programmeproved popular with state legislators, whodiscovered that their constituents liked thegrass-roots approach and were willing to writehundreds of letters of support. Indeed, grass-roots arts programmes generated over five timesthe number of letters requesting continuedsupport than major institutions were able todevelop from their patrons and subscribers. Thestate legislature regularly increased the council’sfunding, although after Republican GeorgeDeukmejian became governor in 1983, thecouncil found itself working with an increasinglyunsympathetic executive branch that whilenever overtly hostile to the council’s philosophy,remained unconvinced of its long-term valueand preferred to see arts practice supervised bywell-established institutions led by responsiblebusinesspeople.19

Public response validated Purifoy’s concep-tion that people in the community had lostsomething valuable as art practices had devel-oped into a modern, professionalised institution.Purifoy was convinced that the autonomy of artsinstitutions did not increase the quality of workproduced, but it did lead to decreased interac-tion between the public and professional artists.Society at large received little extra benefit fromits investment, other perhaps than the construc-tion of more museums. Professionalisation ofthe arts diminished the innate capacities of thepublic by establishing an elite status for artistsand their patrons and devaluing the general urgeto respond to existence through creative forms.The public needed alternative art institutionsthat nurtured the role art played in everyday life.

The Art Council’s programme objectives statedunambiguously

In modern America, following manycenturies of cultural specialisation, thecreative capacity has become the territory ofcertain highly trained and/or gifted personswho are increasingly drawn into the produc-tion of a commodity. The place of thiscommodity is only narrowly assured, andlarge numbers of people are now alienatedfrom it. The society itself is bent on a courseof growth and consumption which seems torender all other human values – such asbeauty – expendable. For sanity andsurvival, we feel the priorities should bereversed.… highly trained and gifted artistsare not a class apart, possessing somethingthat the rest of us lack, but along with allartists great and humble, are bearers of atransmission we all share in, and are teach-ers to everyone of innate and healing powersof creativity and insight which grant everyperson in the land their own view into theintricate beauty of the universe.20

Eventually, he thought, as more people invarious communities developed a close personalconnection with people whose lives were dedi-cated to creativity, they would understand thepotential of art to assist in ‘problem solving’and a broader range of artist-public collabora-tive projects would naturally emerge as long asthe Arts Council was prepared to support inno-vative endeavors. These projects would allowAmericans to explore and discuss questions ofracial inequality, war and peace, the expansionof gangs, crime and punishment, substanceabuse, or the crisis of the family in termsconsiderably more sophisticated than the massmedia or traditional politics had fostered.21 Theultimate goal of the council’s programs wouldbe to arrive at ‘a society so deeply dyed with art,craft, and style as to render an Arts Councilunnecessary.’22

In 1989, Purifoy retired and moved toJoshua Tree, a small community in the desertone hundred miles east of Los Angeles. In thedesert, he began the second creative burst of hiscareer, one that lasted until his death in 2004.He reconstructed two and a half acres into asculpture park. Following the model of SamRodia, relying solely on will power and prop-erty rights, Purifoy worked to leave a trace ofthe ideas he had struggled with his entireprofessional life.

Word of mouth spread about his project,and young people stopped by, interested inlearning from him. Some provided the heavymanual labour that he needed to complete the

Autumn 2009 ORAL HISTORY 55

increasingly larger-scale projects he designed.People in Joshua Tree and the surroundingcommunities dropped off their refuse, givinghim old refrigerators, broken washingmachines, automobile parts, computers andother electronic equipment that no longerworked. One plumbing contractor donatedseveral dozen toilets that could no longer beinstalled in California due to changed water-conservation laws. In 1999 a foundationformed to protect what Purifoy had created andto plan for a cultural centre that could continueafter his death. Artist Ed Ruscha purchased anadjacent lot, which he donated to the founda-tion. Before his death, Purifoy had ten acres athis disposal.

His first pieces were large stand-alone sculp-tures. Constructed with shiny metal sheets anddecorated with simple building constructionmaterials such as heating duct tubing, Purifoyreturned to ideas motivating Breath of Fresh Airtwenty-five years earlier. He spaced his sculp-tures around his site, setting them against thedifferent vistas on the property of distant moun-tains, valleys, and desert flatlands defining theJoshua Tree area. He wanted the harsh high-desert weather with its constant winds, 110-degree-plus heat in the summer, and freezes inthe winter to be an integral part of the sculp-

ture park he was developing. He erected athirty-foot-long, twenty-foot-high scaffolding inwhich he suspended sheets of brightly colouredmetal. In this piece, which he titled Mondrian,he started out with a straight-forward imitationof one of the constructivist masterpieces of thewell-known Dutch modernist. Season afterseason, the weather rearranged the piece as itwould. Whenever Mondrian lost its formalcoherence and no longer could be seen as theproduct of a dialogue between an art idea anda tough natural environment, Purifoy recon-structed it and the process resumed. A verydifferent piece took shape in a large twenty-foot-square field, where Purifoy pinned downold shoes and clothes that he had collected intoa large textile collage. Initially, he wanted thepiece to have the rich colors and textures of aBonnard or Vuillard painting, but over theyears, weather and animals dulled the colorsand pulled the materials back into the soil. Theinitial vision remained detectable in the juxta-posed shapes etched into the desert sand.23

While building the sculpture park, Purifoyalso made large hanging wall pieces for sale. Toget the money he needed to continue the desertsculpture park, he needed to sell more portablework. The questions he grappled with, however,remained those that had puzzled him through-

Noah Purifoy,untitled work, mixedmedia, NoahPurifoy Art SculpturePark, Joshua Tree,California, 1996.

56 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2009

out his life. On the series he made from auto-mobile and truck radiators that he took apartand then reassembled as abstractions, heobserved:

When you see a radiator, you don’t seewhat’s exposed here. You see a rectangularor a square object, with tubes running outof it. That’s what you see. When you do art,you see beyond the object. That effort ofseeing beyond the object is also present inhuman relations. You see beyond the indi-vidual into what he/she thinks and feels.…What’s underneath is always, almost, asurprise. To some of us. To me, no. WhatI’m doing is going back and forth, applying

it to the object itself and then transferring itto people. The thing is never applicable toitself as such. … But looking at a radiatorin a car, how often do we immediatelytransfer to the absence of knowledge aboutanother human being who strikes us asbeing problematic, just like a radiator in acar, and want to know his full function, hisbehavior, in relationship to me or anyone.The relation is peculiar, meaning I don’tthoroughly understand my relationshipwith the human being. But I do thoroughlyunderstand the function of a radiator in acar. Now, why doesn’t the function of a radi-ator in a car stimulate me to want to know,or transfer?24

NOTES1. This article is adapted from materialpublished in The Modern Moves West:California Artists and the Democratic Culture inthe Twentieth Century©. Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 2009.2. Biographical data on Sabato ‘Sam’ Rodia(also known as Simon Rodia) are based onDavid Johnston, ‘Towering Indifference,’ LosAngeles Times, Calendar Section 14, August1984; Jules Langsner, ‘Simon of Watts,’ Artsand Architecture, July 1951; Simon Rodia’sTowers in Watts, exh. cat, Los Angeles CountyMuseum of Art, 1962; Calvin Trillin, ‘I Know IWant to Do Something,’ New Yorker 29 May1965; ‘The Watts Towers,’ pamphlet publishedby the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers inWatts, ca. 1960; and Leon Whiteson, TheWatts Towers of Los Angeles, Oakville,Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1989. See alsoEdward Landler and Brad Byer, I Build theTower, Los Angeles: Brad Byer and BenchMovies, 2006.3. Quoted in Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts,p 11; Langsner, ‘Simon of Watts,’ p 25.4. The name Simon came from a 1937 LosAngeles Times article that incorrectly reportedRodia’s first name as Simon instead of either hisgiven name Sabato or Sam, the nickname heused in most situations.5. See ‘Watts Towers Study,’ State ofCalifornia Department of Parks and Recreation,Division of Beaches and Parks, June 1965.6. For an interpretation of the Watts Towers inrelation to the modern avant-garde artsmovements, see Richard Cándida Smith, Drawnto the Poetry of Objects: The Politics ofImagination and California Art, Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming

2009, chapter 3; Sarah Schrank, ‘Picturing theWatts Towers: The Art and Politics of an UrbanLandmark,’ in Reading California: Art, Image,and Identity, 1900-2000, eds. StephanieBarron, Sheri Bernstein, and Ilene Susan Fort,Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000,pp 373-386.7. Noah Purifoy, ‘African American Art in LosAngeles: Noah Purifoy,’ interviewed by KarenAnne Mason, 1990, Oral History Program,University of California, Los Angeles, p 69.8. Purifoy, p 65.9. Interview with Purifoy by author at Purifoy’shome in Joshua Tree, California, 11 December1998, Tape IV, pp 61ff.10. Ibid, Tape I, pp 4-6. For a discussion ofthe distinction between manual and cognitiveknowledge see David Rothenberg, Hand’s End:Technology and the Limits of Nature, Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993, pp 4-6.Susanne K. Langer presented an earlier andinfluential, although somewhat different arguedversion of this distinction in Philosophy in aNew Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason,Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1942), see particularly pp 266-294,and in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (NewYork: Scribner, 1953). Purifoy had read andvalued Langer’s approach to art as a form ofpractical knowledge. 11. Interview with Purifoy by author, 11December 1998, Tape I, pp 4-5.12. Purifoy, Tape I, p 7.13. On the transformation of the arts councilunder Governor Brown, see Lou Rosing,‘Update on California’s Art Council,’ New ArtExaminer 4, May 1977, p 5. 14. Richard Piper, W. Dwaine Greer, andRuth N. Zwissler, California Arts Council

Alternatives in Education Program: AnEvaluation Study of Nine Project Sites,Sacramento: California Arts Council, 1979.15. For summary of goals with evaluation ofhow effectively the goals were met, see Piper etal., California Arts Council Alternatives inEducation Program, pp 15-20.16. California Arts Council, ‘Report to theGovernor and to the Legislature’, 1976, pp36, 61; interview with Purifoy by author, 11December 1998, Tape I, pp 9-13.17. California Arts Council, ‘Annual Report for1979/80 & 1980/81.’18. California Arts Council, A Summary ofArtists-in-Education Summer Workshop/Conference 6, Sacramento: California ArtsCouncil, 1977, p 3.19. On the political successes of theCalifornia Arts Council in broadening itsprogrammes, see Dorothy A. Kupcha, ‘Howthe Arts Council Shed the “Weirdo” Image,’California Journal 10, 1979, pp 318-320.See also public correspondence files,California Arts Council, 1967-1978 and1984-2003, California State Archives,accessions 84-131 and 2004-089, andNational Research Center for the Arts, Inc,Californians and the Arts: Public Attitudestoward and Participation in the Arts andCulture in the State of California, Sacramento:California Arts Council, 1981.20. California Arts Council, 1977.21. Interview with Purifoy by author, 11December 1998, Tape I, pp. 13-19.22. California Arts Council, 1977.23. Interview with Purifoy by author, 26 April2001, untranscribed.24. Interview with Purifoy by author, 11December 1998, Tape III, p. 49-52, 56.