John Outterbridge, Who Turned Castoffs Into Sculpture, Dies at 87

LOS ANGELES — John Outterbridge, a Los Angeles cultural chief and artist who made highly effective sculptures from what’s normally dismissed as junk or castoffs — a method of exploring loaded social points in addition to celebrating a historical past of African-American resourcefulness — died right here on Nov. 12. He was 87.

His daughter, Tami Outterbridge, confirmed the loss of life. No trigger was given.

Mr. Outterbridge managed to stability his artmaking together with his work as an arts educator and administrator. In 1969 he grew to become director of the Compton Communicative Arts Academy, an previous ice-skating rink transformed right into a neighborhood arts middle. His affect prolonged to the constructing itself, the place he embedded the harp of an previous piano in a wall in order that guests might play the strings as they entered the house.

“It was a magical place,” stated the artist Mark Steven Greenfield, who described Mr. Outterbridge as “a poet-philosopher or up to date griot,” referring to the West African storytellers and history-keepers. “There was all the time one thing happening in there — it may very well be a musical efficiency, a drum circle or a kids artwork’s workshop.”

From 1975 to 1992, Mr. Outterbridge was director of the Watts Towers Arts Heart, an arts training and exhibition house impressed by the hovering towers that the folks artwork hero Simon Rodia constructed by hand and adorned with discovered glass, pottery shards and extra.

His personal artworks had been likewise resourceful, usually incorporating leftover wooden, material scraps or rusted steel. Lots of his supplies got here from junkyards in Pasadena, not removed from his house in Altadena.

“John was a terrific artist, progressive and distinctive with supplies,” the artist Betye Saar wrote in an electronic mail, describing how she first met him within the Nineteen Seventies on the Black-owned Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles. Students now place him alongside Ms. Saar and Noah Purifoy as a number one practitioner within the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s of this usually raggedy, pieced-together mixed-medium type of sculpture referred to as assemblage.

“In castoffs there are profound treasures,” Mr. Outterbridge informed the critic Shana Nys Dambrot in a broadcast by the California public tv station KCET in 2016. “That’s what soul meals is about. Chitterlings and pig toes are all in regards to the notion that, as a folks, we’ve taken the scraps, the castoffs, and made them into one thing so tasty that one can’t assist however suck proper all the way down to the bones.”

John Wilfred Outterbridge was born to John Ivery and Olivia Northern Outterbridge on March 12, 1933, in Greenville, N.C. He was the second of eight kids and is survived by 4 siblings: Freddie, Marvin and Robert Outterbridge and Jackie Outterbridge Parks.

He preferred to say that’s mother and father had been the primary artists he knew. His mom performed piano, made drawings and wrote poetry, whereas his father scraped collectively a residing by hauling and scavenging junk, which he usually saved within the household’s yard. John’s uncle Buddy was “a live performance pianist with no live performance stage” as a result of he was Black, Mr. Outterbridge informed the historian Richard Cándida Smith in 1989 for an oral historical past undertaking on the College of California, Los Angeles.

The household house was coated with work by the youngsters — even some window shades had been hand-painted. And he was surrounded by the fantastic thing about home made issues: his grandmother’s cleaning soap bars, stacked like buildings; wooden floors bleached bone-white by all of the lye; tall poles exterior adorned with gourds that rattled and scared away the birds.

He enrolled at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State College in 1951 however left after a yr to hitch the Military, to reap the benefits of the G.I. Invoice. He skilled as a munitions specialist and was stationed in southern Germany for 2 years throughout the Korean Struggle.

Even his army years proved inventive. He made small work of sights overseas to him, like villages with previous cathedrals and cemeteries. Throughout a barracks inspection sooner or later his commanding workplace was rummaging by Mr. Outterbridge’s locker when a stash of work fell out. The officer confronted him: The place did you get these work?

“I did these,” Mr. Outterbridge stated, having to repeat it a number of occasions earlier than he was believed.

The officer, who collected artwork, was impressed. He created a studio house for Mr. Outterbridge and gave him commissions to embellish officers’ golf equipment.

After his army service, Mr. Outterbridge attended the American Academy of Artwork in Chicago, becoming a member of a neighborhood of artists and musicians. He made work, some with surreal touches, and drove a bus for the Chicago Transit Authority. He met Beverly Marie McKissick at a choir apply at St. Anthelm Catholic Church, and so they married in 1960. (They divorced 30 years later.)

In 1963 the couple moved to Los Angeles in 1963, the place he labored in a manufacturing studio that served designers. Certainly one of his odder jobs was portray an summary canvas for the actress Jayne Mansfield to match the colours of her house décor.

Mr. Outterbridge taught artwork courses at native faculties and have become an artwork handler and teacher on the Pasadena Artwork Museum, the place he put in dozens of Andy Warhol’s Soup Can work and befriended the sculptor Mark di Suvero. When Mr. di Suvero left the nation in 1967, he left his instruments with Mr. Outterbridge.

Mr. Outterbridge credited these instruments, together with electrical shears for reducing steel, with serving to him full his “Containment” sequence. For these sculptures he coated wood armatures with items of sheet steel to create the phantasm of bulk and weight, typically incorporating straps, buckles or ties that evoke notions of bodily restraint or slavery. Created within the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, the work was instantly learn as a portrait of racial oppression.

The sequence debuted in 1969 on the Brockman Gallery, which showcased groundbreaking Black artists — together with Ms. Saar, Mr. Purifoy, Judson Powell, David Hammons and John T. Riddle Jr. — who had largely been neglected by mainstream galleries and who additionally labored with discovered objects.

For his subsequent main physique of labor, the “Rag Man” sequence (1970-78), Mr. Outterbridge started manipulating painted canvases, free from their ordinary wood helps, as a sculptural medium, stretching them into shapes and stitching them into pouches or bundles. The works ranged from summary to political; “Jive Ass Chicken,” for one, from 1971, featured a bloated picture of the American flag.

For his “Ethnic Heritage” sequence, began within the Nineteen Seventies, Mr. Outterbridge long-established dolls — each full-bodied and disfigured — from steel, wooden, pink clay, rag, human hair and extra. The concept had come from watching his younger daughter at play, however he additionally drew on ancestral African imagery and used adornments like shells and beads to create figures he referred to as tribal members or elders.

Mr. Outterbridge returned to rags once more in 2011, when new curiosity in his work started rising after it was included in a regionwide, Getty-funded initiative to discover Los Angeles’s historical past as an artwork capital. His artwork appeared in seven of those exhibitions, together with the Hammer Museum’s survey “Artwork and Black Los Angeles,” overlaying 1960 to 1980, and a present of his new work on the exhibition house LAXART. Referred to as “The Rag Manufacturing facility,” it was his first solo present in Los Angeles in 15 years.

The central work within the solo present consisted of brightly coloured rags tied collectively into lengthy strands that prolonged practically ground to ceiling like columns — essentially the most disposable and light-weight of supplies made quasi-architectural. Different variations of the work appeared on the Studio Museum in Harlem and at Tilton Gallery in New York, Mr. Outterbridge’s important gallery since 2006.

Requested about rags by curators and writers, he shared his recollections. Generally he talked in regards to the garments his mom had sewn, or the material necklaces that his grandmother had stitched, with pouches for medicinal herbs. Or he recalled the rag collectors he had seen in Chicago, with their coloured bundles.

“It was very thrilling to listen to the ragmen transfer out and in of the alleys calling up for rags,” he informed Mr. Cándida Smith. One South Aspect ragman did notably energetic musical call-outs within the morning accompanied by a conga participant.

His rags are layered with such private and cultural historical past. They’ve tales to inform.