The (Re)Discovery of Peter Carr

On October 28, an exhibition titled “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” opened at the Cerritos College Art Gallery in Norwalk, California. The show, which runs through December 13, is “the first comprehensive art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and fascinating outsider artist,” according to the gallery. The following is by the show’s co-curator and ZYZZYVA contributor Andrew Tonkovich. The editor of the Santa Monica Review, Tonkovich was entrusted with Carr’s archive of “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” following Carr’s death in 1981.

The artist, writer and activist Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr (1925-1981) struggled to discover—meaning rediscover—California, and invited others to rediscover political engagement, joyful resistance, revisionist and Left and Indigenous history, and each other. Before his death at age 55, he wrote, painted, and drew scenes celebrating our ecosystems (including his beloved Aliso Creek in Laguna Beach, the Santa Ana Mountains, Anza-Borrego Desert, and Sierra Nevada), but also documenting popular movements, real or imagined. His student forty years ago, I’m sharing his story in a Southern California gallery show featuring paintings, drawings, and a display of the illustrated books he self-published, including Aliso Creek, In the Summer We Went to the Mountains, and What Will We Leave the Children? Think of the work of poet-painters Kenneth Patchen or Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Blake, Whitman and George Grosz.

Carr served in the U.S. Navy, earned a PhD at USC, was a Fulbright scholar in India, and co-founded the Comp Lit department at California State University at Long Beach. He joined peace and justice movements of the late ’60s and ’70s, protested the Diablo Canyon and San Onofre nuclear plants, and co-founded the Orange County chapter of the Alliance for Survival. A charismatic teacher, he led field trips to Disneyland and in between rides deconstructed its cooptation of myth, fairy tale, and archetypes. For years he wrote and revised a Leaves of Grass-style book, never published, titled The Discovery of California.

The above is a scene from it: the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONGS, perversely acronymed) south of Laguna, adjacent Trestles surf break. Juxtaposed in this dream tableau are the dangerous orange of radiation and the gorgeous orange of our sun. Each bleed from or into the foreground character considering the assembly advancing on the site—a mystical procession of vulnerable nakedness or collective strength.

A more straightforward version of Carr’s demand for solidarity, spiritual and political, is in a poster he drew for an Alliance concert rally:

Carr’s defining Aliso Creek is autobiography, homage to place, plea for peace, critique of capitalism, and cri de coeur of ecological disaster, with a pointed demand for the rediscovery of Acjachemen culture:

The people who lived here had one rule that has always seemed crazy to Christians: they believed that there could be no material immortality. You couldn’t leave any thing behind. When you died they burned everything and never mentioned your name again. It was no use making statues and tombs and great buildings and monuments. You left this place and never came back again. It was no use having lots of slaves. It was no use having big wars and conquests and empires. Everything was provided that a person could need during the time here. They didn’t need governments. They belonged to something bigger than any person or group—the whole system that is the earth and sky and sea and sun. They belonged to Aliso Creek.

Too easy, sentimental, or idealized? Carr was angry, funny, and provocative, too:

I invite you to the exhibition to learn more about the work of Peter Carr.

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