This story and all of L.A. TACO's Arts coverage is sponsored by Nikos Constant.
Mr. Wash (aka Fulton Leroy Washington) was only seven or eight years old when he made his first mark as an artist.
A local elder and artist invited his friends and him to add to his latest project: the Watts Towers Arts Center. A young Wash helped to push marbles into wet concrete, before painting them.
This core memory is one of many that have inspired him to construct the Art By Wash Studio & Community Center, funded in part by proceeds from his first book, "Mr. Wash Presents: Artists In Space – Exploring The Connection Between Place & Practice."
“I think this is something that a lot of the children today don't have,” Wash says over the phone about his still-under-construction studio and art center. “They don't have these type of places where they can go meet people, learn how to do things that spark their curiosity and hold on to them for the rest of their life.”
How Mr. Wash got to this point is a story worthy of a second book.
He was wrongfully convicted of a non-violent drug offense 29 years ago and sentenced to life in prison. It was behind bars that he learned to draw and eventually paint.
Ten years ago, then-president Barack Obama commuted his sentence and granted him clemency.
Once Wash was out, numerous people helped him resettle into society and set him up to continue his artistic pursuits. He has since shown his work at the Hammer Museum, LACMA, Huntington Library, the Whitney Museum in NYC and the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in L.A.
"Artists In Space" is a conversation with 20 Los Angeles-based artists about their studios, including some who helped Wash after his release from prison. Others are people he met for the first time, but felt connected to via their artistic practices.
Through these conversations, the book, beautifully designed by Albert Ignacio, with photos by Joppe Rog, shows the reader how a space evolves into a reflection and extension of the artist who dwells in it. It’s the guiding light that Mr. Wash follows as he constructs his studio and community center.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
L.A. TACO: The 20 artists that you included are a very diverse group. There’s something so L.A. about it. When it came to choosing the artists for your book, was there already an intention behind it? Did it depend on who was available at the time?
MR. WASH: I'm very grateful for the people who opened their doors for me when I came home and I had no place to work. People like Devin Reynolds, Patrisse Cullors with her place, Mario [Ayala], all of them people, they welcomed me. And I was just amazed at their spaces because my art studio in prison was a lot different than what it is here. You have room to work.
I started out working in the living room of the senior citizens apartment that I was living in. It was really, really small. Every time you get ready to work on a different artwork, you got to rearrange everything. I couldn't have my grand-kids around. It's too much wet paint.
One day they were there and I noticed the baby thought that the brown paint was chocolate. She had it all over her hands and face. When we, you know, the adults, we talk to them like, ‘What do you got there?’ and she’s like ‘chocolate,’ and we’re like ‘No, that’s not chocolate!’ And we got to get her, clean her mouth, clean her tongue, you know? That was the last time I allowed the children in that space.
But yeah, in selecting the artists, we looked at artists, first off, the artists that have supported me. Kenneth Gatewood and Charles Bibbs, they supported me for 15 or 20 years. I had never met them before. I was in prison and they were taking the artwork that I was doing in prison, added them to their shows up on the art in the garden, and then giving 25% of all their proceeds to the legal team to continue the efforts to get me out. I was really so grateful for them.
And then we had the second group of artists, the artists that I met coming home, like Devin Reynolds, Mario [Ayala], Alfonso [Gonzalez Jr.], Patrisse Cullors. They all gave me space to work inside of their space until I was able to get a space of my own.
And then we had we had other artists that came on board that I had met either through the galleries at different shows that supported me by coming to my shows, or we showed our work together and I reached out to them and asked them, did they want to be part of the book? And so that's kind of like how the process went.
It’s a nice selection of artists who have supported you in different ways throughout the years.
Marisa [Aveling, the book’s editor], she had found artists that she thought had interesting background in the work that they do, and I had never met them before. So we took some some new artists that Marisa was aware of that I wasn't aware of, and through the book, we was able to introduce ourselves and to share our processes with each other. Going into their studios was amazing. It was so versatile, and that's pretty much how we selected those categories.
In the interview with Michael Massenburg, you casually mentioned that you helped with the art during the construction of the Watts Towers Arts Center. What’s the backstory on that?
Well, I was a kid. I lived in the projects not far from the Watts Towers. And I don't know how I end up meeting the guy, but I guess I was with some older guys and we had what we called back then, coasters. It's like, you take a . . . two by four or two by six, and you take the skate that you get from Christmas.
Everybody got the skates with the key screws, screw it up and down and tight, and you take it all apart and nail it to a board. Then you put a like a T handle on it, kind of like these scooters they ride now. And then you take a Carnation milk box. It was made out of wood back then, and you nailed that to the board as well and that became your space where you could carry a passenger, or you could put your stuff in, like your coat and stuff. We’d go into the park and we would skate and we found the guy over there.
We went there because he had a lot of marbles and all kinds of bottle caps and we would decorate the wooden box with all these little parts, like the root beer caps, Pepsi-Cola caps, and all of that. We would nail those to it, to just decorate like headlights and different stuff. So we lived in that fantasy world. I met him and . . . we start trading bottle caps and marbles. We would shoot marbles and I would come in and watch him, right? Sometimes I would just go down there and watch him, because he was welding.
I guess I'd been seven, eight years-old back then, and I used to like to watch the fire. He caught me watching him. He would notice me, but he really didn't pay attention to me. Then he told me I couldn't look at it, right? And then he gave me the goggles and told me to ‘Put these on,’ and they were too big for my head. I couldn't see what he was doing. I could only see the finished results.
I didn't understand, but I think that experience with him also enticed me to buy my first welding machine later, because he was welding with a torch. He was putting rebar and stuff together, building the structure to put the concrete on and I used to go back, go down there, and trade stuff with him. He was showing me and he let me play with the trowel, the concrete and just the stuff.
I don't even remember his name, but I remember he let me push my marbles into the wet concrete, and then he showed me like, after they set up for a while, you take a brush with water and bring the marble back to life. It's in there, but then a little piece of it shows, and he was looking for what they call a tiger’s eye. That's what he wanted. He wanted the tiger eye marbles. When we were playing marbles over in the project, you get the tiger eye and you can go there and trade him for some different stuff. He had all he had a lot of marbles. A lot. He let you look through the bin.
Great childhood experience. I think this is something that a lot of the children today don't have. They don't have these type of places where they can go meet people, learn how to do things that spark their curiosity, and hold on to them for the rest of their life.
I'm hoping my idea with this Art By Wash Studio and Community Center is to have them type of things going on. If I'm in here building a sculpture or drawing a painting, and a kid happened to come through, their parents bring them through, then I'll take the time to share with them the way that the elders took time to share with me.
What’s the status on the construction of the art center?
We're making progress. We only been two-and-a-half years into the project, so we have a lot of the blueprints done. We have two, and I think they're working on a third one, which is a 3D model of the block. We have transformed the place from an open field to half of it is AstroTurf, the other half is covered with billboards.
We kind of got the project broken into phases. If the money come in, we have about five phases already listed out. The first phase would be securing the property, putting in a perimeter wall eight feet high. That way, when they come in for demolition, have to leave their tractors and equipment in, it'll be secure. The plan is, an ideal and the prayer, is to have this completed, or nearly completed, by the time the Olympics come. I've talked with the city. They'll be adding Art By Wash as part of the tour of people coming from other countries to the U.S. for the Olympics, to come through and do paint classes and stuff like that. The interviews were part of this process.
So when you were brainstorming ideas for the look and feel of this center, what were you hoping to learn or take away from these interviews? And what did you learn after these interviews?
In my mind, one of the main things was that I had about 18 years, 19 years, yeah, almost 20 years of painting inside of the institution, doing artwork. Actually, the whole 21 years, because I didn't paint. I knew how to draw. So about a year or so after I was in and I was exposed to the oil paintings.
When I did the interviews, never knowing how other artists paint, what their process was, I looked at the different places that they allowed us to paint in prison. Sometimes you could paint in your cell. In that building, we had no exterior light. All the windows were shut off. So I learned from getting to another place that they had another art room, but it was really, really crowded, but we did have exterior light. So I saw the big difference between what lighting does to your ability to produce the artwork.
In some cases, after visiting the studios and talking with the people, they had a shared community space and they had a community bathroom, and that everybody don't really treat the bathrooms the same.
So in finding this information, that lighting was very important to a person, that the things that they accepted, but didn't really didn't like, was how the people treated the restrooms, you know, some people just leave stuff laying all around. They don't wipe the sink down or whatever. Then the same way comes with the microwave. They have a community to a space where you can warm your food up. But everybody don't treat it the same and everybody don't accept the responsibility of cleaning it. Some people don't bother.
So I decided, in designing the Art By Wash Studio and the art spaces, that each space would have its own bathroom. Each space would have its own cooking area, the microwave type stuff, electrical appliance, no gas. We're not going to have gas in there. A couple of the artists had like, chairs or couches in their space. When they get tired, they had a place to lay down. So I thought that was really unique, because I don't have it here where I work now. I have nowhere really to lay down and sometimes when I get tired, I have to leave and go home just to stretch my body out. So I decided to make sure that each one had a bedroom.
Each one of the spaces, eleven spaces, each one would have its own private bathroom. It would have its own area to prepare foods, lunches, a refrigerator, and it would have its own bedroom that they can rest when they want to. And so put that together. That's all part of the design, but also too, when speaking to them, a lot of the artists, they like community. They want to be around like-minded people sometimes, just to take a break or you have a problem somewhere [and] you want to talk or whatever. That's where the community is going to come in, even though they have all their own independent areas and spaces and the privacy that they need, they also have a community space as well.
So we have the community space and we have a private space. Another thing that I thought was really, really important was that we are having 20 foot ceilings. Some of the spaces were just like little bitty apartments, so they had a problem with they wish they could do bigger work, but they can't get it in and out of their door. So I'm asking them to design this building with at least seven or eight foot doors in order to get the artwork in and out of the room.
That’s something that caught my attention. One of the artists in the book talked about moving into a bigger space and you responded by saying that they could focus on creating larger pieces for museums and other large spaces.
Yeah. I went to the The Broad for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I've never been there. Some of the paintings in The Broad is like, 15, 16 feet tall, you know? I'm starting to understand. I don't know anything about art. I just gotta do what I do, so I'm learning this whole art world [and] the industry itself. I would ask myself, when I first started going to the shows and they'd be doing installations or they have these big sculptures they do, and I'm like, ‘Well, what do you do with it? Why would you spend, eight months, a year, two years working on a sculpture?’
But now I understand that these corporations, when they have these large lobbies, that those installation sculptures sometimes are purchased by corporations. I'm finding that these large paintings are also being bought by corporations because they have very large ceilings. They have 16, 20, 30 foot ceilings inside their lobby. You can't put like an 8x10 on the wall and make it make a difference. It's a fly on the wall, but you bring the painting this 16 to 18 feet tall, you take it into the airport, into their big lobbies and their areas, these are the people who buy that. So I'm starting to understand how the market is going, where art is applied.
Now, who does the acquisitions? Some people, when they build their mansion, they build their homes, they may buy a sculpture to put right in the middle of the circular driveway, the horseshoe driveway. They're like, ‘I want that sculpture right here.’ They invite me to their homes and I be like, ‘That is crazy! Where did you find that artist? Oh, such-and-such made that.’ Everything around them is all one of a kind. So if you can find that appeal to the people who have the resources to build a home, to build a hotel, to build a resort, they look for stuff like that to make their space stand out. I'm looking forward to when we get our ceilings high enough and doors big enough to build big stuff. Yes, I'm gonna be building some big stuff.
I also thought it interesting how some artists are able to work where they live but others need an entirely separate space to work from because they need to separate the two from each other.
I've talked to a lot of different artists, even some that's not in the book, and they they need to be able to divide work, work at home. They need to be able to do that, you know. They need that distance of traveling and seeing things outside in order to, I guess, keep them going. So I do respect that.
It sounds like the art and community center you’re currently building is attempting to balance both: a work space and a living space.
A couple of artists like, I'm trying to think of her name, but in her situation, she's really close to the train, and that that noise of the train sometimes gets to her, but sometimes it's refreshing.
Some people are close to the streets, so they hear all the noise and they actually they look forward to the noise. I have one artist tell me that her commute to work, she likes seeing all the different people, the homeless people, the people just telling their stuff, as she goes in and out of her studio. But she also likes the solitude to get above it, get above the street noise, so she's up high and so then she don't hear it. Now she's in her own zone.
But then when it's over . . . sometimes late at night, it’s a little bit bothersome, a little worried, because that's when a different group of people come out that it becomes a little dangerous. So here, thinking about that, we have like a gated community. You pick and choose, you pull your car in safely, and get in and out, so that you know you ain’t gonna have nobody rob you there.
I look at everything and try to figure out, where's the medium, the balance point in between all of that, that you can make a very secure space that once you hear if the rest of the world don't exist, you have enough stuff right here to keep you occupied that you don’t have to worry about what's going on outside.
"Mr. Wash Presents: Artists In Space – Exploring The Connection Between Place & Practice" is available now. You can order your copy at Mr. Wash’s website. All proceeds go towards the construction of the Art By Wash Studio & Community Center.
There will also be a book launch event and artist talk at Mr. Wash’s studio on March 7 from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. RSVP is required.
