Writers and Musicians in Painterland: City Lights and the Mid-Century Art and Music Explosion

Moderated by Peter Maravelis with Anastasia Aukman, John Bugg, John Mathias, Lewis Watts, Laura Whitcomb, and Paul Yamazaki

City Lights has played a vital role over the decades in connecting the literary world to its creative counterparts. It has served as a hub where artists crossed paths with poets and writers, who then, in turn, frequented the city’s jazz clubs, alternative music venues, and art galleries. These cultural junctions were places where the African American, Japanese, Filipino, Latino, and European communities came together, despite the prevailing segregation of the times. The cross-pollination led to groundbreaking work and the strengthening of community ties. Here’s a chance to learn about City Lights’s deep connections to the mid-20^th-century art and music scenes.

Dr. Anastasia Aukeman is an art historian and curator living and working in New York City. She teaches art history at Parsons School of Design and has curated numerous exhibitions, most recently two shows on the artists of the Rat Bastard Protective Association, one in Los Angeles (The Landing, Oct 1, 2016-Jan 7, 2017) and another in New York (Susan Inglett Gallery, April 27-June 3, 2017). She has written articles and reviews for Art in America, Art on Paper, ARTnews, and Elephant, among other publications. Her most recent book is Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association (University of California Press, 2016.)

John Bugg is Professor; Interim Director of Placement and Professional Development of Graduate Studies at Forham University. He is author of Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2014) amongst other books. His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, ELH, Eighteenth-Century Studies, TLS, Romanticism, European Romantic Review, and Keats-Shelley Journal. He is currently working on a cultural history of City Lights Books for Scribner.

John Mathias is an artist and art historian, as well as a published poet, and a former Director of the San Jose Center for Poetry & Literature, a poet, and President of the Board of the Triton Museum. He curated the show Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Painter, Poet, and Pacifist.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist, and professor emeritus of art at UC Santa Cruz with a longstanding interest in the cultural landscape of the African diaspora in the Bay Area and internationally. He is co-author of Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era.

Laura Whitcomb is the Director of Label Curatorial. Her areas of specialty are mid-century Californian artists, surrealism, the Light and Space Movement, mysticism in 20th century art, and the interdisciplinary cross-over between art. music, and literature. She was a scholar-in-residence and a curatorial resident at the Lucid Art Foundation with a commission to organize the archive of Onslow Ford. She is the author of “Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond” exploring Jim Newman’s seminal North Beach gallery and its impact on the Bay Area cultural scene. She is currently completing a new book titled “Bay Area Artist- and Poet-Run Galleries and Alternative Spaces 1949–1965.”

Paul Yamazaki has been a bookseller since 1970. He has been the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers for more than thirty years.

The moderator, Peter Maravelis is the events director at City Lights.