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Right of return: Prominent east coast artist on coming home

Kenny Scharf’s homecoming welcome to Los Angeles is stretching into its 17th year.
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February 25, 2016

Kenny Scharf’s homecoming welcome to Los Angeles is stretching into its 17th year.

“When I moved back here in ’99, people would be, like, ‘When are you going back to New York?’ And I’d be, like, ‘I live here. And I’m actually from here, born and raised,’ ” the painter and multimedia artist said. He established his reputation alongside his dear friend Keith Haring and a boundary-busting crew back in the 1980s New York art scene, and he hasn’t stopped working since. “Then, I swear, five minutes later in the conversation, they’d say, ‘So, when are you going back?’ ” 

He mocked his own sarcastic irritation in responding to such exchanges. “‘I live here! I’m from here! Sorry, I made my name in New York!’”

Despite the passage of time, the impression of him as a New Yorker hasn’t entirely dissipated, which is partly why the Hammer Museum reached out to the Valley-raised, Oakwood School and Beverly Hills High School alum to paint a temporary installation mural in the museum’s street-level project space as part of its “Hammer Projects” series. 

“Pikaboom.” 

“Another Oil Painting.” 

“Kenny’s an interesting artist because he’s lived in L.A. a long time, and he’s well-known internationally, but he hasn’t really shown in institutions in L.A.,” curator Ali Subotnick said. Yet, she said, “He’s got public projects all over; you see things in Culver City and Pasadena,” including murals in the Pasadena Museum of California Art’s parking garage and another at the West Hollywood library. “Everyone knows him and recognizes him, but it’s just not been in this context.” 

Scharf’s lack of L.A. museum representation makes some sense, given the artist’s populist leanings, pop culture sensibility and multimedia background. Plus all those years he spent in New York in the 1980s and Miami in the 1990s. 

But with the Hammer commission, as well as a forthcoming exhibition at the Nassau County Museum in Roslyn Harbor, N.Y., and more to come, Scharf continues to straddle the outsider-insider art world divide — even as he literally makes work both outside and inside. 

Subotnick said she and her fellow curators at the Hammer all agreed “it’s time” Scharf get more attention from museums here, so they allowed him free rein in painting the walls of the soaring Westwood museum lobby, adjacent to the staircase leading to the upstairs galleries. Continuing through May 22, his kinetic style runs wild within the expansive room. 

His roots are as a street artist, and he has covered every kind of surface — from buildings in New York City to cars and T-shirts — with his now-iconic faces and cartoon-like images inspired by midcentury space-age futurism. “He knows how to deal with this space,” Subotnick said, referring to the Hammer lobby. The often-ephemeral nature of his projects means he understands not to get overly attached to a single work, too. This project came with some limitations, mostly from areas that scaffolding couldn’t access, resulting in more white space than usual with Scharf’s densely packed, fluid figures and space-age imagery.

During a weekday afternoon interview at his West Adams studio, Scharf fielded questions while he worked on a new lithograph he’s collaborating on with L.A. icon Ed Ruscha and master printer Ed Hamilton’s Venice-based Hamilton Press. 

Scharf’s turf occupies a series of low-slung, formerly commercial 1920s spaces, with ideal indoor-outdoor flow at the rear. (He finally gave up a studio he was renting in Brooklyn last year.) Outbuildings are covered in toys and various objects he’s gathered all over the world. Primed and completed canvases are everywhere, along with other pieces such as TV backs he’s been painting since the 1970s. 

“That thing of crap hanging is a Hurricane Andrew piece,” Scharf said, gesturing to a mobile he made soon after moving to Miami in the early ’90s. Parked inside is a golf cart that belonged to his dad. Scharf customized it with a tail and giddily grinning face and has driven the cart in L.A. and Manhattan “art parades.”  

Scharf has even taken his spray paint cans to his trash bins.

Born in 1958, Scharf made a break from his middle- to upper-middle class Valley upbringing and his shmatte business-entrenched family in 1978 to fall in with the post-Warhol community that was taking off in the East Village. Before then, his L.A. Jewish childhood and adolescence meant becoming a bar mitzvah at the Valley JCC, going to Israel on an Ulpan trip at the age of 14 and attending Camp Alonim. (His grandparents made aliyah, but wound up coming back to the States.) He absorbed mass cultural visuals and specifically L.A. vernacular symbols all around him, from Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters to 1950s Detroit-made car design to Googie coffee shop architecture. 

He enrolled at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) after spending two years at UC Santa Barbara. Haring, a fellow SVA student, became his roommate in a sprawling loft downtown. Along with neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat, they made waves and mixed seamlessly with the hip-hop and punk artists of the era, including Fab Five Freddy, Debbie Harry and the B-52s. Interdisciplinary, anti-purist and pluralistic creative currents ruled. 

In the spirit of Warhol’s legacy, these artists’ mix of street art and high art led to extremely popular and successful commercial projects, working with fashion designers and representation from big-name galleries. Then came AIDS. 

“I got a big education in the streets. It was very vital and very important,” Scharf said. “And then everybody died and moved away, and then it was, ‘Well, that’s kind of over,’ ” he shrugged with the residual sadness and resignation that comes with years of distance — and the blessing of a flourishing career and family life. The Honor Fraser gallery in Culver City currently represents Scharf locally. 

He said he’s unfazed by the recent wave of ’70s- and ’80s-New York nostalgia, though he doesn’t avoid talking about the now-influential period in which he was a key player. That said, it must be odd for a young rebel to become an elder statesman of sorts. But his L.A. roots seem to keep him grounded but moving forward. 

“I don’t want to disparage New York in any way, but I really don’t miss it. It’s not really the same city,” he explained. “In my old days, I would walk out in the street, and there would be everyone I knew — on the block.” The East Village, where he lived, was also home to seminal venues, such as Club 57 on St. Mark’s Place. 

The Culver City resident still goes east to visit one of his daughters in Brooklyn, where “I’m like the old guy,” he joked. His other daughter lives near him and has a family of her own. If an official distinction existed for the Coolest Grandfather, he’d be a high-ranking contender. He also regularly visits his mother, who lives near Palm Springs. 

“See how much work I’m getting done while we’re talking?” Scharf said as our conversation was ending. Despite what seemed to the untrained eye to be a decent amount of black paint applied to paper, it wasn’t clear whether he was kidding or not. 

“No, it’s great! I’m really getting a lot done. I’m gonna finish this,” he said.

Scharf’s work ethic, creative drive and ability to work wherever he happens to be are not in question.

“I like it here,” he repeated. “I’m really addicted — to being an artist.”

“Hammer Projects: Kenny Scharf” continues through May 22. For more information, visit hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions.

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