This volume of original essays by leading scholars is an innovative, thorough introduction to the history and culture of California. Includes 30 essays by leading scholars in the field Essays range widely across perspectives, including political, social, economic, and environmental history Essays with similar approaches are paired and grouped to work as individual pieces and as companions to each other throughout the text Produced in association with the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

In 1950s California, and especially in Los Angeles, there existed few venues for contemporary art. To a whole generation of California artists, this presented a freedom, since the absence of a context for their work meant that they could coin their own, and in uncommonly interesting ways. The careers of Ed Ruscha, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz all begin with this absence: Ruscha turned to books as a means of dissemination, Berman pioneered mail art through his magazine Semina and in March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California's greatest historical galleries, Ferus. Within months of opening, Ferus, which is Latin for "wild," gained notoriety when the Hollywood vice squad raided Berman's first--and, in his lifetime, last--solo exhibition, following a complaint about "lewd material." Shows by Kienholz and Jay DeFeo followed, but 1962 was Ferus' annus mirabilis, with solo shows by Bruce Conner and Joseph Cornell, and the first solo shows of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol on the west coast. The following year, Ferus also hosted Ed Ruscha's first solo exhibition. After Kienholz and Hopps parted ways--Hopps went on to mount the first American Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Musuem--the reins were handed to Irving Blum, who got Ferus out of the red and ran the gallery until its closure in 1966. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art. Edited by Kristine McKenna, noted expert and co-editor of the critically acclaimed Semina Culture.

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties is a fascinating look at the avant-garde group that came together—from 1964 to 1968—as Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets, musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of photographs. Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, and the Brillo Boxes. But it was his films—Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea Girls, and Vinyl—that constituted his most prolific output in the mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young’s Paraphernalia, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Max’s Kansas City, and the Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events. Interspersed throughout are Watson’s trademark sociogram, more than 130 black-and-white photographs—some never before seen—and many sidebars of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style of a generation.

Art Forum’s Best of the Year List A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it. An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman’s edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art--before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. With an introduction by legendary Pop artist Ed Ruscha, The Dream Colony is a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.

Arranged in alphabetical order, these 5 volumes encompass the history of the cultural development of America with over 2300 entries.