Artists come together in Watts

Artists come together in Watts

Ten years ago, a collection of African American artists working in the community came together to meet, mingle, talk and document.
The event was called the “West Coast Big Shot,” and it happened at the California Afro-American Museum in Exposition Park. It featured about 130 people.
Ten years later, many of those same artists as well as a few new ones gathered at the Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC) compound to reprise that 1999 shoot during the “2009 A Great Day in Watts” celebration.
About 200 people—from venerable Black arts curator Cecil Fergerson to artists Richard Wyatt, Bill Paajud and Michael Massenburg to music educator Reggie Andrews and photographer Willie Middlebrook, who actually was charged with taking the photo, showed up last Sunday for the event.
“I have a relationship with August 11. It’s my birthday; Diego Rivera died on the day I was born and it is the 44th anniversary of the Watts Revolt,” explained Middlebrook, who added that the idea was to bring the artists together. “That is something the West Coast lacks—somewhere all the artists can come together in one place.”
In fact, Middlebrook said some of these people—because of their schedules and the directions their lives have gone in the last decade—had not seen one another since that last photo shoot.
The other reason WLCAC was chosen as the photo shoot location is to expose the artists to the quality art space that exists in Watts in the form of the Cecil Fergerson Art Gallery, and to do a sort of kick-off for the show currently on view—“Watts Art 24/7,” a solo exhibit featuring the work of Haitian born artist Gary Senatus.