Because of the decade’s emphasis on wealth and consumerism, and the rise of Hollywood, little attention has been paid to the mixed-race, low-income neighborhoods that included Irish, Italian, Slavic, Mexican, Armenian, and Russian-Jewish residents. In the Roaring Twenties, cultural anthropologists Manuel Gamio and Emory Bogardus discovered a youth phenomenon that they referred to as “boy gangs,” young male cohorts that congregated on the streets without parental supervision. In Los Angeles, this type of art is directly related to a complex interrelationship of the histories of street gang organizations, architecture, urban planning, and the built environment. In Vitality and Verve: Transforming the Urban Landscape at the Long Beach Museum of Art, for instance, on view from June 27 through October 25, 2015, Chicano artists are featured, as is a piece by graffiti artist Saber that boldly confronts the issue of officer-involved shootings. Since the Art in the Streets exhibition at MOCA in 2011, renowned museums and galleries all over the world have become more accepting of street art, graffiti, tagging, and other such nontraditional multidisciplinary mediums. Although scholarly research has traced the origin of gang graffiti from the 1930s on, this aesthetic has been largely absent from the dialogue about the shaping of modern art. THE INFLUENCE OF STREET GANG CULTURE on art in Los Angeles has been systematically underrepresented by academia and art history. Left: Saber, Too Many Names, 2015, mural, spray paint on wall at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
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