The Hummingbird Collective: A Cooperative Effort

Located on York Blvd between Ave 50 and 51st in Highland Park the Hummingbird Collective functions as both a medicinal marijuana club and an art gallery. The space is divided into two halves: the first half, open to the public, is their art gallery and front desk while the walled off second part is open to patients looking for medicine. In their own words, the Hummingbird Collective “is a community service oriented premoratorium collective and art gallery that is dedicated to promoting kindness and wellbeing.” T.H.C. opens their gallery wall space to any artist in the community who would like a place to expose their work. An artist must first give a sample of their work and if approved the artist receives wall space for an average of two weeks. Currently, T.H.C. is focusing on paintings.
The paintings are mostly done on non-traditional materials. Materials range from wooden window sills, free hanging canvas, paper mache and found wooden pieces instead of canvas bordered with wood. The works cover a diversity of themes and aesthetic endeavors. One artist focuses on painting cartoon skeletons, perhaps in the spirit of Day of the Dead celebrations that will take place shortly. Others have painted realist landscapes and portraits. T.H.C. has one permanent piece situated right at the entrance to the clinic. This portrait was done using spray paint and adapts certain graffiti aesthetics. The portrait is a mix between surrealist and realist strategies. The actual features on the woman are close to reality, however the colors utilized to paint her skin and hair are blue and a bright orange. And of course a small hummingbird is featured flying right above her flower decorated hair curls.
As much as T.H.C. wants to promote community and give everyone a chance to show their work, not every painter gets so lucky. With business in mind T.H.C. chose to deny one specific artist their wall space. These paintings were stacked behind several wooden planks lying on the floor. When I began asking the workers about their favorite works they immediately showed me these censored and hidden paintings. Highly critical and political these three paintings were too offensive for the customers at Hummingbird. The paintings Diet of a Celebrity, The Surgeon General’s Wife and Still Beautiful are all gorgeous paintings done using very unique brush strokes and color palettes. With strong images that are sure to get your attention and get gears grinding in your head perhaps they were too serious for the patients exiting the clinic. T.H.C.’s motto “it’s always a beautiful day at the Hummingbird Collective” overpowered the intentions of this specific artist. To T.H.C.’s respect they still showed them to me. They were very honest about their motives for taking them down, but still communicated a deep respect for both the aesthetics of the paintings and their critical message.


Still Beautiful
Diet of a Celebrity

Every two weeks the Hummingbird Collective will change their artwork by theme, materials, medium or special events. On October 24th they will be opening a new show featuring graffiti artists from Los Angeles. They will be hosting an official gallery opening with graffiti works on canvas and wood. Their motive behind this project is to promote an appreciation for graffiti artwork which is often times forgotten and regarded as “low-brow” art. T.H.C. believes graffiti is one of the freest and most fundamental pieces of urban life and would like to celebrate its existence and its artists.
The Hummingbird Collective pleases its customers with the community’s artwork presented on their walls. In addition to medicinal marijuana their artwork is sure to serve as medicine as well.

Twenty Eight: Claremont Graduate University Exhibition

“Twenty Eight” featured twenty eight second year MFA students’ work ranging from painting, installations, performance, video and sculptural art. There was a huge diversity in the types of subject matter and approaches that each artist focused on, creating an exciting and intriguing collective exhibition. In the context of art movements since 1975, specifically the return of painting in the 80’s, one artist’s work stood out as an interesting subject matter. Artist, Justin Bower, painted Blue Boy using oil on canvas. This piece seems to embody what many painters were reaching for post the conceptual art movement of the 1970’s.

During the 1970’s painting had been completely forgotten and abandoned by the majority of the art community. Video, photography and performance art had taken over as the preferred mediums during the years of the avant-garde and conceptual art. However, as the 70’s reached an end painters began to strike back and revolt to this “‘narrow, puritan approach, devoid of all joy in the senses’” (Taylor, 67) and returned to the form. That is to say, that painters witnessed art reach such extremes that it could no longer be taken any further and the only way forward was to return to the basics.

Artists wanted to free themselves from the overtly political ramifications of the conceptual artists’ work and create art that could just exist as a beautiful expression of the artist through whatever medium was chosen. One specific artist that stands out from this group is Georg Baselitz. His work returned to figurative art, but also included abstract features. His painting Elke is a perfect example of his strategies and the return to the form with a progressive sense to the painting. Justin Bower’s Blue Boy seemed to embody the same sort of characteristics as many of Baselitz paintings and efforts.

Blue Boy is an aesthetically interesting and pleasurable piece of work that definitely functions towards pleasing the senses. It is a portrait traditionally framed with the face facing the audience. The ratio and form of the head works within traditional rules as well. However, the face is abstracted through wild brush strokes and faded duplications of certain body parts. The brush strokes are closely similar to those that Baselitz used in his Elke painting. The abstraction of the boys face can assert to the tension and arguments between traditional and abstract forms of expression that were taking place during the 80’s. This piece with its perfectly chosen colors embodies much of what painters were reaching for in reaction to conceptual artists. However, there was another group fighting against this arguing that a piece of art could not possibly escape political significance and that art should be more than something nice to look at.

The gallery did include few works that attempted to involve themselves politically and socially. Nevertheless the majority of the artists practiced the freedom of expression that painters were hungry for as the decade of the 1970’s closed out. The work was pleasing to look at, but the majority was dry of any sort of sociological statement. These artists are nonetheless talented and hopefully will leave school to keep developing their skills professionally in the Los Angeles art scene or wherever they chose to work.

Work Cited:
Taylor, Brandon. Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970. Laurence King Publishing, London 2005.