a-
Other than drunks on skid row downtown, Los Angeles didn’t have many homeless people in the postwar era. That was largely because of the immense Camarillo State Mental Hospital, which had 7,000 residents/inmates/patients or whatever you want to call them in 1957. For example, Charlie Parker recorded “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” after his six restful months there in 1946 following a series of unfortunate events such as setting his hotel room on fire and playing his saxophone naked in the lobby.
But then progressive geniuses like Erving Goffman and Michel Foucault decided that locking people up just for being lunatics and out-of-control addicts was a mistake. So, now the old asylum is the very pleasant campus of Cal State Channel Islands.
Key takeaways from a COVID-era California college tour latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
He may be one of the most celebrated American painters of the day, but Henry Taylor’s first encounter with fine art was seeing the paintings on the walls of the grand homes his mother cleaned for a living. Now, as his inaugural exhibition for Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, the Los Angeles-based artist will take over all five of the gallery’s West Country locations to present a major body of sculptural work and paintings.
Born in 1958, his introduction to paint itself could be attributed to his father, who decorated local bars and houses and who, for a time, worked for the US government as a commercial painter on the naval air station in Ventura, California. Taylor didn’t begin formally studying art until he’d reached his 30s, when he became a student at the California Institute of Fine Arts. During this time, he made ends meet by also working full time as a psychiatric technician at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital, where he made portraits of his schizophrenic and bipolar pa