American Artist at REDCAT

American Artist, Shaper of God (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

“My books will be read by millions of people!” Octavia E. Butler wrote in one of her notebooks.“I will buy a beautiful home in an excellent neighborhood,” declares the following line, and a little further down: “I will help poor black youngsters go to college.”¹ The renowned writer’s persistent drive for name recognition is well-documented, both within her archives and through several of her fictional characters (if one chooses to read them as semi-autobiographical). Given how prophetic Butler’s messages were—among other things, she predicted the rise of authoritarianism in America, social siloing, and Los Angeles’ housing crisis and exacerbated drought²—it is no wonder that she wanted to be heard, and heeded. In Shaper of God at REDCAT, a show constructed by American Artist around elements of Butler’s facts and fictions, Butler’s hunger to be witnessed hums clearly while American Artist all but disappears.

Artist, who legally changed their name to American Artist in 2013, has sparsely populated the gallery with installations based on two landmarks from Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower (1993), along with sculptural vignettes that recreate the bus stops Butler would have frequented as a non-driving Angeleno. Framed drawings of selected notes from the writer’s archives, easily mistakable for tracings, hang throughout the gallery (the archives are housed at the Huntington). At face value, the show reads like tribute, in which Artist reconstructs parts of Butler’s story for show-and-tell, adding to the growing gospel choir praising Butler’s formidable, ever-expanding legacy. The scant traces of Artist in the show raise a question: can it be enough to act as an “anonymous” conduit for another American artist who demanded to be heard?

Artist’s engagement takes on more dimension with the aid of exhibition text, which informs us that, “[l]ike Butler, American Artist spent their formative years in and around the adjacent communities of Altadena and Pasadena.” We also know that Artist chose these particular archival notes—about the poverty and abuse lived by Butler’s mother and L.A.’s decline, among other selections—but otherwise, Artist engages Butler’s history with utter opacity. Materially, Artist has reconstructed the menacing fortification that temporarily protected the neighborhood of Lauren Oya Olamina, the young heroine of Butler’s Sower. Robledo Community Wall (Olamina cul-de-sac) (all works 2022) is imposing, life-size, “real” enough: plastic bags are snagged in the wall’s concertina wire. Inside the wall’s open gate, viewers may sit on a “bus” bench in front of Yannis Window, a version of the “media wall” where Olamina and her family gathered to watch the news. Playing on the screen is Arroyo Seco, an educational video from the fictitious Robledo Historical Society that offers context about the area that both Butler and Artist have called home. It explains that the land was first home to the Indigenous Tongva people and later colonized, that it has been the site of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) since the 1930s, and that the Arroyo Seco stream formed the geographic indicators eventually used to segregate the area’s high schools along racial and economic lines. Informative and straight-faced, Artist’s most obvious deviation from Butler-reportage is an expert mimicry of the dry, educational format.

In an art world trained to seek out (and expertly identify) “tricks” and punchlines, it appears that no traps have been laid—and neither, significantly, has the Artist bared their soul. Yet, Olamina proposes in Butler’s Sower, “All that you touch /You Change. /All that you Change /Changes you” and “God is Change.”³ This latter aphorism is a leading tenet of Earthseed, the religion founded by Olamina (another Earthseed maxim lends its name to the show: “God exists to shape /And to be shaped.”⁴). Left to wonder about Artist’s own shaping and being shaped, we are instead gently shown how Butler’s lived and imagined realities overlapped in a real time and place. With Butler’s prescient predictions of social and environmental upheaval literally looming large, Artist seems to say, “Octavia Butler was here,” adding “and so was American Artist” as a rather faint footnote. But if all that you touch you change, and all that you change changes you, that may be just plenty.

American Artist: Shaper of God runs from May 28–October 2, 2022 at REDCAT (631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles, CA 90012).

American Artist, Shaper of God (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

American Artist, To Acorn (installation view) (2022). Steel, acrylic, and hardware, 18 x 18 x 108 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox; courtesy of
REDCAT, Los Angeles.

American Artist, Shaper of God (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

American Artist, Shaper of God (installation view) (2022). Image courtesy of the artist and REDCAT, Los Angeles. Photo: Brica Wilcox.

Rachel Elizabeth Jones is an artist and writer in Los Angeles. She is a co-editor of Tele- and runs the art space Flower Head from her garage. She has contributed to the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New Inquiry, among other publications.

More by Rachel Elizabeth Jones