Label Curatorial

Laura Whitcomb began curatorial work in 1987 premiering the work of Vivienne Westwood and the House of Beauty and Culture in California in an engaging dialogue with Los Angeles artists. Her writing career stems back to 1987 when living in London and Los Angeles as a teenager. She contributed to the Feral House underground bestseller Apocalypse Culture in 1987 writing "Mel Lyman God’s Own Story" and in that same year writing the cover story on Los Angeles gang warfare titled La Vida Loca: Gang Warfare in the LA Barrio for the British Blitz magazine. Studying under Alice McCloskey at UCLA, she began her career focusing on artists collaborating with fashion designers. An iteration of this scholarship was published for Dalí Museum St. Petersburg’s 2017 catalogue Dalí and Schiaparelli with contributors Dilys E. Blum of the Philadelphia Museum and Hank Hine, the director of the Dalí Museum. Responding to Anaïs Nin's belief that art is best learned as an autodidact and working as a fashion stylist, Whitcomb established Label, a clothing line in 1989 and a gallery store in New York’s lower Soho in 1994. Label, whose concept was based on an anti brand, held regular art shows where the clothing line confronted the themes of each exhibition and closed in 2010.

In 2013 Whitcomb became a resident scholar and curator at the Gala and Salvador Dalí Foundation in Figueres, Catalonia at the Museu Gala Salvador Dalí where she focused upon the occult forays of the Surrealist movement and how the exploration of hermetic traditions was a key underpinning of their art fulcrum. She began investigating with more focus the influences of the Surrealist movement on California through the arrivals of both an émigré community and homegrown developments. With a particular interest in the phenomenology of light explored in the California rayograph experiments of Man Ray, Whitcomb focused on the Light and Space Movement which emerged from this influence. Studying the inceptive roots of what became Los Angeles’s most notable home-grown movements, Whitcomb was asked to curate the official re-opening in 2014 of the Brand Library and Art Center to focus on the Light and Space Artists Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Laddie John Dill in a committed section of the exhibition. The exhibition, which focused on post war Los Angeles, included Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Frank Gehry, Joe Goode, Billy Al Bengston, Allen Ruppersberg, Beatrice Wood and Tony Berlant as well as a photography exhibit of Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe and George Hurrell in dialogue with the portraits of the art patron and impresario Joan Agajanian Quinn. Whitcomb also began work on The Passing of the Torch (2022) which documents the hermetic influences in the arts handed down through the centuries which saw a cumulative zeitgeist in California through the efforts of transplanted Surrealists and the poet Phillip Lamantia. Whitcomb further explored the impact Surrealist émigrés made upon Californian art, poetry, experimental music and performance and the outcomes of these intersections. This approach led her to immerse in the zeitgeist of California artist-and poet-run galleries where she documented for the first time the little known Cole gallery which existed on the second-generation Surrealist Gordon Onslow Ford and Jean Varda's Sausalito ferryboat in the year before Alan Watts occupied the space. In 2016 after both a scholar-in-residence and a curatorial residency at the Lucid Art Foundation and a commission to organize the archive of Onslow Ford, Whitcomb's research on the Cole gallery formed the basis of new scholarship for the Sonoma Valley Museum’s exhibition The Vallejo: Ship of Dreams. The catalog featured a chapter by Whitcomb published by the Lucid Art Foundation. In 2017 Whitcomb also completed the book Bay Area Artist- and Poet-Run Galleries and Alternative Spaces 1949–1965 which will be published in 2023. After this she particularly focused upon the Dilexi gallery which presented the most poignant example of the convergence of art, performance, film and experimental music. The Dilexi publication presented the case that this Bay Area interdisciplinary groundswell largely impacted NY’s Judson Theater and Park Place Gallery. The gallery's championing of composers Terry Riley, Morton Subotnick, La Monte Young and Sun Ra led Whitcomb to study the deeper implications of their music. In 2017, with the National Parks at Joshua Tree’s Cap Rock, she organized an evening exploring the themes of stargate Sirius B in the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sun Ra and the Dogon people of Mali. The 2 night performance premiered the films of Douchan Gersi through his archivist Eric A. Zimmerman. Projected onto the large rocks of Joshua Tree State Park, Gersi’s never- before- seen footage of the 1972 Dogon Sigui ceremony presented their sacred ceremony to commune with their astroculture ancestors which takes place once every 75 years.

Whitcomb returned to focus on the potency of electronic pioneers converging with the arts and focused upon the little-known collaborations of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop. In 2018 she organized an exhibition at the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock of the composer/ poet/ filmmaker and artist Warner Jepson co-hosted by Dublab and the Estate of Warner Jepson. This retrospective presented the works of Robert Morris, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Ruth Asawa, Steven Arnold and Harry Partch with a series of auxiliary performances of indeterminate dance and music. In 2018 Label Curatorial began working with research director Narin Dickerson to highlight Jim Newman’s Dilexi gallery and its aftermath, which resulted in the publication Dilexi: A Gallery & Beyond which sees its publication release September 2021. The 2019 multivenue Dilexi Retrospective saw Whitcomb as the curatorial director and participating galleries included Crown Point Press and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco and Parrasch Heijnen, the landing, Parker Gallery and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles. One of these exhibitions, Seeking the Unknown, at Parker Gallery, highlighted her investigations into the little-known occult influences of California artists. In 2020 Whitcomb was commissioned by the Andrew Edlin Gallery and the Estate of Paulina Peavy to research for publication and exhibition the history of the channeler artist Paulina Peavy. Working with Narin Dickerson and editor Andrew Choate the project uncovered an unknown chapter of California history. Whitcomb researched and compiled for the publication the first account of how the hermetic and esoteric societies, most notably Agni Yoga, Ding Lei Mei and Theosophy largely informed California contemporary art and that many of their philosophies were the underpinning of the astroculture zeitgeist. Whitcomb presents a paradigmatic shift for our era exploring the intersection of the occult and astroculture as a reciprocal ethos in Peavy’s cosmology. These intersections will also be explored in the forthcoming publication The Passing of the Torch also edited by Andrew Choate. In June 2021 Whitcomb curated Paulina Peavy: An Etherian Channeler at the poetry center Beyond Baroque’s Mike Kelley Gallery which would be the artist’s first show in California in over 75 years.

Whitcomb’s other fields of specialty are the history of art theft, damage and destruction in war and a history of fine artists collaborating in stage design and costume, which will also see forthcoming publications.

Laura Whitcomb has curated exhibitions featuring artists Peter Alexander, Ruth Asawa, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Tony Berlant, Wallace Berman, John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Salvador Dalí, Roy De Forest, Tony DeLap, Claire Falkenstein, Frank Gehry, Joe Goode, Wally Hedrick, David Hockney, Alfred Jensen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Morris, Ed Moses, Ron Nagle, Paulina Peavy, Deborah Remington, Charles Ross, Ed Ruscha, H.C. Westermann and Beatrice Wood. Exhibitions that have focused on the convergence of fine art and music include Harry Bertoia, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Warner Jepson, Harry Partch, Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Photography shows include Jean Clemmer, Patrick Demarchelier, George Hurrell, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Mathew Rolston and Arthur Tress.

Her greatest strength as a historian is the persistence with which she conducts research, gleaning fresh understandings from this information. Label Curatorial's culturally-responsive programming based on this research displays a multiplicity of viewpoints while enriching history with additions from the curatorial's research. She has explored the history of contemporary art in California with a particular focus on the impact of Dada and Surrealism which were key to the gestation of Abstract Expressionism, the Light and Space Movement, Funk and California Conceptualism.

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