Find world class Black art in these LA County libraries and community centers

Walk through the automatic doors at the Carson Library and you’ll see on your left a 1973 painting called "Dominoes" by John Riddle.

Riddle, a prominent Black artist, has worked in the L.A. County Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, and has been collected by Jesse Jackson and Roberta Flack.

Riddle's work was previously owned by the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company in West Adams. Over two decades, the company’s art director, William Pajaud, an L.A. artist himself, carefully collected hundreds of pieces of Black art. Each piece in the collection, Pajaud said, would be a chapter telling the story of African Americans in the U.S. The collection included oil paintings, watercolors, and sculptures in clay, wood and metal.

When Golden State Mutual Life Insurance shut down, the company sold most of the best pieces at a private auction in 2007, with some selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. L.A. County was able to acquire about 120 works, including Riddle's piece.

To keep the works accessible to the public and free of charge, county officials chose four public libraries and three community centers to show the work. Earlier this year, the county arts department created a new website with a map to make them easier to find. The locations include the Golden State Mutual historic building in West Adams, plus:
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Libraries

• Carson Library (Carson)
• A.C. Bilbrew Library (Willowbrook)
• Masao W. Satow Library (Gardena)
• View Park Bebe Moore Campbell Library (View Park/Windsor Hills)
  

Community centers:

• Curtis Tucker Behavioral Health Center Health Services (Inglewood)
• Willowbrook Senior Center Aging and Disabilities (Willowbrook)
• Mark Ridley-Thomas Behavioral Health Center Health Services (on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Campus).

“All of these are county-owned spaces that are available, accessible to the public and to patrons to be able to live with the works, learn about the works, see the works, learn about the works,” said Kristin Sakoda, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Dominoes by John Riddle. The painting was part of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance collection but is now part of the Los Angeles County Civic Art Collection.

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As you walk past the checkout desk at the Carson Library, toward the teen section, you’ll see another remarkable piece from the county’s holdings. It’s a two-foot-tall sculpture made from one piece of mahogany. It’s called "The Embrace" by artist Elizabeth Catlett, whose work is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, among many other institutions. Catlett depicted two people hugging, their faces and bodies fused together, their eyes looking at the viewer.

Detail of El Abrazo (The Embrace) by Elizabeth Catlett.

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In the auction catalogue for the Golden State Collection, Catlett wrote: “I still work figuratively, trying to express emotion through abstract form, color, line, and space. I attempt to reach out to ordinary people who have little or no experience or understanding of art principles, and extend to them what I may feel about a subject."

Ancestral Fragments by Stanley Wilson.

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Meanwhile at A.C. Bilbrew Library, north of Compton, there’s a piece by Charles White, who lived in L.A. County for decades and mentored many artists in the region. His paintings and drawings in the 1960s took on the issues of the Black Civil Rights Movement, and that led well-known Black Americans like Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt to buy his art.

County officials are hopeful that the communities around these neighborhoods enjoy the art’s benefits, including “mental health, in our education, our youth development, our sense of inclusion and belonging,” Sakoda said.