Peter Carr | Artist for Survival
October 28 - December 13, 2024

Monday, October 28, 2024
Curator Talk @ 6-7pm
with Opening Reception @ 7-9pm

Saturday, November 23, 2024
Live Poetry Readings @1-2pm
and Documentary Screening @ 2-3pm
with Visitor Reception @ 3-5pm

Cerritos College Art Gallery is proud to present PETER CARR: Artist for Survival, the first comprehensive art historical retrospective of the poet, activist, and fascinating outsider artist, Peter Carr (1925-1981), featuring a wide range of Carr’s large-scale paintings, frenetic drawings, and homemade political posters, as well as his own personal notebooks, intimate sketches and studies, self-published books, and other biographically-significant ephemera.

Throughout his relatively short life (he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at just 56 years old), Harry Lawson “Peter” Carr created a seemingly endless array of idiosyncratic images, all constructed using his own distinctively evocative and expressionistic visual style. Frequently, Carr would also liberally inscribe these drawings and paintings with handwritten textual fragments, pulled from his own poetic compositions and meant to variously imply an internal monologue, overheard conversations, and/or omniscient narration. As a visual extension of both his acclaimed literary practice and his anti-authoritarian activist impulses, these images ruminate, often quite intensely, on the same explicitly political and existential dilemmas that consumed a majority of his waking focus. Not surprisingly, as a co-founder of the Orange County chapter of the Alliance for Survival and creator of its local spinoff, Artists for Survival, as well as the posthumous namesake for the Peter Carr Peace Center at Cal State Long Beach, Carr regularly deployed his inspired writing, challenging imagery, and satirical wit in the service of much bigger causes, hoping to engage likeminded creatives on the issues to which he so dedicated his personal life and professional career. A long-time resident of Laguna Beach as well, Carr’s visual and poetic compositions employed subtle gestures, both provocative and profound, to present his own acute social observations on the beauty and the absurdity of everyday life along the California coast in the 1970s, including his well-established personal antagonism to the encroachment of the nuclear and military-industrial complex into the region.

Carr served as a comparative literature professor at Cal State Long Beach for many years. Following his sudden death in 1981 (with the blessing of his widow and fellow community activist, Jeanie Bernstein), his massive personal archive of drawings, paintings, and notebooks passed to his fellow activist and student, Andrew Tonkovich, himself now a retired UC Irvine lecturer and longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review. For over forty years, these works have gone largely unknown and unseen, with this major retrospective being the first time that many of these pieces will ever have been exhibited publicly. In fact, the title of the exhibition, Peter Carr: Artist for Survival, while clearly derived from the name of the activist artist collective that Carr founded, primarily alludes to Carr’s incessant and insatiable drive to create art as a strategy for personal and communal survival; but, it is also meant to serve as an acknowledgment of, and expression of gratitude for, the unlikely survival of this entire archive, almost exclusively through the dogged and dedicated persistence of Carr’s acolyte and former student, and co-curator of this exhibition, Andrew Tonkovich.

Harry Lawson "Peter" Carr (1925-1981) was born in Pasadena, served in the US Navy, earned a PhD in Comparative Mythology from USC, and studied in India on a Fulbright Fellowship. He co-founded the Department of Comparative Literature at CSULB, where he was a popular and innovative teacher, and co-founded the grassroots anti-nuclear organization, the Orange County Alliance for Survival. Carr was the author of many self-published books and pamphlets, including Aliso Creek and In the Summer We Went to the Mountains, and produced thousands of drawings, paintings, political posters, and illustrations throughout his life. His work was shown in galleries in Laguna Beach, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and the Pacific Northwest. He lived for many years in South Laguna with community activist Jeanie Bernstein and was active with the Laguna Poets. A small posthumous showing of his work was previously organized by the late Mark Chamberlain at BC Space in 2016. Both the Jean Bernstein and Peter Carr Papers are held at the libraries of the University of California, Irvine.