Etchings, Ben Sakoguchi, Dec 7, 1964 - Jan 9, 1965, Ceeje Galleries, Los order Angeles

Offset lithograph exhibition poster / invitation for important Los Angeles artist Ben Sakoguchi from 1964. Condition should be noted in the photos -- some small rips and tears in the folds and elsewhere. An excellent piece of historical ephemera from a golden period of the nascent LA art scene.

Ben Sakoguchi was born in 1938, in San Bernardino California. During World War II, his family was incarcerated by the United States government because of their Japanese ancestry, so he spent his early childhood in an internment camp at Poston, Arizona. After the war, the Sakoguchis returned to San Bernardino, and with considerable difficulty, reopened their small grocery business. Ben attended public schools, including San Bernardino Valley College.

Moving to Los Angeles and UCLA, Sakoguchi earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, teaching credential, and in 1964 a Master of Fine Arts degree. He stayed in the Los Angeles area, accepting a teaching position at Pasadena City College, where he was on the Art Department faculty until his 1997 retirement.

In five decades as a professional artist, Sakoguchi has shown his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, primarily at schools, museums, and other non-profit venues within the United States. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and in 1997 participated in the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund's Artists at Giverny Program. Sakoguchi has also received grants from the J. Paul Getty Trust, the California Arts Council, and the Flintridge Foundation. (Ben Sakoguchi website)

During his childhood, Sakoguchi drew constantly on butcher paper from his father's store. By 1964, having earned BFA and MFA degrees from UCLA, he was familiar with Pop Art, and turned to media sources for his imagery, finding a wealth of material in books, newspapers, magazines, comic books and Japanese playing cards and erotic prints. (Today he also relies on the Internet). Never doubting that his subject matter should be socially relevant, he responded through art to events that dominated late-1960s media such as the Vietnam War and police brutality at the 1968 Democratic Convention. In a detail from Big Painting, a multi-canvas work begun that year, Sakoguchi created a dense and forceful composition, reminiscent to some extent of Mexican murals, including images of poppy fields symbolizing fallen soldiers from World War I, a World War II fighter plane, U.S. propaganda posters attacking Germany and Japan and a host of contemporary women wearing bell-bottom fashions of the day and armed with machine guns. A political time capsule of 1968, the painting is something of a cautionary tale. Yet by his own admission, Sakoguchi sees himself as a history painter and not simply a political commentator. In his email he noted, “I've always been an observer, because you were forced to if you were the only Asian kid in school. You don't have a tribe there, you don't have a gang there…you're looking…you're not part of any group.”

In the early 1970s, Sakoguchi came across some vintage orange crate labels at a swap meet. He soon began collecting them and, in turn, created his first label compositions on canvases the size of the actual labels. The artist worked steadily in this format through 1984, broke away from it for a time to pursue other directions (including a number of large-scale installations), returned to it in the mid-1990s and continues to employ it to this day. When exhibiting the label paintings, Sakoguchi often organizes them into modular grids, a practice common among 1960s Minimalist and Conceptual artists which also brings to mind the symbol-filled modules of Wallace Berman's Verifax collages and Andy Warhol's groupings of Campbell's Soup Can paintings. In Sakoguchi's case, the grid organization perfectly personifies the ubiquity of visual media-blasting, which has been a cultural staple since the 1960s.

Sakoguchi's self-imposed rules for the label paintings are to include a brand name, at least one orange and the name of a real city, all of which relate conceptually to a subject. In Napalm Brand, based on the iconic Life Magazine photo of children fleeing a napalm attack, the brand logo order is shown in flames, the orange is wrapped to simulate the shape of a grenade and there is a reference to the California town of Firebaugh. In Bank on Frank Brand, large blocky letters and ready-to-pick oranges accompany an image of a Frank Stella painting hanging in a corporate setting, with the location of the produce company identified as Commerce, Calif. Although these works were painted in the late 1970s, their subjects—bombings and art tied to Wall Street—remain relevant today, perhaps even more so.

In his more recent orange crate label paintings, Sakoguchi has documented the histories of baseball, where race is a prominent issue, and of slavery itself. His latest label group can be seen at the Brand Library Art Center Gallery in the exhibition ONE YEAR: The Art and Politics of Los Angeles, on view through January 12. In the new series, Sakoguchi calls attention to words and phrases that have only recently become English jargon, including ‘Obamacare,' ‘Brexit,' ‘Nasty Woman' and ‘Alternative Facts.' “I started with Brexit and Stuxnet,” he said. “Now those are neat words, you gotta admit, they're interesting words…Words matter, but they're meaningless, too, because the viewer puts the meaning into the word. It always has been that way—just like the art…I stick it out, but the viewer completes the act.” (thisisfabrik)