Jon Peterson (1945 – March 4, 2020) was an American artist, most known for his "guerrilla sculpture" in the 1980s and his stylistically eclectic paintings in the 2000s.Richards, Paul. "Bum Wraps," The Washington Post, May 29, 1980. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Centeno, Jimmy. "on Peterson: 12 Years of Painting and More to Come," Fabrik, February 28, 2018. Retrieved April 24, 2019. He was active in the emergence of Los Angeles's downtown art scene—partly captured in the 1982 documentary, Young Turks—as both an artist and real estate developer.Young Turks. "Who Are the Young Turks?". Retrieved April 24, 2019.Drohojowska, Hunter. "Young Turks," Artforum, February 1982. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Mandel, Jason. "The Loft Pioneers," Los Angeles Downtown News, September 30, 2002, p. 6. Retrieved April 24, 2019. His work has been commissioned by or exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE),Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. "Site Projects: Downtown L.A.," Exhibition. Retrieved April 24, 2019. the San Diego Museum of Art, Washington Project for the Arts, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston Art Festival, Foundation for Art Resources, and the International Sculpture Conference.Richards, Paul. "The guerillas of art," The Washington Post, March 24, 1981.McEvilley, Thomas. "The Houston Festival," Artforum, October 1983. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Rosamund Felsen Gallery. "Jon Peterson," Artists. Retrieved April 24, 2019. It has been discussed in Artforum, Art in America,Mallinson, Constance. "Jon Peterson at Newspace," Art in America, January 1980. ARTnews,Wortz, Melinda. Review, ARTNews, December 1980. Los Angeles Times,Muchnic, Suzanne. "An L.A. showcase for iconoclasts," Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2006. Retrieved April 24, 2019. The Washington Post and The Village Voice, and recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts.Wilson, Pamela (ed). Jon Peterson Paintings and Sculpture: A Survey, Los Angeles: LA Artcore, 2013. Museum director and one-time Artforum critic Richard Armstrong wrote that his outdoor, urban "Bum Shelters" "neatly grafted function and relevance onto the sadly barren tree of public sculpture"; critic Peter Plagens called them "hand-made, subtly irregular riff[s] on Minimalism" that injected social consciousness into "erstwhile formalist work."Armstrong, Richard. "Jon Peterson, Newspace," Artforum, January 1980. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Plagens, Peter. "Gimme Shelter," Jon Peterson Paintings and Sculpture: A Survey, Pamela Wilson (ed), Los Angeles: LA Artcore, 2013. Reviewers liken his painting practice in the 2000s to the "polymath"-model of Gerhard Richter, interchanging diverse styles and genres as a means to understanding the nature of painting itself.Mallinson, Constance. "Encountering the Sublime – The Art of Jon Peterson," Jon Peterson Paintings and Sculpture: A Survey, Pamela Wilson (ed), Los Angeles: LA Artcore, 2013. Peterson died March 4, 2020, at the age of 74, and is survived by his wife, Tanarat, and son, Raymond.Young Turks. "Jon Peterson, 1945–2020: Painter, Sculptor & Arts District Pioneer", News. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
Life and career Peterson was born in 1945 in Stillwater, Minnesota. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1968, he worked at General Dynamics, Lockheed and Rockwell, at one point designing helicopters. In 1972, in Los Angeles, he turned to art, eventually studying at Otis Art Institute (MFA, Painting, 1976), with Michael Asher, Miles Forst, Matsumi Kanemitsu and Charles White. In 1976, he rented a cheap ($75 per month for 2,500 square feet) downtown Los Angeles loft in a former garment factory between Skid Row and Little Tokyo, and helped to jumpstart what Peter Plagens called a "scruffily energetic artists’ milieu," documented in Steven Seemayer’s film, "Young Turks."Drohojowska, Hunter. “Urban Art”, L.A. Weekly, May 22, 1981, p. 6–8. Retrieved April 24, 2018. Some Los Angeles writers credit Peterson, Michael Tansey and Seemayer with pioneering the development of the downtown arts district—including the emergence of LACE—after they began renting and subdividing warehouse buildings and subleasing them as live-in studios to artists.Burnham, Linda Frye. "Young Turks: The Real Story," September 1, 2011. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Johnson, Reed. "They were here first" Los Angeles Times, October 16, 2003. Retrieved April 24, 2019. In subsequent years, Peterson and Tansey developed several loft projects in the area, including the construction of a 74-unit complex and the 160-unit Little Tokyo complex.Peterson, Jon. "The Downtown Art Scene Is Not Dead," Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1993. Retrieved April 24, 2019.Thornburg, Barbara. " You Call This a Loft?" Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2006. Retrieved April 24, 2019.
Peterson exhibited actively after leaving Otis, in solo shows at the Newspace (Los Angeles, 1976–1979) and Protetch-McIntosh (Washington DC, 1980) galleries, and group shows at the Laguna Art Museum (1976), San Diego Museum of Art (1980), Houston Art Festival (1983), and LACE (1981, 1985), among others. In 1980, he attracted widespread attention and received a National Endowment of the Arts grant and commissions for a body of outdoor installations that came to be known as “Bum Shelters,” which he installed in New York City's Bowery,Rickey, Carrie. "In Flagrante Derelicto," The Village Voice, January 7, 1980. Santa Barbara,Ross, Richard. "At Large In Santa Barbara," L.A.I.C.A. Journal, September—October 1980. p. 45–47. Washington DC, Madison, Los Angeles, and Houston between 1979 and 1983. In the 2000s, Peterson returned to painting, with exhibits at the LA Artcore and Andlab galleries in Los Angeles, Long Beach City College and SoPas Gallery in South Pasadena.ANDLAB. "Jon Peterson,". Retrieved April 24, 2019. He was represented by Rosamund Felsen Gallery.
In addition to his work as an artist, Peterson served on the boards of several Los Angeles art organizations, including Inner City Arts, LACE and LARABA (Los Angeles River Arts and Business Association) and was the President and founding member of Downtown Arts Development Association (DADA).
Work Peterson's early influences included Michael Asher's practice of Institutional Critique—which interrogated conventional art practices, often through temporary works, architectural interventions and performative gesturesAlberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson (eds). Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists' Writings, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Retrieved April 24, 2019.—and the guerrilla work of artists Maura Sheehan and Judith Simonian.Frauchiger, Fritz. Off the Street, Los Angeles: Old City Print Shop, 1985. Richard Armstrong described his early work, which included painting, sculpture and installation, as exploring field-situation and body-object relationships and "marked by a consistently cool temperament" toward the effect its non-conventional approaches produced. His later painting is characterized by a more personal exploration that liberally appropriates diverse historical styles and media imagery.Mallinson, Constance. "Jon Peterson: 12 Years of Painting at LA Artcore," Art and Cake, March 1, 2018. Retrieved April 24, 2019.
Early paintings and sculpture Peterson began as a painter, creating translucent, abstract, grid-based works on large sheets of vellum, as well as site-specific work spray-painted directly on gallery walls.Muchnic, Suzanne. "Spatial Transformations," Artweek, April 1978.Young Turks. "Jon Peterson". Retrieved April 24, 2019.Zimbardo, Tanya. "Manitoba Museum of Finds Art: Interview with Alberta Mayo," Open Space, SFMOMA, November 7, 2011. Retrieved April 24, 2019. His "Negentropic Spaces" series (1976) used layered vellum sheets with strings and paint sandwiched between; they alternated between flatness and illusionism and recalled the graphs and structural plans of his engineering background.Jon Peterson website. "Archives," Other Work. Retrieved April 24, 2019. His "Wall Paintings" (1978–82) were dark, atmospheric and mysterious, like backgrounds of Old Masters paintings with affinities to the art of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. This work subverted notions of the art object by eschewing foregrounds and embracing a fluid relationship dependent on chance and improvisation, in which what happened in front of the piece became its subject. Concurrent to his painting, Peterson created lattice- or airframe-like, brightly colored wood-and-wax sculptures that were architecturally inspired and echoed the grid paintings. Critics suggest that as their scale increased to human proportions, the geometric, cage-like structures suggested absent bodies and enclosure, presaging his "Bum Shelters", as did the wall paintings' blurring of subject and object.
Peterson's "Symbol Paintings" (1983) explored representation and perception and the play of object versus content. Critic Hunter Drohojowska described them as "startling canvasses [of] lovely encaustic, carefully rendered, highly charged symbols: cross, red cross, Star of David and swastika"; they were shown only once, at LACE's "Emblem" show in 1984, where they were removed from the wall and turned around by an offended viewer at the opening.Drohojowska, Hunter. “Pick of the Week: "Emblem" at LACE," L.A. Weekly, November 9, 1984. Retrieved April 24, 2019. From 1989 to 1994, Peterson created a series of monumental, monochromatic abstract paintings inspired by the landscapes of J .M. W. Turner. Painted in stark, black and white-pigmented beeswax, the works have been described as transmitting a hazy, dreamlike quality situated between figuration and abstraction and the imaginary and real, reminiscent of Clyfford Still's biomorphic work.
"Bum Shelters" (1979–1983) Inspired by the guerrilla interventions of other artists, frequent interactions with the homeless population outside his studio, and the idea of "accidental discovery of an artwork," Peterson began constructing plywood, masonite and fiberglass sculptures that might also be used as single-body shelters (e.g., Los Angeles Shelter #4, 1980). He placed the works—which other artists dubbed "Bum Shelters"—in vacant lots and alleys and under bridges of urban areas frequented by the homeless and street populations, anticipating later artist interventions by Krzysztof Wodiczko and Michael Rakowitz. Portable and playfully painted in bright primary colors, they took diverse forms: flattened tubes, a triangular plane with two splayed legs, a small igloo, a curved lean-to, a long wedge supported by converging chain link fences, and tents designed be inflated by subway and underground exhaust grates.Knight, Christopher. Review, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, February 18, 1981. In formal terms, critics called them minimal, graceful and interesting; Thomas McEvilley described a Houston Arts Festival-commissioned installation as "an elegant and inviting little structure covered with mirrored rectangles to echo the mirrored style of the emerging skyline."