Fearless Witness: Seymour Rosen’s SPACES

SPACES—Saving and Preserving Arts and Cultural Environments—is an organization and archive managed by the Kohler Foundation dedicated to the study, documentation, and preservation of art environments and self-taught artistic activity around the world. SPACES was informally organized by photographer and cultural advocate Seymour Rosen in 1959 and officially established as a nonprofit organization in 1978. The impetus of Rosen’s artistic proclivities was his 1952 discovery of Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, leading to decades of dedication to documenting and celebrating “extemporaneous individual acts of people declaring their existence.” SPACES has amassed thousands of photos, documents, books, and ephemera related to art environments—homes, gardens, and studios fully transformed into site and life specific works of art—and it continues to serve as a leading advocate for the conservation of art environments. This presentation will examine Rosen’s creative practice, including his photography of the Ferus Gallery and his exhibitions Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1962), I Am Alive (LACMA, 1966), and In Celebration of Ourselves (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1976) in order to better understand the artistic legacy upon which SPACES was founded. As we continue to challenge canonical limitations on artmaking, it is critical to recognize those like Rosen who generated conversation about unconventional practices and set forth the challenge to “acknowledge the magic made available to us by those whose work looks best outside of institutional walls—with the hope that we all will take the time to do our own explorations.”