Exhibit celebrates a late Orange County activist and artist’s revival
Before his untimely passing decades ago, Peter Carr left an indelible mark on Orange County through his paintings, political posters and prose.
Ensuring that his legacy endures, the “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” exhibit at the Cerritos College Art Gallery celebrates the former Laguna Beach resident’s life, activism and art.
The exhibit, which opened on Monday, is the first comprehensive look back at Carr’s artwork, which is infused, at times, with the natural beauty of the county’s ecosystems while also sounding an alarm about the pressing political issues of his time, including the nuclear arms race.
“The smart people who are the art historians and artists who have looked at the work have told me that people who know will recognize German expressionism, they will recognize the New Objectivity movement,” said Andrew Tonkovich, co-curator of the exhibit. “They will recognize the influence of George Grosz, William Blake and Otto Dix.”
Speaking to its broader appeal, Carr’s paintings are eye-catching enough to have piqued the interest of college students casually passing by as Tonkovich unloaded art pieces to be installed.
For Tonkovich, an author and retired UC Irvine English lecturer, the showcase is part of a personal mission to be the keeper of his mentor’s flame. The two met when Carr taught comparative literature at Cal State Long Beach and Tonkovich was his student.
“I was charmed by this totally charismatic teacher who kind of made me the weirdo that I am today,” Tonkovich recalled. “He was somebody who brought politics and life and love into the world. You could see that he adored his students.”
The pair only got to know each other for a little more than a year before Carr’s unexpected passing at 55 from a heart attack.
Jeanie Bernstein, Carr’s wife, entrusted Tonkovich with becoming the custodian of her husband’s vast archive of paintings, posters and writings after her own death in 2011. Tonkovich donated Carr and Bernstein’s papers to UC Irvine’s Special Collections and Archives.
He also rolled up and donated a select few of Carr’s posters to the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Culver City
Other posters, including one promoting a protest against an “arms bazaar” at the Anaheim Convention Center, are on display at the exhibit.
Carr’s artwork has only been posthumously exhibited once before, at BC Space in Laguna Beach in 2017. Tonkovich and Lisa Alvarez, his wife, celebrated the release of their edited anthology, Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, at the gallery while showcasing some of Carr’s art.
But once James MacDevitt, the director of Cerritos College Art Gallery, spent a day with Tonkovich looking at his vast Carr collection, a singular and larger re-evaluation of the late activist and artist’s creative output became an imperative.
In addition to Carr’s large-scale paintings, the exhibit that MacDavitt co-curated alongside Tonkovich also includes his drawings, notebooks, and self-published books.
“If you just walk through the show, the exhibit tells the story because Carr documented it all,” Tonkovich said. “There’s journals, buttons and bumper stickers that accompany his work.”
As Carr helped found the O.C. branch of the Alliance for Survival, an antinuclear organization, much of his self-taught art reflects a stance that saw nuclear proliferation as an existential threat to humankind. It also inspired him to form Artists for Survival, a creative auxiliary of artists and poets.
A few paintings on display document a Saturday morning peace vigil that he and his wife faithfully showed up at every weekend in Laguna Beach to protest U.S. intervention in Central America or the nuclear arms race.
Another painting shows people swimming through an orange ocean with the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station faintly in the backdrop, a subtle if stern denunciation.
“Peter didn’t live to see it, but that goddamn nuclear power plant is now decommissioned,” Tonkovich said. “God bless Peter Carr.”
The exhibit also threads through the “Discovery” of California, which Tonkovich describes as Carr’s opus. Though the activist disregarded conquest narratives, he did come to appreciate O.C. from Aliso Creek in Laguna Beach and the Santa Ana Mountains, ecosystems that feature prominently through his three decades of innovative artwork.
Tonkovich hopes that people rediscover Carr through the retrospective, which is on exhibit through Dec. 13, and come to appreciate one of the county’s unheralded heroes.
“Not to pat myself on the back too much, but for 40 years, it turns out, I was right all along,” he said. “This guy was an amazing outsider artist, a self-taught writer and poet. Carr was a person who was, first and foremost, an Orange County artist. I’m doing my best to make him immortal.”
“Peter Carr: Artist in Survival” is on exhibit at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, Fine Arts Building Room 107, 11110 Alondra Blvd., Norwalk. The gallery is open Monday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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