LOS ANGELES FINE ARTS SQUAD
Biographical Information
Artists Terry Schoonhoven and Victor Henderson began a collaboration in 1969 with the mural, Brooks Street Painting, on the back wall of Henderson's Venice studio. Although academically trained, both shared a desire to take their art out of the elitist gallery scene and bring it directly into the community. Jim Frazen and Leonard Koren, students of Schoonhoven's, joined the group for a short time. The Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad viewed its murals as street theater, relishing their immediate effect on the community and caring less about how long their paintings lasted. Most of the group's work is either gone or badly damaged. The squad disbanded in 1974.
By far its largest and most visible mural was the 15,000-square-foot Beverly Hills Siddhartha, a satire of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha and the only project on which all four members worked. It became an instant landmark when completed on the exterior of a La Cienega Boulevard nightclub in 1969, but was painted out in 1972 by a new owner. Another popular mural was Venice in the Snow, at the Venice boardwalk. Painted in 1970, it was almost totally obscured just two years later when an apartment building was constructed next door. In 1971 the Newport Harbor Art Museum commissioned Schoonhoven and Henderson to paint Black Submarine for an exhibit. The Squad's last mural, Ghost Town, was a futuristic landscape of the San Fernando Valley community of Thousand Oaks where the painting was completed in 1972.
Mural Credits
The Isle of California (photo)
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