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This introductory chapter begins with a brief biographical sketch of Sabata Rodia, artist and creator of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. It then sets out the book's purpose, namely to bring together documentary evidence and hence sharpen our focus on the man, his life, and his art, while offering broader interpretive meanings of the artwork on three fronts. First, it places the artist and his artwork within various interpretative contexts of artistic and literary movements while elaborating the historic and cultural contexts of this Italian immigrant artist within local and global migrations and within the Italian diaspora. Second, it considers the issues of art and conservation, the struggle to save the Towers, as well as the contested cultural and political axes occupied by the Towers (and kindred heritage sites) today. Third, it turns to the Watts Towers' legacy in predominantly African American communities of creativity and the issue of “development” in Watts itself. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

The structures best known as the Watts Towers were known to Sabatino Rodia as “Nuestro Pueblo,” a provocative take on Los Angeles' original name, “El Pueblo de Nuestra Se ñora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula.” By inscribing his Towers in Spanish, Rodia honored his Mexican neighbors, the pre-American history of Los Angeles, and claimed the Towers and the city for others than he alone. This chapter shows how Nuestro Pueblo acted as a galvanizing force for a politics grounded in cultural identity and loud claims to social equity. Nuestro Pueblo's towers have been both generative of community and symbols of community in political fights over funding and territory. Nuestro Pueblo also represents the penultimate modern city as it embodies premodern labor while holding the multitudinous meanings, multilingual names, and commercial promises of the postmodern world city.

This chapter focuses on the activities of the guardianship group known as the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts (CSRTW). The group was founded in 1958 by William Cartwright and Nicholas King who had purchased the abandoned Watts Towers site. The CSRTW is committed to contesting, when necessary, city or state treatment of the Towers. Topics discussed include the creation of the first Watts Towers Arts Center in 1961 aimed at creating community goodwill and awareness of the Towers; the CSRTW's demise in 1985 and renewal in 2000; the preservation and maintenance of the Towers; the proposed establishment of an Advisory Conservation Committee composed of museum professionals; and the CSRTW's accomplishments.

This chapter presents the transcript of an artist's panel held during the conference “The Watts Towers Common Ground Initiative: Art, Migrations, Development,” in Los Angeles on October 22–24, 2010. The panel demonstrated how the Towers have inspired many individual artists and how the Watts Towers Arts Center (WTAC) became the cultural heart of Watts. Participants were former (John Outterbridge) and current (Rosie Lee Hooks) WTAC directors along with several artists involved with the Center over the years, including R. Judson Powell (who had worked with its first director and artist, Noah Purifoy in the early 1960s), Charles Dickson, Betye Saar, Augustine Aguirre, and Kenzi Shiokava.

This chapter addresses, first, Rodia's life and worldview as an Italian immigrant and, second, the Italian cultural practices and imagery embedded in his art. That is, it examines Rodia's life and the Towers in Watts through the prism of Italian diaspora history and southern Italian peasant cultural practices, imaginaries, and worldviews seemingly adapted by Rodia in California. It listens for Rodia's expressions of personal longing and enduring cultural myths and seeks to identify his hidden landscapes of memory. It considers the possible sources of his topographies—both mythic and physical. It focuses on the symbolic culture embedded therein—for example, bell towers, ships, gardens, hearths, treasure—and explores cultural practices of devotion, such as village celebrations (e.g. the Gigli of Nola) and ex-votos, to consider how the Towers might be considered a street festival or conversely a tangible expression of gratitude for “graces received”.

This chapter considers the highly individual and unprecedented nature of Rodia's Towers. It argues that Rodia's emphasis in building these Towers was on the doing, on the creation of something not simply momentous, but momentous because it was unprecedented. In short, building these Towers was about making a beginning—envisioning something utterly new, and something that would always remain new insofar as its objective could not be clearly understood. The process of creation ended only when Rodia decided to quit building the Towers. In fact, the Towers were never finished; they were only terminated. After working on the Towers for more than thirty years, Rodia one day decided that he was through with them. He then gifted these to a neighbor and left Los Angeles for good. Once finished, the Towers had lost their purpose, for they were all about the doing.

This afterword serves as a codicil to both the volume's Introduction and to the author's contribution, “Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migration, and Italian Imaginaries,” allowing her to share some personal reflections on the past decade of involvement with the Watts Towers and its Arts Center. This decade of activity has included both archival and oral research, public programming, and academic conference organization. In reviewing this recent history, the author has sought to further understand its challenges, goals, and accomplishments and achieve some form of closure in her own mind. She asks: Where had my early encounters with the Watts Towers led? What have I learned?

This chapter proposes that Rodia's architectural fantasy emerged in relationship to a larger set of interrelated sociocultural precepts immersed in southern Italian peasant and Italian American immigrant laborer perspectives. It explores the Watts Towers as the elucidation of, and resolution to, a turbulent life of displacement, death, alcoholism, and abandonment that was part of Rodia's Italian American subjectivity. It focuses on the social context of his life and artistic venture, as opposed to the biography that perpetuates the shopworn “outsider” narrative. To this end, it aims to locate Rodia's unique vision, individual drive, and innovative technology as emerging from a set of cultural practices that were part of a willful act of reinvention.

This chapter examines the Towers within a convergence of several disparate, yet interconnected, discourses about cities, history, monumentality, and public art in order to demonstrate how Simon Rodia's artwork gestures toward a particular production of space that is distinctly of a place, in general, and particularly Los Angeles. It first considers how narratives about cities and art circulate and interact in a fluid process of becoming within space and through time. Drawing on Italian writer Italo Calvino's work Invisible Cities, it uses the dialogic conversations about cities between the two main characters to begin to open up the possibility of reimagining how a place is collaboratively created through the stories told about it. From here it considers how storytelling as a form of history making is a salient way to think about how we teach and engage the politics of place. Finally, it looks into how embracing a more collaborative and processual approach to understanding urban environments based on narratives and storytelling interfaces with more specific theoretical engagements with the question of urban space.

This chapter examines the more “material” aspects of the Festa dei Gigli, a festival that has been celebrated for centuries in the town of Nola, in the Italian region of Campania. It considers features that might hypothetically connect the Gigli of Nola to Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts. It frames the discussion by reviewing current academic and nonacademic debates around the Festa dei Gigli in Nola—debates much like those swirling around the Watts Towers—focusing on “valorization” through a complex and highly articulated system of “patrimonialization,” on “museification,” on the Gigli UNESCO proposal, on the author's recent visits to other European festivals, and finally on tourism marketing and “mediatization.” The chapter especially reflects on the concept of tangible and intangible “heritage” as it specifically relates to the Gigli.

This chapter presents the author's account of creating the From Where I'm Standing photo-documentary workshop in 1995. Since 2005, she has been providing in-depth photography and writing workshops at the Watts Towers Arts Center to people in the community aged ten through sixty-nine. The objective of the workshop is the creation of an in-depth photo-documentary by and about the Watts community, and in the process build community. People of all ages participate in discussions about their photographs and writing, and experience the dynamic and vital relationship between the individual (artist) and the community (society) at large. The chapter concludes by identifying the resonances between the workshop, the Arts Center, and Simon Rodia's Watts Towers.

This chapter offers a conceptual and creative interpretation of Rodia's work, replacing critical analysis with a form of “creative synthesis” that answers the question: “How can an architectural work like Rodia's Watts Towers dictate structural constraints for a written work?” To emulate the Watts Towers, which integrates heterogeneous materials into a coherent structure, the chapter is composed of six discrete sections that merge into a continuous whole. As tribute to Rodia's masterpiece, a poem entitled “Sam's Ark: An LA Landmark” is also presented. The poem is written under the constraint that A is the only vowel used to correspond to the structural frame of Rodia's Towers.

This chapter presents the author's reflections about art environments, to aid in confronting the challenges of maintaining the future safety and security of Rodia's Watts Towers. It reinforces these thoughts by introducing the work of six contemporary creator-builders of art environments in Spain whose experiences bear out the broader nature of the area under discussion. These include the works of Francisco González Gragera, Justo Gallego Martínez, Francisco del Río Cuenca, José María Garrido Garciá, Julio Basanta López, and Josep Pujiula i Vila.

The structures Simon Rodia began constructing in 1921 were a personal undertaking and remained so until he ended it in 1954. During that period, this developing site was a personal endeavor executed on private land and not subject to review or public scrutiny. However, when Mr. Rodia ceded the deed to the property, a chain of ownership ensued that had consequences for the welfare of this site. In the art historical world, provenance defines this chain of ownership. Custody is more than mere possession of something or someone. The custodian (e.g. owner) is responsible not only for the care and supervision but the preservation and conservation of a work of art. This chapter traces the chain of ownership or custody of the Towers and comments on the impact of each custodian on this artwork. The chain of custodians includes Louis H. Sauceda (1955), Joseph Montoya (1956), William Cartwright and Nicholas King (1959), City of Los Angeles (Department of Public Works, 1975), State of California Department of Parks and Recreation (1977), and State of California Department of Parks and Recreation, and City of Los Angeles (Department of Cultural Affairs, 1985).

This chapter discusses how the Watts Towers is as much about Italian immigrants in California as it is about its creator, Italian immigrant Simon Rodia. Italian American immigrant novels and autobiographies of the era reveal that one common measure of success in the New World was how much wealth the immigrant could amass in the shortest amount of time. However, Rodia's life and Towers must be located on that other side of the success story, transcending the mere pursuit of riches in the New World. Ultimately, what is important about the Towers is that Rodia's site, like the over 100-year history of Italian American literature, expresses not only Italian immigrants' aspirations but conflicted recollections of their past in the Old World.

This chapter reflects on Rodia's Watts Towers, described as embodying “a philosophy of freedom, an image of human labor, and the everlasting creative tension—a true performance—toward realization.” Rodia courageously joins the Opus Incertum, assembling it into a new iconology, recycling and upcycling broken parts into meaningful fragments, fractal geometries, and kaleidoscopic aesthetics, where symmetry and rhythm predominate. For Rodia, his Towers have several meanings, including a celebration of California highways (66, 99, 101, the height of the three Towers); a complicated and flamboyant sundial system, casting its shadows in triplicate Stylus, or Gnomon; or a ship of fools or even an ark.

This chapter explores the conception of Rodia as the quintessential modernist artist of California, an inspiration who influenced the state's cultural life fully equal to that of any other visual artist who had lived and worked in the state. It argues that Rodia was the equal of Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, or Paul Klee for many in the generation of artists who came of age during or after World War II. He provided an exemplary model for transcending the dual challenge of personal marginality and regional provinciality. He created a work that was original, despite the absence of institutional resources to support his project. Each of his limitations, whether of materials, real estate, finances, or his own education, passed through his creative imagination to become a positive element strengthening his statement.

The Feast of the Gigli of Nola (Festa dei Gigli di Nola) is celebrated annually in honor of Saint Paulinus (San Paolino) on the 22nd of June in the city of Nola, Italy. During the festival, eight wood and paper-mâche obelisks, together with a boat, are carried through the streets of the city's historic center, lifted on many shoulders, and “danced” to the rhythm of music. This chapter describes the Gigli of Nola in the late nineteenth century; accounts for their evolution in time; and supports the thesis that Sabato Rodia likely had known of the Gigli and was inspired by them in the construction of his Towers in Watts.