Foundation for Art Resources

Foundation for Art Resources, 1977-2017

Claire Copley, Morgan Thomas and Connie Lewallen directed amongst the most innovative galleries in the Los Angeles area during the mid-seventies. Claire Copley Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard presented a range of American and international artists including Allen Ruppersberg, Michael Asher, Bas Jan Ader, William Leavitt, and Allan McCollum. ThomasLewallen Gallery in Santa Monica showed many of the artists associated with Cal Arts including Douglas Huebler, John Baldessari, Jack Goldstein, and Jonathan Borofsky.

Since the galleries were commercially unsuccessful, Thomas, Lewallen, and Copley developed the nonprofit organization Foundation for Art Resources, FAR, 1977, enabling them to work more flexibly with the artists they believed in. Without a permanent location to support FAR would be able to respond to the needs of each particular project, be it film, book, lecture, performance, or exhibition. Their first projects included the production of John Baldessari's film, Six Colorful Inside Jobs, the book and performance Open America by James Lee Byars, taking place in Los Angeles and New York simultaneously. In 1979, the three founders moved on to other pursuits and the direction of FAR was transferred to the artist Dorit Cypis who invited Christina Ritchie to join as partner.

In 1979 Cypis and Ritchie maintained the exhibition space that was handed to them giving it up a year later to innovate an exploration of partnership with venues across the city, to question what an artist practice has to do with civic space and the public. Between 1979-1982, they initiated collaborative partnerships amongst numerous private, public and educational institutions throughout Los Angeles, producing and presenting contemporary art as site-specific installation, publication, video, film, performance, dialogue, radio, and the lecture series Art Talk Art addressing theoretical and critical issues of contemporary art and culture. Art events and dialogues were produced in numerous public contexts including the International Design Center, Downtown Los Angeles Public Library, an abandoned residential site, neighborhood movie theaters, a shopping center, etc. Participating artists included Mike Kelly, David Askevold, Louise Lawler, Candace Lewis, Matt Mullican, Glen Branca, Michael Smith, Barbara Bloom, the Kuchar Brothers, Jenny Holzer, Edit DeAk, as well as writers/historians Howard Singerman, Christopher Knight, Ann Rorimer, Ingrid Sischy, and Benjamin Buchloh. This was but a beginning of what continued to be generated by new FAR artist members over the next four decades. Many stories yet to be told.

In 1980 Cypis and Ritchie initiated two major changes in FAR's internal governance: 1. traditional power dynamic of a Board of Directors over the working staff was changed by stipulating that members of the Board are the working members of FAR; 2. FAR would be handed over to a new working Board of young artists and cultural workers every three years. The goal was to structure the identity of FAR as unfixed, to challenge artist members to work collectively, and to always distribute power. Between 1976-2016 FAR has been in the hands of more than 20 different groups and over 100 cultural workers as working Board members. FAR is the longest existing art collective without an exhibition space in Los Angeles. There is growing cultural interest in collective structures for production and artists are increasingly working collectively and socially to meet public contexts. FAR members have been exploring this vision for 40 years.

"FAR was managed by its initial founders for two years before Morgan Thomas handed its leadership over to Dorit Cypis in 1979, along with an exhibition space in Downtown LA. Cypis invited Christina Ritchie to run the organization with her, and together they developed the by-laws that would see FAR run by the artist volunteers who would participate as working members. They gave up the exhibition space in 1980, deciding to focus on itinerant projects that would explore relationships between the art works and the organization and venue partners throughout Los Angeles that hosted them." [1]