Sumptuous swimming pools; AfriCOBRA’s black power art
·30 min·2 clips
Swimming pools turned home into a vacation place, a big transformation after the war.
The pool comes first. Frances Anderton opens in Southern California summer, then picks up Splash! The Art of the Swimming Pool, the Rizzoli coffee table book with Tim Street Porter's photographs and Annie Kelly's essays. Kelly gets practical about fantasy. An infinity edge needs the right site; in a plain suburban yard, it can feel pointless unless the water can meet a view, as it does at Lautner's Silvertop pool above Silver Lake. Resorts helped sell that dream. Hotels and warm-weather holidays made the infinity pool feel almost normal, so homeowners try to bring the feeling home when the property can handle it. The trick is staged from the swimmer's side, where the edge briefly makes the pool seem to slide into the view. Rooftop pools take the same desire and move it upward. Anderton uses the Standard Hotel as an example of a pool type turning up more often in LA hotels and multi-family buildings. Kelly treats that as a question of structure and placement. If the ground will not work, the roof can become another room, as long as the supports can take it. At night, the height does its own work. The swimmer gets a skyline instead of a backyard. Then the episode changes medium. AfriCOBRA, the Chicago-based collective formed in the late 1960s, appears through artists who wanted their work to strengthen black communities. Color carries the argument. The guests describe Kool-Aid colors as part of the AfriCOBRA philosophy, tied to what African-Americans were wearing across the country in the 60s. At the Broad Museum, Carolyn Lawrence talks about receiving attention after a life where art was not her only way to make a living. Soul of a Nation, Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963 to 1983 places AfriCOBRA inside that era and closes at the Broad Museum on September 1st.
