Los Angeles Museum to Oversee Watts Towers
By RANDY KENNEDYThe Los Angeles County Museum of Art said on Thursday that it had completed an agreement with the City of Los Angeles that puts the museum in charge of efforts to repair and preserve the Watts Towers, the cathedral-like spires and crockery-encrusted forms built by the self-taught artist Simon Rodia in his spare time over more than three decades. The towers, which were once almost demolished by the city and then later designated a national landmark, were damaged slightly in the 1994 earthquake and again during a 2008 windstorm.
The museum, with $150,000 supplied by the city’s department of cultural affairs, will collaborate with other art institutions and with community groups in the Watts neighborhood to assess the site’s condition and make a plan for repairs and conservation. The hope is that the effort will lead to greater philanthropic attention and a source of long-term financing to maintain the towers, two of which soar more than 90 feet and have become symbols of Los Angeles’s cultural history.
Rodia, an immigrant from Italy who died in 1965, used basic tools and found or donated materials (scrap iron, mesh, shells, broken glass and tile) to build the massive artwork, which he described as a monument to America and to the human spirit. “I had it in mind to do something big,” he once said, “and I did it.”
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