What makes L.A. what it is?
Getty Research Institute (GRI) project manager Karen Stokes believed the answer lay in the city’s many archives. In 1994 she launched L.A. as Subject, a venture that took stock of the collections scattered across the metropolis—in everything from a big university library to a small shoebox—and explored new ways of studying L.A. through the traces of its past.
The GRI hosted L.A. as Subject from 1995 to 1999 and celebrated it with the 1999 symposium “Mapping L.A: A Global Prototype.” The GRI also distributed copies of Cultural Inheritance/LA, a 350-page directory of more than 170 community organizations, libraries, museums, and private collections surveyed by L.A. as Subject. Among those included in the project, which still continues to this day at the University of Southern California: the archives of the Automobile Club of Southern California, Western Costume Company, and a group of East LA muralists.
L.A. as Subject emerged against the backdrop of the 1992 Rodney King uprising. “This was a complicated moment, much like the moment we find ourselves in now in terms of institutions reconsidering their relationships with communities—particularly communities of color,” Stokes said in a 2020 interview. “All of us were a part of this conversation, East and West Side, North and South, Black, white, brown, red, etc.” Her far-reaching vision: to create collaborative partnerships between communities, cultural organizations, and local universities to share resources and information in both directions.
L.A. as Subject focused on the tinier, rarely used, and at-risk archives in the city. “There’s always been the traditional history of Los Angeles being told through the main repositories, but there’s an additional history of L.A that is contained in many of the smaller collections,” Robert G. Marshall, who led the endeavor’s advisory forum, told the Los Angeles Times in 1999. The project team hoped that coming together to care for and celebrate these collections would lead to more inclusive narratives about L.A. Indeed, Stokes’s work, says Getty research specialist Kristin Juarez, posed important questions about what is considered the subject of scholarship and how we engage with the larger L.A. cultural landscape, laying the groundwork for strategies developed for the African American Art History Initiative.
As part of the project, the 1996/97 theme of the Scholars Program—the long-standing annual fellowship that hosts scholars from around the country to conduct research at the GRI—was “Perspectives on Los Angeles.” It was the first time the Scholars Program theme was not related to European art. The inaugural event held at the Harold Williams Auditorium at the newly opened Getty Center featured a panel discussion about literary depictions of L.A. as both a utopia and an apocalyptic hellscape. At Getty, L.A. was now becoming a topic of serious study.
And yet the undertaking was never intended to stay at Getty. Stokes developed L.A. as Subject as a “prototype” and wanted it to evolve. “The idea was to bring these resources together on behalf of the community, not to be owned by an institution but to bring them together for the benefit of the broader L.A. regional community,” she says. The project has only grown since. As members of the LA as Subject network, the custodians of these compilations can share knowledge about preserving, conserving, and displaying the objects and ephemera related to LA history. In the past 25 years, L.A. as Subject has also organized the popular annual Los Angeles Archives Bazaar and founded the first Resident Archivist program in the country.
“L.A. as Subject develops like Los Angeles—it’s very amoebic, it doesn’t have strict borders,” says Liza Posas, an archivist and the project’s current coordinator. “L.A. as Subject is as unique as the city itself.”
