"Trading Dirt with Simon Rodia & Allan Kaprow" to be screened

Watts Towers Arts Center/Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center and LA CITYVIEW 35 announce

TRADING DIRT WITH SIMON RODIA & ALLAN KAPROW
A film by Rosie Lee Hooks and Paul. S. Rogers

SCREENING: Sunday, August 10, 2008, 2:00 p.m.
Watts Towers Arts Center
1727 East 107th St.
Los Angeles, CA 90002


In ‘Trading Dirt With Simon Rodia & Allan Kaprow’, Host Rosie Lee Hooks takes us on a Happening with Artist-Storytellers Rogelio Acevedo, Augustine Aguirre, Domonique Moody, John Outterbridge, Margarita and Saul Pichardo, Kenzi Shiokava, Jacqueline and Roderick Sykes. Together, they share spontaneous conversations, storytelling, socialization and unrehearsed interactions while exchanging buckets of dirt.

Allan Kaprow, an American painter, assemblagist and a pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art developed a new art form that came to be known as a "Happening". Just a few short years earlier, Simon Rodia, working alone for thirty-three years, using tile setter’s tools with no drawing board designs, scaffolding, bolts or welding finished the largest single work of art created by one man – The Watts Towers.

The production documents in a tangible form, the idea of circulating and giving back to the community and receiving and passing on ideas. The artist-storytellers are each directly involved in educating and providing leadership in arts education on a continuous basis at the Watts Towers Arts Center. ‘Trading Dirt With Simon Rodia & Allan Kaprow’ inter cuts vintage footage from the film ‘Watts Towers” by William Hale with contemporary images of the Watts Community, surrounding areas and St. Elmo Village.

As Kaprow said, "The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible." The idea of having some of these mentors’ dirt and culture, mix directly with each other and Simon Rodia is a moment in time ‘Trading Dirt With Simon Rodia & Allan Kaprow’.