Lewis Hine
Lewis Wickes Hine was an American sociologist and photographer. Hine used his camera as a tool for social reform, his photographs were instrumental in changing child labor laws in the United States. Hine was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on September 26, 1874. After his father was killed in an accident, Hine began working and saved his money for a college education, he studied sociology at the University of Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. Hine led his sociology classes to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates and came to the realization that documentary photography could be employed as a tool for social change and reform. In 1907, Hine became the staff photographer of the Russell Sage Foundation. In 1908 Hine became the photographer for the National Child Labor Committee, leaving his teaching position.
Over the next decade, Hine documented child labor, with focus on the use of child labor in the Carolina Piedmont, to aid the NCLC's lobbying efforts to end the practice. In 1913, he documented child laborers among cotton mill workers with a series of Francis Galton's composite portraits. Hine's work for the NCLC was dangerous; as a photographer, he was threatened with violence or death by factory police and foremen. At the time, the immorality of child labor was meant to be hidden from the public. Photography was not only prohibited but posed a serious threat to the industry. To gain entry to the mills and factories, Hine was forced to assume many guises. At times he was a fire inspector, postcard vendor, bible salesman, or an industrial photographer making a record of factory machinery. During and after World War I, he photographed American Red Cross relief work in Europe. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hine made a series of "work portraits," which emphasized the human contribution to modern industry.
In 1930, Hine was commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building. He photographed the workers in precarious positions while they secured the steel framework of the structure, taking many of the same risks that the workers endured. In order to obtain the best vantage points, Hine was swung out in a specially-designed basket 1,000 ft above Fifth Avenue. During the Great Depression Hine again worked for the Red Cross, photographing drought relief in the American South, for the Tennessee Valley Authority, documenting life in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, he served as chief photographer for the Works Progress Administration's National Research Project, which studied changes in industry and their effect on employment. Hine was a faculty member of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was not completed; the last years of his life were filled with professional struggles by loss of government and corporate patronage.
Hine hoped to join the Farm Security Administration photography project, but despite writing to Roy Stryker, Stryker always refused. Few people were interested in his work, past or present, Hine lost his house and applied for welfare, he died on November 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after an operation. He was 66 years old. After Hine's death, his son Corydon donated his prints and negatives to the Photo League, dismantled in 1951; the Museum of Modern Art was offered his pictures and did not accept them, but the George Eastman House did. In 2006, author Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop's historical fiction middle-grade novel, Counting on Grace was published by Wendy Lamb Books; the latter chapters center on 12-year-old Grace and her life-changing encounter with Hine, during his 1910 visit to a Vermont cotton mill known to have many child laborers. On the cover is the iconic photo of Grace's real-life counterpart, Addie Card, taken during Hine's undercover visit to the Pownal Cotton Mill.
In 2016, Time published colorized versions of several of Hine's photographs of child labor in the US. Hine's work is held in the following public collections: Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County – five thousand NCLC photographs George Eastman House – nearly ten thousand photographs and negatives Library of Congress – over 5,000 photographs, including examples of Hine's child labor and Red Cross photographs, his work portraits, his WPA and TVA images. New York Public Library, New York Child Labor: Girls in Factory Breaker Boys Young Doffers in the Elk Cotton Mills Steam Fitter Workers, Empire State Building House Calls, a documentary about physician and photographer Mark Nowaczynski, inspired by Hine to photograph elderly patients. Lewis Wickes Hine | University of Illinois Lewsin Hine photographs | Shorpy.com
Baroque
The Baroque is a ornate and extravagant style of architecture, painting and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th until the mid-18th century. It preceded the Rococo and Neoclassical styles, it was encouraged by the Catholic Church as a means to counter the simplicity and austerity of Protestant architecture and music, though Lutheran Baroque art developed in parts of Europe as well. The Baroque style used contrast, exuberant detail, deep colour and surprise to achieve a sense of awe; the style began at the start of the 17th century in Rome spread to France, northern Italy and Portugal to Austria and southern Germany. By the 1730s, it had evolved into an more flamboyant style, called rocaille or Rococo, which appeared in France and central Europe until the mid to late 18th century; the English word baroque comes directly from the French, may have been adapted from the Portuguese term barroco, a flawed pearl. Both words are related to the Spanish term berruca; the term did not describe a style of music or art.
Prior to the 18th century, the French baroque and Portuguese barroco were terms related to jewelry, An example from 1531 uses the term to describe pearls in an inventory of Charles V's treasures. The word appears in a 1694 edition of Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française, which describes baroque as "only used for pearls that are imperfectly round." A 1728 Portuguese dictionary describes barroco as relating to a "coarse and uneven pearl."The French term for the artistic style may have had roots in the medieval Latin word baroco, a philosophical term, invented in the 13th century by scholastics to describe a complicated type of syllogism, or logical argument. In the 16th century the philosopher Michel de Montaigne associated the term'baroco' with "Bizarre and uselessly complicated." In the 18th century, the term was used to describe music, was not flattering. In an anonymous satirical review of the première of Jean-Philippe Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie in October 1733, printed in the Mercure de France in May 1734, the critic wrote that the novelty in this opera was "du barocque", complaining that the music lacked coherent melody, was unsparing with dissonances changed key and meter, speedily ran through every compositional device.
In 1762, Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française wrote that the term could be used figuratively to describe something "irregular, bizarre or unequal."Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a musician and composer as well as philosopher, wrote in 1768 in the Encyclopédie: "Baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, loaded with modulations and dissonances. The singing is harsh and unnatural, the intonation difficult, the movement limited, it appears that term comes from the word'baroco' used by logicians."In 1788, the term was defined by Quatremère de Quincy in the Encyclopédie Méthodique as "an architectural style, adorned and tormented". The terms "style baroque" and "musique baroque" appeared in Le Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française in 1835. By the mid-19th century, art critics and historians had adopted the term as a way to ridicule post-Renaissance art; this was the sense of the word as used in 1855 by the leading art historian Jacob Burkhardt, who wrote that baroque artists "despised and abused detail" because they lacked "respect for tradition."Alternatively, a derivation from the name of the Italian painter Federico Barocci has been suggested.
In 1888, the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin published the first serious academic work on the style, Renaissance und Barock, which described the differences between the painting and architecture of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The Baroque style of architecture was a result of doctrines adopted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1545–63, in response to the Protestant Reformation; the first phase of the Counter-Reformation had imposed a severe, academic style on religious architecture, which had appealed to intellectuals but not the mass of churchgoers. The Council of Trent decided instead to appeal to a more popular audience, declared that the arts should communicate religious themes with direct and emotional involvement. Lutheran Baroque art developed as a confessional marker of identity, in response to the Great Iconoclasm of Calvinists. Baroque churches were designed with a large central space, where the worshippers could be close to the altar, with a dome or cupola high overhead, allowing light to illuminate the church below.
The dome was one of the central symbolic features of baroque architecture illustrating the union between the heavens and the earth, The inside of the cupola was lavishly decorated with paintings of angels and saints, with stucco statuettes of angels, giving the impression to those below of looking up at heaven. Another feature of baroque churches are the quadratura. Quadratura paintings of Atlantes below the cornices appear to be supporting the ceiling of the church. Unlike the painted ceilings of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, which combined different scenes, each with its own perspective, to be looked at one at a time, the Baroque ceiling paintings were created so the viewer on the floor of the church would see the entire ceiling in correct perspective, as if the figures were real; the interiors of baroque churches became more and more ornate in the High Baroque, an
San Francisco Art Institute
San Francisco Art Institute is a private, non-profit college of contemporary art with the main campus in the Russian Hill district of San Francisco, California. Its graduate center is in Fort Mason on Pier 2 in the Golden Gate National Recreation Center, an army post. 400 undergraduates and 200 graduate students are enrolled. The institution is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, is a member of the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. Founded in 1871, SFAI is one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. San Francisco Art Institute began in 1871 with the formation of the San Francisco Art Association - a small but influential group of artists and community leaders, most notably, led by Virgil Macey Williams and first president Juan B. Wandesforde, with B. P. Avery, Edward Bosqui, Thomas Hill, S. W. Shaw, who came together to promote regional art and artists, to establish a school and museum to further and preserve what they saw as a new and distinct artistic tradition which had developed in the relative cultural isolation and unique landscape of the American West.
By 1874 the SFAA had 700 regular members and 100 life members, had raised sufficient funds and the necessary momentum to launch an art school, named the California School of Design. Painter Virgil Macy Williams, who had spent nearly ten years studying with master painters in Italy and had taught at Harvard College before coming to San Francisco, became the school's first director and painting instructor—positions he held until his sudden death in 1886. During Williams' tenure, the CSD developed a national reputation and amassed a significant collection of early California and western fine art as the foundation collected for a planned museum. In 1893, Edward Searles donated the Hopkins Mansion, one of the most palatial and elaborate Victorian mansions built, to the University of California in trust for the SFAA for "instruction in and illustration of the fine arts and literature." Named the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, it became San Francisco's first fine art and cultural center, housed both the CSD's campus and SFAA's art collection.
Through this new affiliation, students of the University of California, Berkeley were able to enroll in classes at the CSD. In 1906 the devastating fire following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art building, the CSD and SFAA facilities and art collection. At the time, the replacement value of the building and its contents was estimated at $2,573,000. However, the combined amount of numerous insurance policies yielded less than $100,000 for rebuilding. Within a year, the SFAA built a new but comparatively modest campus in the same location, adopted the name San Francisco Institute of Art. In 1916, the SFAA merged with the San Francisco Society of Artists and assumed directorship of the San Francisco Museum of Art at the Palace of Fine Arts, established to host the 1915 World's Fair, Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In addition, the school was renamed the California School of Fine Arts to better reflect its mission to promote and preserve regional art and culture.
In 1926 the school moved to 800 Chestnut Street, which remains the school's main campus as of 2015. In 1930 Mexican muralist Diego Rivera was hired to paint The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, located in the student-directed art gallery. During its first 60 years, influential artists associated with the school included Eadweard Muybridge and pioneer of motion graphics. S.. After World War II ended the school became a nucleus for Abstract Expressionism, with faculty including Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, Clay Spohn. Although painting and sculpture remained the dominant mediums for many years, photography had been among the course offerings. In 1946 Ansel Adams and Minor White established the first fine-art photography department, with Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange among its instructors. In 1947 distinguished filmmaker Sydney Peterson began the first film courses at CSFA. In this spirit of advancement, in 1949 CSFA Director Douglas MacAgy organized an international conference, The Western Roundtable on Modern Art, which included Marcel Duchamp, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gregory Bateson.
The roundtable aimed to frame new questions about art. By the early 1950s San Francisco's North Beach had become the West Coast center of the Beat Movement, music and discourse were an intrinsic part of artists' lives. Collage artist Jess Collins renounced a career as a plutonium developer and enrolled at SFAI as a painting student. In 1953 he and his partner, poet Robert Duncan, along with painter Harry Jacobus, started the King Ubu Gallery, an important alternative space for art and music. A distinctly Californian modern art soon emerged that fused abstraction, figuration and jazz. SFAI
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper, published in Los Angeles, since 1881. It has the fourth-largest circulation among United States newspapers, is the largest U. S. newspaper not headquartered on the East Coast. The paper is known for its coverage of issues salient to the U. S. West Coast, such as immigration trends and natural disasters, it has won more than 40 Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of other issues. As of June 18, 2018, ownership of the paper is controlled by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the executive editor is Norman Pearlstine. In the nineteenth century, the paper was known for its civic boosterism and opposition to unions, the latter of which led to the bombing of its headquarters in 1910; the paper's profile grew in the 1960s under publisher Otis Chandler, who adopted a more national focus. In recent decades, the paper's readership has declined and it has been beset by a series of ownership changes, staff reductions, other controversies. In January 2018, the paper's staff voted to unionize, in July 2018 the paper moved out of its historic downtown headquarters to a facility near Los Angeles International Airport.
The Times was first published on December 4, 1881, as the Los Angeles Daily Times under the direction of Nathan Cole Jr. and Thomas Gardiner. It was first printed at the Mirror printing plant, owned by Jesse Yarnell and T. J. Caystile. Unable to pay the printing bill and Gardiner turned the paper over to the Mirror Company. In the meantime, S. J. Mathes had joined the firm, it was at his insistence that the Times continued publication. In July 1882, Harrison Gray Otis moved from Santa Barbara to become the paper's editor. Otis made the Times a financial success. Historian Kevin Starr wrote that Otis was a businessman "capable of manipulating the entire apparatus of politics and public opinion for his own enrichment". Otis's editorial policy was based on civic boosterism, extolling the virtues of Los Angeles and promoting its growth. Toward those ends, the paper supported efforts to expand the city's water supply by acquiring the rights to the water supply of the distant Owens Valley; the efforts of the Times to fight local unions led to the October 1, 1910 bombing of its headquarters, killing twenty-one people.
Two union leaders and Joseph McNamara, were charged. The American Federation of Labor hired noted trial attorney Clarence Darrow to represent the brothers, who pleaded guilty. Otis fastened a bronze eagle on top of a high frieze of the new Times headquarters building designed by Gordon Kaufmann, proclaiming anew the credo written by his wife, Eliza: "Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True." Upon Otis's death in 1917, his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, took control as publisher of the Times. Harry Chandler was succeeded in 1944 by his son, Norman Chandler, who ran the paper during the rapid growth of post-war Los Angeles. Norman's wife, Dorothy Buffum Chandler, became active in civic affairs and led the effort to build the Los Angeles Music Center, whose main concert hall was named the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in her honor. Family members are buried at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios; the site includes a memorial to the Times Building bombing victims. The fourth generation of family publishers, Otis Chandler, held that position from 1960 to 1980.
Otis Chandler sought legitimacy and recognition for his family's paper forgotten in the power centers of the Northeastern United States due to its geographic and cultural distance. He sought to remake the paper in the model of the nation's most respected newspapers, notably The New York Times and The Washington Post. Believing that the newsroom was "the heartbeat of the business", Otis Chandler increased the size and pay of the reporting staff and expanded its national and international reporting. In 1962, the paper joined with The Washington Post to form the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post News Service to syndicate articles from both papers for other news organizations, he toned down the unyielding conservatism that had characterized the paper over the years, adopting a much more centrist editorial stance. During the 1960s, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, more than its previous nine decades combined. Writing in 2013 about the pattern of newspaper ownership by founding families, Times reporter Michael Hiltzik said that: The first generations bought or founded their local paper for profits and social and political influence.
Their children enjoyed both profits and influence, but as the families grew larger, the generations found that only one or two branches got the power, everyone else got a share of the money. The coupon-clipping branches realized that they could make more money investing in something other than newspapers. Under their pressure the companies split apart, or disappeared. That's the pattern followed over more than a century by the Los Angeles Times under the Chandler family; the paper's early history and subsequent transformation was chronicled in an unauthorized history Thinking Big, was one of four organizations profiled by David Halberstam in The Powers That Be. It has been the whole or partial subject of nearly thirty dissertations in communications or social science in the past four decades; the Los Angeles Times began a decline with Los Angeles itself with the decline in military production at the end of the Cold War. It faced hiring freezes in 1991-1992. Another major decision at the same time was to cut the range of circulation.
They cut circulation in California's Central Valley, Nevada and the San Diego ed
Edward Ruscha
Edward Joseph Ruscha IV is an American artist associated with the pop art movement. He has worked in the media of painting, drawing and film. Ruscha works in Culver City, California. Ruscha was born into a Roman Catholic family in Omaha, with an older sister, a younger brother, Paul. Edward Ruscha, Sr. was an auditor for Hartford Insurance Company. Ruscha's mother was supportive of her son's early signs of artistic skill and interests. Young Ruscha was attracted to cartooning and would sustain this interest throughout his adolescent years. Though born in Nebraska, Ruscha lived some 15 years in Oklahoma City before moving to Los Angeles in 1956 where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute under Robert Irwin and Emerson Woelffer from 1956 through 1960. While at Chouinard, Ruscha edited and produced the journal "Orb" together with Joe Goode, Emerson Woelffer, Stephan von Huene, Jerry McMillan, others. Ruscha spent much of the summer of 1961 traveling through Europe. After graduation, Ruscha took a job as a layout artist for the Carson-Roberts Advertising Agency in Los Angeles.
By the early 1960s he was well known for his paintings and photographs, for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which included artists Robert Irwin, John Altoon, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Edward Kienholz. He worked as layout designer for Artforum magazine under the pseudonym “Eddie Russia” from 1965 to 1969 and taught at UCLA as a visiting professor for printing and drawing in 1969, he is a lifelong friend of guitarist Mason Williams. Ruscha achieved recognition for paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books, all influenced by the deadpan irreverence of the Pop Art movement, his textual, flat paintings have been linked with both the beat generation. While in school in 1957, Ruscha chanced upon unknown Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces in the magazine Print and was moved. Ruscha has credited these artists’ work as sources of inspiration for his change of interest from graphic arts to painting, he was impacted by John McLaughlin's paintings, the work of H.
C. Westermann, Arthur Dove’s 1925 painting Goin’ Fishin’, Alvin Lustig's cover illustrations for New Directions Press, much of Marcel Duchamp’s work. In a 1961 tour of Europe, Ruscha came upon more works by Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, R. A. Bertelli’s Head of Mussolini, Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais; some critics are quick to see the influence of Edward Hopper's Gas in Ruscha's 1963 oil painting, Standard Station, Texas. In any case, "Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head," Ruscha said. Although Ruscha denies this in interviews, the vernacular of Los Angeles and Southern California landscapes contributes to the themes and styles central to much of Ruscha's paintings and books. Examples of this include the publication Every Building on the Sunset Strip, a book of continuous photographs of a two and one half mile stretch of the 24 mile boulevard. In 1973, following the model of Every Building on the Sunset Strip, he photographed the entire length of Hollywood Boulevard with a motorized camera.
Paintings like Standard Station, Large Trademark, Hollywood exemplify Ruscha's kinship with the Southern California visual language. Two of these paintings and Large Trademark were emulated out of car parts in 2008 by Brazilian photographer Vik Muniz as a commentary on Los Angeles and its car culture, his work is strongly influenced by the Hollywood film industry: the mountain in his Mountain Series is a play on the Paramount Pictures logo. The proportions of the Hollywood print seems to mimic the Cinemascope screen. Ruscha completed Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights in 1961, one year after graduating from college. Among his first paintings this is the most known, exemplifies Ruscha's interests in popular culture, word depictions, commercial graphics that would continue to inform his work throughout his career. Large Trademark was followed by Standard Station and Wonder Bread. In Norm’s, La Cienega, on Fire, Burning Gas Station, Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Fire, Ruscha brought flames into play.
In 1966, Ruscha reproduced Standard Station in a silkscreen print using a split-fountain printing technique, introducing a gradation of tone in the background of the print, with variations following in 1969. In 1985, Ruscha begins a series of "City Lights" paintings, where grids of bright spots on dark grounds suggest aerial views of the city at night. More his "Metro Plots" series chart the various routes that transverse the city of Los Angeles by rendering schematized street maps and blow-ups of its neighborhood sections, such as in Alvarado to Doheny; the paintings are grey and vary in their degrees of light and dark, therefore appearing as they were done by pencil in the stippling technique. A 2003 portfolio of prints called Los Francisco San Angeles shows street intersectio
Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the middle ages; the intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became manifest in art, politics and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man"; the Renaissance began in the 14th century in Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.
Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Milan and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy. The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation; the art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance": It is no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization – historians of economic and social developments and religious situations, most natural science – but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly by historians of Art. Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
The word Renaissance meaning "Rebirth", first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France; the word Renaissance has been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, art, politics, science and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, searched for realism and human emotion in art. Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West.
It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. In the revival of neo-Platonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion, reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity; this new engagement with Greek Christian works, the return to the original Greek of the Ne
West Adams, Los Angeles
West Adams is a historic neighborhood in the South Los Angeles region of Los Angeles, California. The area is known for its large number of historic buildings and notable houses and mansions throughout Los Angeles, it is a youthful, densely populated area with a high percentage of African American and Latino residents. The neighborhood has several private schools. West Adams is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles, with most of its buildings erected between 1880 and 1925, including the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. West Adams was developed by railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington and wealthy industrialist Hulett C. Merritt of Pasadena, it was once the wealthiest district in the city, with its Victorian mansions and sturdy Craftsman bungalows, a home to Downtown businessmen and professors and academicians at USC. Several historic areas of West Adams, Harvard Heights, Lafayette Square, Pico-Union, West Adams Terrace, were designated as Historic Preservation Overlay Zones by the city of Los Angeles, in recognition of their outstanding architectural heritage.
Menlo Avenue-West Twenty-ninth Street Historic District, North University Park Historic District, Twentieth Street Historic District, Van Buren Place Historic District and St. James Park Historic District, all with houses of architectural significance, are located in West Adams; the development of the West Side, Beverly Hills and Hollywood, beginning in the 1910s, siphoned away much of West Adams' upper-class white population. One symbol of the area's emergence as a center of black wealth at this time is the landmark 1949 headquarters building of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, a late-period Moderne structure at Adams and Western designed by renowned black architect Paul Williams, it housed. West Adams' transformation into an affluent black area was sped by the Supreme Court's 1948 invalidation of segregationist covenants on property ownership; the area was a favorite among black celebrities in the 1950s. Singer Ray Charles's business headquarters, including his RPM studio, is located at 2107 Washington Boulevard.
The intersection of Washington Boulevard and Westmoreland Boulevard, at the studio, is named "Ray Charles Square" in his honor. Many African-American gays have moved into the neighborhood, it has become the center of black gay life in Los Angeles earning the nickname of "the black West Hollywood" or "the black Silver Lake" Many of the neighborhoods are experiencing a renaissance of sorts with their historic houses being restored to their previous elegance. In total, more than 70 sites in West Adams have received recognition as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, a California Historical Landmark, or listing on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the Mapping L. A. project of the Los Angeles Times, a total of 21,764 people lived in West Adams's 1.48 square miles, according to the 2000 U. S. census—averaging 14,686 people per square mile, among the highest population densities in the city as a whole. Population was estimated at 22,857 in 2008; the median age was 28, considered young.
The percentages of residents aged birth to 18 were among the county's highest. Latinos made up 56.2% of the population, with black people at 37.6%, white people 2.4%, Asian 1.7%, other 2%. Mexico and El Salvador were the most common places of birth for the 36.9% of the residents who were born abroad, an average percentage of foreign-born when compared with the city or county as a whole. The $38,209 median household income in 2008 dollars was considered low for the county; the percentage of households earning $20,000 or less was high, compared to the county at large. The average household size of 3.1 people was about average for the city. Renters occupied 62.8% of the housing units, homeowners occupied the rest. In 2000, there were 1,078 families headed by single parents, or 21.8%, a rate, high for the county and the city. The percentages of never-married women and divorced women were among the county's highest. According to the "Mapping L. A." project of the Los Angeles Times, West Adams is flanked by Mid-City to the north—across the Santa Monica Freeway—Jefferson Park to the east, Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw to the south and Palms to the west.
The neighborhood's street boundaries are the Santa Monica Freeway on the north, Crenshaw Boulevard on the east and Jefferson Boulevards on the south and the Culver City line on the west. Project leader Doug Smith reported that, in response by the public to advance posting of the proposed maps, "Among the bitter rifts we encountered were the competing claims to the name West Adams." Historical purists would reserve the designation West Adams for the once-upper-crust district of Victorian mansions now falling in the shadow of USC. But residents farther west have appropriated the name for that hard-to-define area between the 10 Freeway and Baldwin Hills. To bolster their case, the area's Neighborhood Empowerment Zone bears that name; the discussion has taken on powerful emotional content in recent years as part of a larger debate over gentrification and changing demographics in that part of the city. We resolved the argument as best we could, using the West Adams label for the region west of Crenshaw Boulevard and including the old mansions east of Ve
