Timothy Washington (b. 1946) has crafted a visionary display of mixed media works at his Los Angeles studio for over 50 years. A prominent figure during the Black Arts Movement—a key moment in the 1960s and 70s when African-American artists and writers collectively celebrated black culture—Washington has been a pioneer of socio-politically charged work ever since, exhibiting both locally and nationally with renowned fellow artists such as Charles White and David Hammons.

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Washington was raised in Watts where he found inspiration from his time climbing the Watts Towers while playing with his friends. Washington attended Chouinard Art School where he received a bachelor’s in fine arts degree. As a graduate of Chouinard Art Institute, (later merged with Cal Arts), he gained a firm foundation in realism and figurative abstraction. Between the 1970s and 1980s, he exhibited at now-legendary art space Gallery 32 in MacArthur Park in Brockman Gallery and Leimert Park. Both galleries were notable for cultivating the careers of prominent black artists in Los Angeles. While he went on to build a career as a studio set painter for NBC and Disney, Washington continued to create a prolific body of work that reflected his personal spirituality, social vision, and political critique.

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Washington received early recognition for his powerful dry point drawing on aluminum and carved wooden sculptures. In the early 1980s, he sought to innovate his use of materials and techniques and shifted to producing futuristic assemblage sculptures, which he continues to make today. To create them, Washington dips cotton in white glue, then applies it to shaped wire- hanger armatures, while also embedding it with myriad objects, including urban debris, plastic toys, street signs, ceramic shards, and other broken items that he finds in his neighborhood or collects through family and friends.

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An inter-disciplinary artist, the materials and content within Washington’s work often contain nuanced messages reflective of the contemporary moment. A series of aluminum etchings from the 1960s and 1970s depict the human form in reaction to social and political events of the time. The etching “1A” (1972) combines dry-point etching with found-object collage and depicts Washington and his brother as young men. With fingers outstretched both are rejectingWashington’s draft card, collage onto the aluminum plate, that branded him as immediately available for service in Vietnam. His unusual choice of showing the aluminum plates as completed objects, rather than using the plates to create prints, led LA Times art critic Henry Seldis to characterize Washington’s work as “technical unorthodoxy”.