Whatever Happened to the Frontier? Performing Provincialism in Post-War Los Angeles

During the 1950s and 1960s, critics writing about art on America’s West Coast often treated it as provincial. At the same time, artists working in Los Angeles engaged in projects of self-fashioning that frequently alluded to frontiersmen and cowboys. This article examines how the rhetoric of the historic frontier and the Old West were deployed in the post-war decades by both writers and artists. It considers the ways in which artists such as Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode and Barbara Smith incorporated these references as a means to perform, undermine or challenge regionalism and provincialism.