Free Rebels in Paradise by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

 
    Timeline: 1955–1969
    1955
    Walter Hopps organizes Action I, exhibition in the Merry-Go-Round building on the Santa Monica Pier. Announcement is designed by his childhood friend, artist Craig Kauffman.
    Ed Kienholz shows his work at Von’s Café Galleria, Laurel Canyon. Meets his future wife Mary Lynch.
    Later opens his first gallery in the lobby of the Coronet Theatre Cinema.
    Wallace Berman publishes first issue of his magazine of poetry and pictures, Semina .
    Peter Voulkos teaches ceramics at the Los Angeles County Art Institute (future Otis College of Art and Design). Students include Billy Al Bengston, Ken Price, and John Mason.
    The film Rebel Without a Cause , directed by Nicholas Ray, stars Dennis Hopper, James Dean, and Natalie Wood.
    Dean, 24, dies in a car accident.
    1956
    Lorser Feitelson begins his TV show, Feitelson on Art, which runs until 1963.
    Kienholz opens his Now Gallery.
    John Altoon returns to Los Angeles from New York and Europe and teaches at Chouinard Art Institute.
    Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams arrive in Los Angeles. Ruscha enrolls in Chouinard. Williams discovers folk music clubs in L.A. Joins the Navy.
    Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz organize the “4th Annual All-City Outdoor Art Festival” in Barnsdall Park.
    Jack Kerouac’s On the Road published.
    First polyurethane surfboards go on the market.
    1957
    Llyn Foulkes, Judy Gerowitz (later Chicago), and Irving Blum move to Los Angeles.
    Wallace Berman and Robert Alexander open Stone Brothers boutique and printing press.
    George Herms presents Secret Exhibition, his assemblage sculpture on a vacant lot in Hermosa Beach.
    Robert Irwin has first solo show at Felix Landau Gallery.
    Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz open Ferus Gallery. Wallace Berman exhibition is closed and artist is arrested for obscenity. John Altoon is given solo show.
    1958
    The TV police series 77 Sunset Strip debuts.
    Everett Ellin opens first gallery and Chez La Vie café, which closes after a year.
    Ruscha shares a house with fellow Chouinard students and Oklahomans Jerry McMillan, Pat Blackwell, and Don Moore. Joe Goode joins them in early 1959 and enrolls at Chouinard.
    Larry Bell enrolls at Chouinard.
    Billy Al Bengston, Craig Kauffman, and Ed Moses have first solo shows at Ferus.
    Robert Alexander and James Newman open Dilexi Gallery in San Francisco and show many Ferus artists including Moses, who starts using the name Ed Moses Y Branco.
    Irving Blum buys out Kienholz and becomes co-director of Ferus at new location on La Cienega Boulevard.
    Publication of The Holy Barbarians , with John Altoon on the cover, an account of the Beat scene in Venice by Lawrence Lipton.
    Peter Voulkos ceramics, sculpture, and paintings shown at the Pasadena Art Museum.
    Democrat Edmund (“Pat”) Brown elected Governor of California.
    Lenny Bruce performs monologues inspired by improvisational jazz and left-wing politics.
    Richard Neutra builds the Singleton house in Bel Air.
    1959
    Craig and Vivian Kauffman travel to Europe from 1959 to 1961.
    Ken Price returns to L.A. from graduate school in Alfred, New York.
    Virginia Dwan opens her gallery in Westwood.
    Four Abstract Classicists, a show of geometric abstract painting by John McLaughlin, Lorser Feitelson, Fred Hammersley, and Karl Benjamin at the L.A. County Museum of History, Science, and Art.
    A show by abstract artist Lee Mullican is held at the UCLA art galleries, organized by curator Frederick S. Wight.
    1960
    The contraceptive pill comes on the market.
    John Lautner designs the “Chemosphere,” or Malin residence.
    Opening of the LAX theme building designed by Charles Luckman, William Pereira, Welton Becket, and Paul Williams.
    Julius Shulman photographs Case Study House No. 22 designed by Pierre Koenig. The nighttime view of fashionably dressed young women seated in a glass-walled living room cantilevered over a hillside with a grid of lights in the distance defines the exotic, modern Southern