Visiting artist series ends with Foulkes

Llyn Foulkes, dubbed “the curmudgeon-genius of the L.A. art scene,” comes to Spokane this week to close out this season’s Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

His idiosyncratic painting style, which often mixes familiar pop-culture elements in unexpected ways, has been compared to the 1960s Chicago movement and the Pop art of Los Angeles.

The introduction to his 1995 book collection “Llyn Foulkes: Between a Rock and a Hard Place” proclaims: “Only Foulkes would paint a child comforting her angst-ridden father, who wears a Superman costume under his shirt, or the Lone Ranger dying of laughter at the feet of Mickey Mouse in Western schoolmarm drag.”

In addition to the “curmudgeon-genius” label from the LA Weekly, the New York Times described one Foulkes exhibit as “a big, vehemently satiric multimedia picture about genocide, environmental destruction and the moral idiocy of mainstream American culture.”

Foulkes was born in Yakima in 1934 and attended the University of Washington before entering the U.S. Army. After leaving the service, he moved to Los Angeles to study at the Chouinard Art Institute.

In 1967, he was chosen as the U.S. representative to Brazil’s Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, and was awarded first prize at the Paris Biennale that same year.

His work has been seen in galleries and museums around the world, including the Museums of Modern Art in New York and San Francisco, New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Chicago Art Institute.

A longtime musician, Foulkes in 2004 released a CD of original songs performed on “his machine,” a one-man band apparatus that includes bulb horns, animal bells, a xylophone, drums, a bass string and organ pipes.

The 2007-08 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, titled “Real, Surreal & Cartoons,” has included previous visits by Seattle painter Karen Ganz in October and Bay Area video artist Kota Ezawa in March.