Having been involved for many years with communities of artists in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and New York City, I am currently working toward a PhD in Geography here at UCLA. My master's thesis was about artist organizations in Los Angeles, looking at their place-making activities and whether these activities align with a creative cities approach to urban planning and development. My dissertation will extend these ideas to encompass environmental advocacy alongside artists' cultural and civic work. During this summer, however, I am processing the recently acquired records of the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), an advocacy group that has, over the years, emphasized a creative, cultural approach when addressing urban environmental issues that pertain to the Los Angeles River.

The narrative of the Los Angeles River's concrete imprisonment has become a rallying cry for environmentalists and urban nature lovers throughout the region. The Los Angeles River is an alluvial river. According to urban environmental historian Jared Orsi, the two principal river systems affecting the Los Angeles Basin - the Los Angeles and the San Gabriel - lose more elevation in their fifty-mile course to the sea than that American icon, the "mighty" Mississippi, loses in its entire route to the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1930s, flooding had catastrophic effects on the ever-growing built environment in Los Angeles; the resulting solution was to use concrete to channelize almost the entire length of the river. Below, the devastation wrought by the 1938 flood is documented in two small photographs by the American architectural photographer, Julius Shulman:

The historical construction project that is the Los Angeles River-as-flood control channel took approximately 20 years to complete. In the mid-1980s, the river became the object of another sort of construction project launched by FoLAR. The complexity of this project meant a careful dismantling of assumptions and understandings of the urban environment, in order to reconstruct the Los Angeles River as an object with symbolic, cultural, political, environmental, and civic significance.

The organization, Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), was conceived of as a 40-year art project and from its inception often proclaimed the river in cultural terms. One of the original founders of FoLAR, the performance artist and poet, Lews MacAdams, has identified Robert Smithson, the American earthwork artist; Joseph Beuys, the German performance artist associated with the Fluxus movement; and the American poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder as inspirations.

In FoLAR's archives, we find reference to poets:

In FoLAR-generated educational materials, references to cultural representations of life along iconic "American Rivers" re-envision a Los Angeles River as one of natural and symbolic significance:

And, almost from FoLAR's inception, we find river advocates' vision of the river's potential to provide opportunities for urban recreation:

In keeping with the vision of a culturally re-constructed Los Angeles River, the current site of the Los Angeles State Historic Park near Los Angeles' Chinatown and the Los Angeles River was the site of an artwork, This is Not a Cornfield, using an historically and culturally significant crop - corn. Employing a reference to surrealist artist René Magritte's Treachery of Images (this is not a pipe), art was the catalyst for a solution involving politicians, businesspeople, environmental advocates, and Los Angeles residents. These few images are a small peek into the FoLAR records documenting the ongoing revival story of the river that has, in the past, been ridiculed as not-a-river.

By Diane Ward