Remembering Olala Farms

Alvin Banfield Light (1931-1980) was an artist active in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s and is known for sculpture-modernism. Robert H. Hudson (born 1938) is five years younger than Arlo and enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1963 to receive his Master's Degree in Fine Arts, the same institute Arlo attended. Inspired by Alvin Light, most of Arlo's early sculptures were made from different kinds of wood, relying on natural colors and textures (as seen, for example, in Arlo's piece 'Hipster' from 1961, illustrated in Albright's book).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Arlo and Robert H. Hudson, who is mainly known for his funk art assemblages of the late 1950s and 1960s, both belonged to the Funk art movement: "The Funk art movement was a regional art movement, most predominant in Northern California. Some notable cities where the Funk movement was concentrated in consisted of Berkeley, Marin County, Big Sur, and North Beach. [...] During the 1960s, the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, was a free and spiritual environment due to its beatnik art culture and the youth political activism reacting against the Vietnam War going on at the time" (Wikipedia 2017). Arlo, who was also part of the Beat Generation in the 1950s,  "had done his most innovative and influential work before the 1960s had ended" (Albright 1985, 151). The literary movement of the Beat Generation was started by a group of authors including Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, as well as Gary Snyder (born 1930). Snyder, a poet and important member of the Beat Generation, left San Francisco around the same time Arlo and Robyn did, also to live on the Ridge in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. They have been friends ever since.

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As mentioned above, Arlo was also part of the Funk art movement of the 1950s, as he attended the California School of Fine Arts together with Robert Hudson. In an article written in 1967, the author and first director of the University of Berkeley Art Museum, Peter Selz, writes about the Beat Generation's involvement in the Funk movement in San Francisco: "Many of the Funk artists began as painters, and much of Funk art, although three-dimensional, remains more closely related to recent traditions in painting than in sculpture. [...] In the fifties the beat poets, with their vociferous disregard of social mores and taboos, were very much on the scene" (Selz 1967, 5). He explains that "in San Francisco it [the movement] was new and full of excitement, and helped bring about a kind of free environment in which Funk, itself a combination of sculpture and painting, could flourish. [...] [T]here is a general trend toward greater care in execution and more precision, partly due to a limited amount of recognition enjoyed by the artists, and partly facilitated by the use of new materials - all kinds of plastics, including fiberglas, vinyl, epoxy, and the polyester resins. [...] Arlo Acton uses shiny metal instead of old pieces of lumber" (Selz 1967, 6). Arlo's connection to the Funk art movement inspired him to work with other materials than wood, such as different kinds of metals or later on with titanium balls that he bought from Mars Aviation (see 'Music with Balls').

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Arlo has also taught Sculpture at the Art Institute of the University of California, Berkeley in 1963 and is one of the founders of the Berkeley sculptors' movement. His sculptors have been exhibited in various museums and he has won several prizes (See: Painting and sculpture in California: The Modern Era: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 1976, page 196 to read about Arlo C. Acton).

 

The list below summarizes some of the exhibitions and art shows Arlo was part of, and some of the prizes he won:

​- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in 1961; Edgar Walter Prize (won) in 1961

- Richmond Art Association in 1961 (won, second prize)

- First one-man exhibition held at the Holies Gallery in San Francisco in 1962

- 'Some Points of View' exhibition in 1962 at the Stanford University in Palo Alto

- 'The Artist's Environment: The West Coast' exhibition in Fort Worth, Texas in 1962

- 'Fifty California Artists' Exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art (WMAA), 1962-1963

- Group exhibition at the 'Troisieme Biennale de Paris' in the 'Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris' in 1963

- 'Funk' exhibition at the University Art Museum, UC, Berkeley in 1967, curated by Peter Selz

- 'American Sculpture of the Sixties' in the Los Angeles 'County Museum of Art' in 1967

- Esther Robles Gallery in Los Angeles in 1969

- 'Sound Sculpture As' at the 'Museum of Conceptual Art' (MOCA) in San Francisco in 1970

 

The 'Sound Sculpture As' exhibition was curated by Tom Marioni, who invited nine sculptors to make sound works for his show. "Each artist produced sounds by manipulating a material. [...] For the finale, Arlo Acton distributed several hundred metal crickets and the loft began to ring with chirping sounds. Then he released a polished metal ball hung from the ceiling which smashed into a heavy glass plate" (Exhibition: Sound Sculpture As 1970). The 'Sound Sculpture As' exhibition has been recorded and you can listen to a 38 minute audio file by MOCA/FM to get an impression of the sounds produced: 'MOCA/FM: Sound Sculptures As'.