By Barbara McMurray, Special to the Laguna Beach Independent
There is edgy art, and then there is art that lands one in jail.
Renowned Laguna Beach painter and sculptor G. Ray Kerciu, who turns 90 on Oct. 24, has led a life shaped by major events: the Korean War, the civil rights struggle, and technological breakthroughs like the iPad.
As the son of Romanian immigrant parents growing up in a working-class Detroit family, he imagined he would emulate his dad and work on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company.
The Korean War intervened. He was 20 years old when he and his best friend of 80 years, the actor Tom Skerritt, joined the Air Force after high school.
“My job was dropping supplies and troops from Japan out of planes,” he said. “I also transported a lot of body bags. A lot. My mom commented that I was a happy-go-lucky guy before the war and I came back much more subdued.”
But life went on. Skerritt urged his friend to also take advantage of the education the United States government offered them.
“The GI Bill saved my life,” said Kerciu. “If it weren’t for that, I would be building Fords on the factory floor.”
He attended Michigan State to get his bachelor’s degree, then earned his MFA at the resplendent Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, MI. Primarily a painter, he was that school’s first printmaking graduate student. The next step in any educated, enterprising young man’s life circa 1961: a first job.
“Dreadful” is how he describes his initiation into the working world as a professor at Sam Houston College in Huntsville, Texas. Home to the state’s oldest maximum-security prison with the highest rate of executions, his Texas experience sent him running for the exit after a year.
Although he could not have known it, his next step was a trip from the frying pan to the fire for an idealistic young artist: he landed a visiting professor teaching gig at the University of Mississippi. In 1962, Ole Miss was a racially segregated campus that made headlines when it refused to admit James Meredith, an African-American Air Force veteran. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett even assumed the position of university registrar to block Meredith’s admission. From his studio classroom balcony, Kerciu watched a tense drama unfold in the quad, with federal marshals lined up nose to nose against state troopers.
“Every redneck in the state came out,” Kerciu recalled. “Every other word was n—, ni—, ni—.”
When a deal was reached between Barnett and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to allow Meredith’s enrollment, a violent riot broke out on campus. Two bystanders were killed, 206 marshals and soldiers were injured, and 200 people were arrested.
Meredith was allowed to register for classes, but white students started wearing buttons emblazoned with “never” – signaling their opposition to campus integration. That button inspired Kercui’s massive painting that subtly incorporated a swastika image. Kerciu wanted to express that hatred must always be called out and battled. The fight continues.
“I honestly thought that someday this kind of racism would all be gone,” he observed. “But it’s just as alive now as it was then. It was just more obvious then.”
For the customary guest-professor exhibition at the end of the academic year, Kerciu decided to hold up a mirror to the hateful injustice.
The show featured “America the Beautiful,” an abstract, 8-foot Confederate flag with graffiti written all over it at a time when graffiti was not yet an artistic pursuit. His art students participated in the painting, scrawling on the canvas the ugly racist slogans they had heard on campus. Of the Mississippi bigots, Kerciu said, “I rubbed their faces in it.”
A lawsuit was filed against him for “desecrating the Confederate flag” with the slogans, and he was thrown in jail. A media frenzy ensued, including a Time magazine story. John Steinbeck sent a handwritten letter, now lost to history and multiple moves, that read, “I share your guilt.” Malcolm X sent him encouraging postcards on four consecutive days, one that read, “Get those Dixie rats!”
Sprung from jail, he high-tailed it to New York City and discovered he was the talk of the town for his bold civil rights activism. Vogueish New York artists were not producing works about the red-hot social upheaval issues, so Kerciu was a sensation. He was invited to show at the noted Martha Jackson Gallery, where donated works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol were sold to support the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a nonviolent civil rights organization.
Kerciu was offered teaching jobs and art shows, but California called. In 1963, he took his first tenure-track teaching job at Orange State College (changed a year later to California State College at Fullerton, and in 1972, Cal State Fullerton). On arrival, he discovered the campus was “an orange grove and some Quonset huts.” He became one of the founders of the school’s art department and helped build it to prominence.
When the Vietnam War began, the firebrand artist naturally became a passionate antiwar activist. “We booed Governor Reagan off the campus,” he reminisced with a grin.
The sexual revolution and drugs figured into his 1970s lifestyle, but he held down his teaching job and found his community in Laguna Beach. He bought a tiny cottage on a hillside in 1967 for $34,000, a sum his father called him crazy for spending. He still lives in the house with Mihae, his wife of 29 years, having designed and remodeled it himself. Like his art, it reflects the Bauhaus movement and the strong abstract elements of modernism he loves.
In 1996, Kerciu and many other locals were outraged when the 78-year-old Laguna Art Museum was usurped behind closed doors by the Newport Harbor Museum of Art, which, with the merger, became the Orange County Museum of Art.
“It was a done deal. The collection, the endowment, and the museum building were all going to Newport,” he recalled. “In my home, I gathered other shocked, angry art lovers – lawyers, activists, artists – and we formed SLAM, Save Laguna Art Museum. We put up such a fierce battle, and they were getting so much bad press, they blinked.
“We somehow got them to return the building, the museum name, half the endowment, and half the collection,” he said. Starting the museum over from scratch, Kerciu was voted president of LAM’s board.
He points out that LAM is not a city-held institution but a nonprofit that must constantly fundraise and support itself. “There have been times when we struggled to keep the doors open. It has turned out to be very successful.”
He still has strong feelings about social, economic and environmental justice. Kerciu is convinced the world’s most pressing issue is climate change. “Where we are right now, it’s just not working. We can’t even agree there’s a problem. The only solution is if young people step up and create change.”
Kerciu has given up his home art studio and now creates exclusively on the iPad, drawing abstract images with a stylus and editing them on a large monitor. He prints some in large format on metal and uses CVS Pharmacy’s economical photo center for others.
He has used his persuasive powers and his pocketbook to ensure that BC Space, a creative stronghold founded in 1973 by the late photographers Mark Chamberlain and Jerry Burchfield, “didn’t end up becoming a law office.” He contributed to the upgrades in the upstairs space at 235 Forest Avenue, which is now reimagined as the nonprofit Laguna Beach Cultural Arts Center. On Kerciu’s birthday, Oct. 24 at 7 p.m., the Center will screen “An Uncharted Journey,” a short documentary about his life and art, followed by a discussion. For information, visit lbculturalartscenter.org.
