In Honor of Its 50th Anniversary
SOME SERIOUS BUSINESS LAUNCHES AN ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
ABOUT THE 70s ALTERNATIVE SPACE MOVEMENT IN L.A.
Some Serious Business (SSB) was founded in Venice, California, in 1976 by Nancy Drew, Elizabeth Freeman, and Susan Martin, as a catalytic response to Conceptualism’s West Coast explosion of live performance, video screenings, installations, new music, dance, punk concerts, guerrilla exhibitions—and hybrid combinations that defied easy categorization.
The era was marked by tectonic shifts and demanded unique solutions to the particular needs of artists, as resources for groundbreaking creators were especially limited on the West Coast. A core participant in Los Angeles’ extraordinary diversity and growth in artistic production and collaboration, SSB devised support systems and gathered whatever was needed for pioneering artistic events—drawing what it could from conventional museum, entertainment, and media practices, and inventing the rest.
The newly launched Oral History Project traces the legacy of Some Serious Business and examines the rise of the alternative space movement in the 1970s and beyond. Nomadic by nature, SSB was one of handful of spaces—all run by women—that used Los Angeles as its canvas. The project seeks to record the voices of key individuals who helped create “alternative” spaces, who lived through that period, who participated in shaping a vibrant alternative art scene, and who broke new ground. It offers a look at an overlooked era in Los Angeles, whose collaborative strategies—before the “professionalization” of the art world—fostered close relationships and intense creativity.
Enablement models like Some Serious Business and CARP, which operated without a physical space, presented creators for the first time who went on to influence generations of artists. Liveness and direct experience were prized and performance flourished in myriad forms—breaking down boundaries and rigid definitions of what constituted “art” or “music.” Meanwhile, video, still in its infancy, redefined the possibilities of “television.”
The performance economy was built on mutual support. It wasn’t about money. News of events spread by word of mouth. Collaboration was key, and momentous events were staged on a shoestring. Publications such as High Performance, Art-Rite, LAICA Journal, WET, and Slash magazine covered the alternative scene, where audiences were repeatedly pushed beyond their comfort zones.
After 50 years, we are still going strong. Since our relaunch in 2015, we have carried forward the legacy we began half a century ago. We have produced performances like Our Future Ends by writer/director Clement Hil Goldberg, the centerpiece of Outfest in Los Angeles; curated exhibitions like Love Among the Ruins at Howl! Happening; published “We Started a Nightclub”: The Birth of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge by Those Who Lived it, an oral and social history of the seminal New York nightclub; presented artists ranging from Lydia Lunch and Umar Bin Hassan in No Wave Out, Delbert Anderson, an accomplished Diné jazz trumpet player, and the premiere of Sunder by composer Mariel Roberts, a commission for pianist Conor Hanick; and hosted dozens of artists residencies in New Mexico, Hawaii, and Tuscany through our SSB AWAY initiative.
“As leaders in arts management and producers, SSB enabled a cross-national network of artists, presenting works in Los Angeles and bringing some artists here for their very first time,” says art historian Homer Arnold, co-curator of the oral history. “Through their dynamic and nomadic curatorial methods, these works popped up throughout the city, like little creative brushfires that burned with the larger DIY energy of that moment.”
The oral history is destined for our collection in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian. We invite your help in filling in the blanks so that the life and work of the artists who contributed to the incredible energy of Los Angeles’ Alternative Space Movement of mid-70s will endure.
We are launching our first-ever online fundraising drive to support this project. Learn more here. Thank you for your generosity!