For years, artist Todd Gray kept the two strands of his creative life totally separate from each other. There was his commercial work: shooting bands like the Rolling Stones live on stage and creating album covers for acts like Cheryl Lynn and Barry White. And there was his fine art, which has generally taken the form of sculptural photographic collages that he creates out of pictures he makes.
In 1988, when he was hired to shoot the cover of Bobby Brown’s hit solo album, “Don’t Be Cruel,” he hid the news from his classmates at the California Institute of the Arts, where he was pursuing his master of fine arts. “I didn’t tell anybody,” he recalls. People who knew the artist from one world didn’t necessarily know about the other — a divide that Gray’s wife, artist Kyungmi Shin, likened to the separation between church and state.
That concept serves as the foundation for the artist’s new solo show at the Brick, “Todd Gray: Church and State.” The exhibition, which opened Sunday in East Hollywood, aims to unify both halves of his work.
Many of his more than 100 album covers are on view. So are three mural-sized collages that reflect his ongoing investigations into the legacies of colonialism. This includes two brand new works, as well as a nearly 30-foot piece from 2021, “Sumptuous Memories of Plundering Kings,” never before seen in Los Angeles. It is a commanding work: composed out of overlapping framed photographs stacked upon one another, it links together sites marked by the slave trade, including imperial gardens in Europe and old slave trails in Ghana (where Gray and Shin maintain a residence).
On a sunny Thursday morning, I meet the artist at the Brick, where he is in the process of installing his show. Gray, 72, is a personable, wide-ranging conversationalist. At one moment, he shares a wild story about the near-mortal travails of sharing a house with Iggy Pop. (The singer almost asphyxiated him after leaving the gas running on the stove.) The next, he is reflecting on the ideas of theorist Stuart Hall and the ways individuals can resist hegemony. “What is resistance?” asks Gray, shifting into professor mode. (He taught at Cal State Long Beach for many years.) “It’s identifying normativity. It’s how power makes the unacceptable, acceptable.”
The exhibition at the Brick marks an ascendant moment in the artist’s already extraordinary life. In April, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art debuted its new David Geffen Galleries, it prominently featured a commission by Gray titled “Octavia’s Gaze,” a 27-foot-long collage that includes a portrait he made of the science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. The following month, he unveiled a monumental public art piece for L.A. Metro’s new Wilshire/La Cienega Station, inspired by the drawings of S. Charles Lee, the Art Deco architect who designed the Saban Theatre. This past spring, Gray was also the subject of a solo show at Perrotin gallery’s L.A. space titled “Portals,”where he presented numerous photo collages that explored the themes of power and submission that preoccupy him.
The Brick’s director Hamza Walker, who first became acquainted with the artist more than a decade ago, says that to encounter Gray’s work is to tug on a thread that winds through centuries of history, as well as through more specific narratives of popular culture and fine art. “Church and state were kind of at war,” he says of Gray’s work, “but they were also in dialogue.”
Gray’s early life has all the ingredients of a congenial coming-of-age movie, one rooted in the anything-goes landscape of postwar Southern California. Born in Los Angeles in 1954 to parents who hailed from Chicago, his father, Warren, founded a tape duplication service and later served as vice president of sales at Sussex Records, which produced acts like R&B crooner Bill Withers.
In high school — Gray is a graduate of Hamilton High — he played drums in a rock band called Population Explosion. “We never made it out of the garage,” he says. But his affinity for music led him to the camera. At around 15, he and his pal Neil Zlozower attended a concert and were struck by the photographers up front covering the show. “It was the closest you could get to the stage without playing an instrument,” remembers Gray. “I was like, I can do that.”
And did he ever. He and Zlozower (now a renowned rock photographer known as “Zloz”) crafted a pair of fake photo passes in the school print shop and began photographing live shows at venues like the Whisky a Go Go. They printed their images in a dark room that Zlozower improvised in a bomb shelter tucked into his parents’ house, then sold the best ones at Aron’s Records on Melrose. By the time he graduated, Gray had already done shoots for Life magazine and the rock bible Creem.
Through Danny Sugerman, another friend, they ended up in the orbit of the Doors. (Sugerman had a job answering the band’s mail and would later become its manager — all while still in his teens.) As a result, Gray ended up becoming good friends with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.
When it came time for Gray to go to college, it was Manzarek who served as counsel. “I was split between ArtCenter and CalArts,” recalls Gray. “It was Ray who said, you’re an artist, you need to go to CalArts.” When Manzarek died in 2013, Gray paid tribute to him by wearing his clothes for a year, a performance piece that he intentionally chose not document. He reprised it in 2016 for the duration of the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A.” biennial (which Walker co-curated).
It was at CalArts where Gray drew the hard line between church (his fine art work) and state (his commercial projects), but it was also where he would later begin to blur it.
CalArts in the ‘70s was a hotbed of debate about topics such as Marxism, feminism and U.S. interventionism. Anything commercial was “looked down upon,” says Gray, so he kept that aspect of his life to himself.
As a Black student, he also continuously fought the assumption that his artistic impulses were motivated by street photography. Gray was more enthralled by artists such as Duane Michals and Guy Bourdin, who wielded the camera to surreal effect. For one assignment, he visited malls and photographed people riding escalators. “I was listening to Kraftwerk and there’s a certain attitude when people are on an escalator,” he explains. “Basically, I was trying to show how we are shaped by machines.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1979, Gray returned to music photography — shooting a slew of album covers and, in the early 1980s, serving as Michael Jackson’s personal photographer at a time when the singer was breaking out as a solo act. (This was years before allegations of sexual harassment began to surface. “It was hard to understand,” says Gray of the accusations. “He was so sensitive and empathetic. I couldn’t imagine him hurting a flea.”)
During that period, Gray continued to make art but found himself shut out of the gallery system. “Other people that graduated with me were showing in galleries, but I wasn’t,” he says, “I knew it was because of race.”
In response, he created a series of photographic collages that showed Black boxers battling corporate towers — figures that generate wealth attempting to take down the symbols of its accumulation. “I saw this parallel to how gladiators would win their freedom,” says Gray. “Brown and Black bodies would have to battle to get out.” Without a gallery to show them, he installed them on the streets of L.A., putting them on the routes traveled by buses ferrying athletes around for the 1984 Olympics.
In the late ‘80s, the artist returned to CalArts to pursue his master’s degree, and the divide between his two worlds began to fray. Frustrated by the dialogues surfacing in class — the school is infamous for its interminable crit sessions — Gray one day arrived with a box of his Jackson photographs and dumped them on a table, revealing the commercial work that occupied the other part of his life.
That caught the attention of his professor Allan Sekula, a conceptual artist who married photography and text to create installations that explored issues of labor and trade. He was intrigued by Gray’s commercial work and suggested he examine what lay beneath the surface of his images. “He wanted me to do a critical photo-text work of my archive,” Gray explains. At his suggestion, Gray began to dive into writings by Gilles Deleuze, bell hooks and Frantz Fanon, thinkers who engaged questions of difference, race and identity.
He soon began to see systemic issues represented in his pictures — such as the ways Black people are expected to conform to white standards of beauty. For his thesis, he created a piece titled “Reflections on the American Dream,” 1989, that consisted of a series of images of Jackson layered with handwritten texts. These included quotes by Fanon, a philosopher who wrote extensively about the ways in which colonized people adopt the mindsets of their oppressors.
For Gray, it was an idea that went deeper than theory. He had witnessed this psychology in action as Jackson’s photographer. In the early ‘80s, the singer was already obscuring his Blackness with makeup (prior to remaking his features with plastic surgery). “The pictures were not about Michael, it’s the culture,” explains Gray. “He is a product of the culture.”
Since then, church and state have been increasingly braided together. Gray regularly mines his commercial archive for images of entertainers, though he frequently presents them with their faces obscured, as a stand-in for larger ideas. To those images, he adds still lifes he has made of colonial art collections or the architecture of old slave dungeons in Ghana, where the imprisoned were held before transport to the Americas. Adding a luminous quality are pictures of the cosmos — the only images Gray doesn’t make himself. (He acquires them from NASA.) Altogether, they represent the historical forces that shape social concepts like Blackness.
“His work is lyrical,” says Walker. But it goes deeper than that too. “This is about modernity. It is epic in sweep. It’s the whole picture. Don’t miss the forest because of the orientation of the trees.”
As Walker puts it, his methods are also an act of “radical discombobulation.” Gray willfully toys with the conventions of photography, incorporating images corrupted by digital glitches, turning others upside down, and placing pictures in the sorts of elaborate frames generally reserved for paintings; the stacked frames create texture and depth. Looking at his work is like peering through a series of conjoined windows that lead to different times, spaces and bodily states. Western traditions of symmetry and notions of linear time are upended. “I have to interrupt it,” Gray says. “I have to create a pebble or a disruption.”
The effect is astonishing; it is also unsettling. Black public figures mingle with slave forts and the most vaunted creations of high art. It’s the sacred and the profane — church and state, one might call them — presented as a unified whole. As it turns out, they aren’t so different. Images, whatever their origins, can enforce dominance. Until an artist like Gray comes along to undermine them.
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