John T. Riddle Jr. Scholarship Fund
Welcome to The Scholarship Fund of John T. Riddle Jr, where your contribution will have a direct impact on our student applicants’ ability to attend college. Through the John T. Riddle Jr Scholarship, the Los Angeles City College Foundation supports the education of LACC students pursuing Art Studies.
About John T. Riddle, Jr.
John T. Riddle, Jr. (1933 – March 3, 2002) was an American artist known for his paintings and sculptures.[1] Riddle’s metal assemblage sculptures, created from the debris of the Watts riots, are among his best-known works. He died March 3, 2002.
With financial support from the G.I. Bill, he pursued a bachelor’s degree in art education from California State University, Los Angeles, graduating in 1966. He later earned a master’s degree in fine art from the same university in 1973, while teaching ceramics at Los Angeles High School and Beverly Hills High School. Before finishing graduate school, Riddle had his first solo show in 1968, at the newly founded Brockman Gallery.
He was also featured, along with Timothy Washington, in the 1971 Emmy Award–winning television miniseries Renaissance in Black: Two Artists’ Lives, which chronicled his young career and focused primarily on his work after the Watts rebellion of 1965. Riddle was deeply affected by the physical aftermath of the riots and created assemblage works from the torched metal junk that was piled everywhere.
His sculpture Ghetto Merchant (1966) was pieced together from a destroyed cash register that Riddle found in the wreckage, picked apart down to its barest skeleton, and then mounted on metal legs that he had scavenged from a junkyard. Although its parts betray a pained history, the sculpture possesses a lyricism of form that clearly draws from early twentieth-century abstraction in its emphasis on line and geometry.
Riddle moved back to Los Angeles in 1999 to work as program manager of visual arts for the California African American Museum (CAAM), where he organized the exhibitions William Pajaud: The Sights and Sounds on My New Orleans (with Samella Lewis), Echoes of Our Past: The Narrative Artistry of Palmer C. Hayden, and Celebration and Vision: The Hewitt Collection of African American Art. Riddle died just a few years later, in 2002, and was honored by former Representative Diane Watson on the floor of the U.S. Congress for his many contributions to the state of California. The following year, CAAM organized a retrospective of more than thirty of Riddle’s sculptures, prints, and paintings—the largest exhibition of his work to date.
Cited Source: Gyorody, Andrea. “John T. Riddle Jr.” Now Dig This! Art in Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 Digital Archive. Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2016. https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this/artists/john-riddle.
For More Information Please Visit:
John T. Riddle, Jr. Sculptures
The LA Artists Who Advanced Black Stories Through Art-Making
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Los Angeles City College Foundation
855 North Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90029
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Telephone: (323) 953-4011
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