It’s not every day I get excited about a salt shaker.

But there it was, a glass cylinder with a slanted top of chromed steel. Next to it, its sister, the pepper shaker, and a big dad of a sugar shaker.

The sight of these elegant little objects transported me to my youth. Growing up in L.A., I’d see them in diners and restaurants, and in my own kitchen. In the 1960s, they looked modern and sleek. Space Age salt and pepper shakers.

They were created by Henry Keck, a Cal Tech-trained designer. And now they’re inside a display case at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


LACMA’s show “Living in a Modern Way, California Design 1930-1965" celebrates the birth of the “California look” and the men and women who brought it into being.

The California I was born into was filled with the things they made, each a symbol of the hopefulness of the age: fiberglass chairs shaped like cupped palms, polyurethane surfboards, women’s “playsuits” covered with colorful prints, and tables built of slabs of wing-shaped wood.

They created cool-looking things that could be mass-produced at low cost, allowing even a Guatemalan immigrant family like mine to purchase a bit of California style.

Those beautiful objects of California’s recent past, and later works of art that are dark and disturbing, are on display this autumn at more than five dozen museums from Santa Barbara to San Diego. It’s all part of Pacific Standard Time, the multi-museum collaboration that celebrates the period when California art came of age, between 1945 and 1980.


Those years also happen to mark the apogee of the California economy. And during my visit to two of the Pacific Standard Time exhibits last week, I felt the sweep of my own life here, of all our lives in this big, troubled state.

Most of the designers in the “Modern Way” show at LACMA came to California in the years after World War II. Behind the simplicity of their creations, there was an ethos of optimism and risk-taking. Their designs, as one magazine put it in 1951, were based on “the willingness to experiment and be different, to solve problems in the California way.”

“You genuinely felt like you were a crusader,” graphic designer Lou Danzinger, a transplanted New Yorker, says in one interview I heard at the “Modern Way” exhibit. “You’d do a trivial ad for a lighting company and felt you were changing the culture.”

We all felt special in California back then. My father parked cars for a living but knew he was doing something grand with his life just by living in L.A. Having left Guatemala with a sixth-grade education, he majored in electronics at a community college and took his only son to LACMA to see Roman statues and Impressionist paintings.


I figured that by the time my own kids grew up, we Californians would be driving flying cars and taking vacations on the moon.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

Already, by the mid-1970s, the gleam of California had started to fade. A Southern California-born president, Richard Nixon, resigned in disgrace. The boom faded.

Our vision of what California was turned dark, as is made plain by another Pacific Standard Time exhibit, “Under the Big Black Sun, California Art 1974-1981,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary.


That California was familiar to me too: a lonely place, defined by inequality, anger and alienation.

“We look like ordinary people,” writes a woman photographed by Jim Goldberg. She looks like a laborer and is living in a cramped downtown apartment circa 1980, and Goldberg has taken her portrait alongside her daughter. He’s asked her to write a message on the photograph. “We have a terrible life,” she scribbles.

In the name of enterprise and profit, we covered this beautiful place by the sea with soulless industrial parks, like those in Irvine captured in a series of haunting pictures by Lewis Baltz in 1974.

Homelessness and decay spread through our cities. Even the beach wasn’t immune, as is clear in a startling series of photographs from the late 1970s by John Divola, in which the azure Pacific can be seen through the window of an abandoned Zuma Beach home that’s being slowly destroyed by vandals.


People began to question everything. Over my head at the Geffen Contemporary, slides of ‘70s protests flashed on a screen: people walking onto a freeway to stop traffic to protest the Vietnam War, and the feminist activists of “Take Back the Night” dispersing at dusk across L.A. streets.

An exhibit wall is covered with the silk-screen posters of the day, including one by the Mental Patients Liberation Movement and another by the Little Tokyo Art Workshop inviting people to join for a rally and remembrance at the site of the Manzanar detention camp.

When I went away to college in Northern California, I had posters like those on my dorm-room wall — images of people with raised fists, marching. And for a moment, wandering around the Geffen Contemporary, I felt nostalgia for those days of idealism and outrage.

Then, as I stepped out the front door, I saw small groups of people with posters in hand marching westward. It was as if the characters in those gallery silk-screens had come to life. So I followed them down 1st Street.


They were headed for City Hall and the Occupy L.A. protest against corporate power.

Several protesters had created a kind of impromptu art gallery on the City Hall lawn. On one poster, thousands of repetitions of the word “occupy” formed a City Hall tower. A large, street-art version of the American flag covered a patch of grass, and an oil painting depicted capitalists as green monsters.

Near the base of the City Hall steps, Chad Knutsen, 22, had constructed a tepee, using a white linen sheet painted with blue and purple lines. “At night, we turn on the light inside, and it’s like a beacon up on this hill,” Knutsen told me.

Art can be like that: a beacon, a celebration of possibility. In California, there are still people who believe in its power.


hector.tobar@latimes.com