Llyn Foulkes

Llyn Foulkes (born 1934, 17 November, Yakima, Washington) is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles.

The seminal documentary about his fifty year, up and down career, LLYN FOULKES ONE MAN BAND, is directed by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty.

As a student at Chouinard Art Institute (now CalArts), Foulkes began exhibiting with the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in 1959. He held his first one-man exhibition at Ferus in 1961. Other early solo exhibitions included the Pasadena Art Museum (1962) and the Oakland Art Museum (1964). He also showed with a new gallery across the street from Ferus (exhibiting Jess, Georgia O'Keeffe, Irving Petlin, and others) called the Rolf Nelson Gallery (1963, 64). In 1967, Foulkes was awarded the Prize for Painting at the Paris Biennale, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris followed by a European exhibition there. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art was the first museum to acquire his work for its collection, in 1964 as the original building was still under construction. Charles Proof Demetrion selected Foulkes to represent the United States in the IX São Paulo Art Biennial, Museu de Arte Moderna São Paulo, Brazil also in 1967.

Through the late sixties into the seventies Foulkes created landscape paintings that utilized the iconography of postcards, vintage landscape photography, and Route 66-inspired hazard signs. This period resulted in his first retrospective organized by the Newport Harbor Art Museum (1974). Music also became a major catalyst in Foulkes's work at this time. He played drums with City Lights from 1965 to 1971, and formed his own band, The Rubber Band, in 1973, which stayed together until 1977. By 1979, Foulkes had returned to his childhood interest in one-man bands and began playing solo with "The Machine," which he created. He still performs with The Machine regularly on the West Coast and has released a CD of original compositions, entitled Llyn Foulkes and His Machine: Live at the Church of Art.

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