Doggerel Life

The struggle for identity, collaboration and cultural exchange within the Los Angeles arts community in the 70’s and 80’s is the backdrop of Ulysses Jenkins’ autobiographical stories. A history still largely unknown: a city full of unrecognized artists of many colors: painters, sculptors. muralists and video artists.



Ulysses was part of a group who called themselves “The artists of the humble infinity”. Dismissed, forgotten, they did not search for easy success. They embraced their African ancestral roots and redefined their presence in the US as an irregular variation of comedic verse: inconsequential, doggerel. Proud to be griots, they “created a world of their own paradigm”.



Ulysses writes of his family history in the south, and growing up the son of a barber in Los Angeles. Following a family tradition he attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, came back to Los Angeles after graduating and began painting murals in Venice. A chance encounter led him to several months in Hawaii living the hippy in a treehouse in a mango forest. Returning to Los Angeles he was accepted at Otis Art Institute Graduate School where an extraordinary group of teachers helped him to conceive an original, provocative series of video works and performances: Chris Burden, Charles White, Frank Lloyd and Betye Saar among them. In 1983 Jenkins opened his own studio, the Othervisions Studio. His future as an artist will see musical rituals, the creation of the Othervisions Art Band, performances in adventurous sites, more videos, ups and downs, starting video-art centers in black and latino communities, collaborating with the Electronic Cafe. In the end, becoming a University professor.



He lived the life of the many artists of color practicing their own sense of multiculturalism, developing new genres of artistic expression connecting all sectors of our society. They built a collaborative movement, based upon re-appropriation, while sharing and performing. They developed “Othervisions”, asserting ritualized dialogs as models of communication. As Ulysses Jenkins put it: “The work refers to a time when our space was created between that which exists and that which was not allowed to exist and was invisible because it did. We remember it as an attempts at a true relatedness to the Infinite —our Doggerel Period.”