Memory

Edition 5/15.
In 1963, Everts, who was an influential printmaker in Los Angeles, co-founded and served as president of the Los Angeles Printmakers Society, whose membership also included June Wayne and Betye Saar. He was among the first guest artists at Wayne's Tamarind Lithography Workshop and taught at the influential Chouinard Art Institute, where he had been a student. Everts gained notoriety when his suite of nine lithographs titled Studies in Desperation (1963) drew obscenity charges when they were exhibited at LA's Zora Gallery in 1964. Of the prints, Everts said, “I was thinking about the state of the world and the view of the world from the womb. What if someone looked out from the womb and decided not to be born until it was a better world?” Memory dates from the same period and evinces Everts's interest in Gestalt psychology, which argues that the human mind synthesizes parts into wholes, perceiving coherent structures which are more than the sum of their parts.