On June 20, 1964, the Los Angeles Times reported that the L.A. County District Attorney’s office had brought charges of obscenity against artist Connor Everts for artwork displayed at the Zora Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard; works which in the D.A.’s view, “openly outrage public decency.” Thus Everts became one of three Los Angeles artists from the period—after Wallace Berman and before Edward Keinholz—to come into conflict with local authorities in a little-known but historic struggle between the forces of censorship and political control on the one hand, free expression and emerging professionalism in the visual arts on the other.
 
The artworks at the Zora Gallery were collectively titled Studies in Desperation. A lithographic suite by that name is the centerpiece of Everts’ upcoming show at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art. Also on view will be contemporaneous charcoal and pencil drawings on shared themes of anguish, terror and alienation. Nearly all of the work from this era was executed in black and white. In the case of the lithographs and some of the pencil drawings the result is a delicately rendered cluster of darker human forms nestled within the white sheet of paper.  The larger charcoal drawings reverse the pattern with a lighter interior image framed by a deep black perimeter. It was some of this latter work—particularly when depicting what was taken to be a womb or a vagina form—that proved most provocative at the time, notwithstanding what now can be recognized as a subtle and rich aestheticism. 
 
Everts denied any prurient interest in this body of work, tracing his intentions back to the Kennedy assassination and the collective sense of horror flowing from that event. In this interpretation, the recurring fetus-like image feels safe and protected within the womb, resisting expulsion out into a new and awful world. Even the artist’s defenders conceded at trial that some of the imagery was “shocking and repellent” while insisting that it was without question “worthy of merit,” and then invoking works by Goya as historical precedent. After one hung jury the case against the artist was resolved at his second trial in a directed verdict of acquittal.
 
Richard Sherwood, Everts’ attorney, expressed hope “that this is the last time a serious professional artist in Los Angeles will have to undergo trial on an obscenity count” and so it was. When in 1966, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors moved to close the controversial Edward Keinholz exhibition at the County Museum of Art, their attempt at censorship was successfully resisted by a united art community emboldened in part by Everts’ legal victory the year before. The era of art-censorship in Los Angeles that began in 1957 with the arrest and conviction of Wallace Berman for “inciting lewd and lascivious passions” had come to an end. But while much was gained here, something also was lost.
 
The art-censorship impulse is often characterized as indifferent to or disrespectful of art when the opposite is the case. To the censor, art is always dangerous and thus worthy of a respect born of fear. In The Republic  Plato issued a powerful warning about the threat posed by music, visual art and poetry, and particularly the notion of “change” in the arts (a concept that would become central to the Modernist artists of Everts’ generation). “The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state,” Plato wrote, “for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions”. “The new style” in the arts, the philosopher continued, “gradually gains a lodgment, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from these it goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.” By this early and authoritative standard, perhaps the District Attorney’s office got it right about the work of Connor Everts after all.