Peter Carr: This Is How We Will All Be Saved

It’s taken me eighteen months to get from a visit to the CSULB archives to celebrating a new show of the work of Peter Carr, patron saint of this journal. In February 2025, two months after the closing of a landmark show of his work, I finally made it the special collections archives at Cal State Long Beach. This visit to the third floor of the library was long postponed, perhaps because performing more research would mean more on my to do list: fact checking, writing, cataloging.  Alas, I’ve buried this story’s lede once again, not on purpose but because there is nowhere really to start, only restart, only reconstruct, only resurrect. And yet research, finally, made all the difference.

Peter Carr: Artist for Survival, which many Citric Acid readers attended, was organized by visionary Cerritos College Gallery Director James McDevitt. It was a comprehensive first-ever retrospective featuring over 150 pieces by Peter Carr (1925-1981), a defining moment in this long and never-ending story, some of which I share here in an update, report, perhaps even draft chapter (god help me) of a book somebody should write, if not me.  It drew big crowds and was the subject of a feature story in The New York Times of all places, penned by brilliant arts writer Walker Mimms, again not to bury the lede.  Also, a crew of student filmmakers documented the project, elements of the unlikely story whose details, chapters, and characters kept arriving and rearranging the narrative, a bit like my own poorly organized telling, retelling, and selecting. It’s something like the way I sort my way through the hundreds of Peter’s drawings, illustrations, posters, paintings on canvas, notebooks piled on two unsteady sawhorses in my study or crammed in the storage unit I rent in Lake Forest.

That generous and smart Walker Mimms piece was helpfully titled “How to Resurrect a Radical Artist,” both a provocation and invitation but also, in its way, a mic drop. It’s got it all, including implied instruction (okay, please, how exactly, Walker?) As noted by Mimms, I’ve indeed been storing and admiring and thinking about and otherwise taking care of Peter’s work, writing about it, and insisting that friends, academics, museum and gallery directors, collectors, other writers, and political comrades consider it.  

Before Mimms, I was the only one to assess it, with my own essays published, first in Irvine Valley College’s The Earand, recently, in Citric Acid, Alta, Air/Light, Random Lengths, Zyzzyva, and via a reading of Carr’s work (by me) aired on KPFK 90.7 FM.  Local reporter Gabriel San Roman wrote a terrific piece on the show for the LA Times OC/Daily Pilot and podcaster Abby Walthausen of The Lovely Wallpaper hosted me to talk about Peter’s prose, poetry, scholarship, art, and activism.

No kidding, absolutely everyone who’d seen Peter’s art or writing, or read about it or heard it had been engaged, and admiring and congratulatory. But now what?

 In fact, the Cerritos show was the second revival exhibition, an earlier one staged at Laguna’s seminal BC Space Gallery in 2016 to help celebrate publication of Orange County: A Literary Field Guide (Heyday), which I co-edited with Lisa Alvarez. We included Peter’s defining prose chapbook among five dozen representative novel chapters, poems, short stories, excerpts, articles on the county.  Anthem: Aliso Creek (1974) was a self-published beauty of a self-illustrated art book: sociological study, tone poem, ecological cri d’ coer, and loving spiritual meditation on the beauty of that locale and threats to its future. And, because life sometimes makes beautiful and poetic sense, while he was hanging the show BC’s legendary late co-founder Mark Chamberlain actually remembered working with Peter, who was a Laguna Beach local, living in South Laguna near Aliso Creek and occasionally reading with the Laguna Poets and working with both the anti-nuclear Alliance for Survival and Artists for Survival.

Meanwhile, for all the research, examination, and reading I’d done, including finally finding and studying his PhD dissertation, “The Comparison of Poetry and Painting: Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and Some Paintings of Albert Pinkham Ryder” I had put off or otherwise not found time to go first where perhaps I more logically might have begun this unlikely Peter Carr Resurrection Project, despite offhandedly mentioning to friends and newfound fans of his that I planned to visit CSULB, where Dr. Peter Carr taught for 22 years and where, if you’ve heard or read the story, I’d been lucky to be a student of his.

My two young documentary filmmaker friends, recent UCI graduates Kane Le Hong and Brian Nguyen, offered to drive to my alma mater. We visited together, me to see  what might be there, and the two of them to research writing and constructing their film, but also to observe me making this long-overdue pilgrimage. We’d been collaborators for months, and I’d gotten used to being a subject as well as a guide.

The excellent librarian at the Special Collections and University Archives there, Heather Steele Gajewski, welcomed us, apologizing for how little she had to share. There’s plenty to tell about any trip to any archives, from signing an agreement, requesting copies, and washing your hands thoroughly in the bathroom down the hall, so as not to damage the material. Of course, Heather had come up with more than promised. You’ve noticed that I am sharing it here. I adore librarians, including those at UCI who’d encouraged and helped with research for the OC anthology, and introduced me to Mark Chamberlain. Archivists care. They are curious. And they don’t get a lot of visitors except perhaps researchers and other weirdos with crazy projects so are especially hospitable.

Heather was ready for us, offering three seats and three respective small piles on a long table so there we were, each taking turns carefully looking through and gently handling letters, memos, photographs, documents, grant proposals, obituaries all concerning, as per the tabs on the respective individual file folders, “Peter Carr,” “Peter Carr Peace Center,” and “CSULB Comparative Literature.”  The “weekly bulletin” item, above, was one of many affirming Peter’s activities. These together and separately would inform the afternoon’s on-site archival investigation of the artist and writer and activist, but also of Dr. Peter Carr, PhD from USC, who cofounded the school’s Comparative Literature program in 1967 and who taught there from 1959 until his death. And who died there, on campus, from a massive heart attack, delivered DOA in a campus cop car, to a local hospital.

I’m confident that absolutely no one had requested or viewed them, not ever. Here I should say, unshyly, that I seem to be the go-to expert on the life and work of Carr, only because nobody else has signed up for the quixotic if totally rewarding project of caring for his work, writing and proselytizing for it, all toward trying to find a permanent home for the thousands (I am absolutely not kidding) of paintings, drawings, notebooks, cards, books, journals, and ephemera left when his widow passed away and I rescued the work from imminent destruction.

All to say that I was thrilled, confused, and intrigued to find documents which either confirmed or only further complicated, contradicted or in some places significantly changed the narrative I’ve been offering by way of a default biography-in-progress of Carr.

Indeed, the helpful index of images of work which Kane, Brian, and I requested includes flyers, audio recordings, memos, letters, and announcements documenting Peter’s career, proposals, death and the activities of the Peter Carr Peace Center, founded immediately after his passing, mostly due to the efforts of another amazing scholar-professor-activist Dr. Robert Brophy, perhaps the leading expert on the California poet Robinson Jeffers. Look him up! 

 There was an old VHS recording for which the library lacked a player.  I was given special permission and played it later at home, having signed a document promising to be responsible and return it.  I did, of courwe. It turned out to be an early-80s boosterish City of Long Beach Chamber of Commerce “history” … of industry, real estate, tourism, capitalism --- ironically the exact kind of boosterism that Peter mocked, satirized, railed against on the canvas, in the classroom, and at protests. 

Sitting at that long table and carefully leafing through my own stack of papers from a manila folder labeled “Peace Center,” I found flyers for a film festival sponsored by the Peter Carr Peace Center. There had also apparently been a show of Peter’s art a year after his death, at a gallery in Long Beach.  The “Center,” by the way, was not an academic program, more of a clearinghouse for left activism on campus and in the community. But a couple of documents, dated in pencil “64” described a peace center which didn’t match in any way the one honoring Peter. 

A letter from the then-chancellor regarding the destruction (!)  of a “peace center,” and hand-mimeographed flyers memorialized the place but the dates were all wrong, and the story matched nothing I remembered. I speculated that this apparent manifestation of campus activism must have occurred somewhere around the time of the Vietnam anti-war moratorium or illegal bombings of Laos and Cambodia. Other documents suggested that the students of Cal State Long Beach had indeed asked for and received a permit for a makeshift structure. Apparently, the university declined to extend the temporary permit for this bespoke “center,” and it was bulldozed. I wondered if Peter Carr had been involved in this and assumed that he must have at least known about it. On the other hand, he seems not to have been all that active in anti-war protest until after returning from a sabbatical trip to India, then leaving his wife, and beginning a relationship with longtime civil rights and anti-war activist Jeanie Bernstein. They got beat up together, she used to brag, at the famous Century City protest in June 1967.

Looking at the actual documents and corroborating some CSULB (sic) history my best guess now is that there was in fact a 1964 “peace center.”  After all, the flyer reads Long Beach State College. The renaming of the school occurred a year later.

 I’m sharing these images and notes on my research and resurrection journey here because just now I have nowhere else to chart my research and writing. So, yes, there’s the letter about dismantling the earlier makeshift “peace center,” and a memo announcing a posthumous show at the Shakti Gallery in Long Beach, no idea when.  I am tracking down the place, long gone, it seems. Maybe I’ll contact the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce!  There’s of course the black marker drawing of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant featuring the sea and a whale and the slogan “Plutonium is Forever,” so typical of Peter’s agit-prop art. There’s the “Hate to Hurt” poem or manifesto, with at least two meanings, inexplicably (to me) marked with a room number.

Much of that is familiar Carr territory.  More surprising to me is a scholarly article titled “Progress Report: Mythology and Folklore on Closed-Circuit Television” with a note that it had been accepted by the NAEB and memos confirming his efforts (ten years apart) to establish, first, a folklife an/or folklore center, on campus or in the community. The NAEB turns out to be the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. I assume this was related to Peter’s effort at teaching an adult ed class on TV, studio photos of which are dated and marked “Long Beach State College.” Did it ever air? He might not have made it to that earlier peace encampment, but Peter was busy.   

Of course, there were student and university-produced newspaper reports of his death, appreciations published a year later, and flyers advertising the respective LA and on-campus Lawrence Ferlinghetti readings put on the week before Peter died, the latter an event seemingly sponsored by every Left activist group on campus in addition, it seems to being funded by the school. Bravo. Peter, who admired and corresponded with Ferlinghetti, seems to have arranged the campus visit. Best of all, there were audio recordings of Peter, perhaps being interviewed by a student of CSULB’s legendary Sherna Gluck, who taught students how to conduct oral histories?

Now, for the tentative coda to the story which is always only a beginning, and an invitation. I lately lucked out. Again. My curator friend, the writer Tyler Stallings, advocated on my behalf, as did archivist Heather, and months later, it’s here: a second (or third) show, October through December at, of all places, CSULB’s own Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Art Museum. Fifty years later, it’s Peter’s first-ever on-campus show.  Much of the work featured at Peter Carr: This Is How We Will All Be Saved     was on display at Cerritos but --- here’s the best part! --- Interim Director Erin Stout and Interim Co-Director and Registrar Alyssa Torres have done something truly amazing. They have researched, revised, re-envisioned, resurrected and have now retold their own Peter Carr story with a focus on his teaching, art and politics in the context of campus history. They’ve created an opportunity to consider, celebrate, and research further campus anti-war, civil rights, and related activism in exactly the period Peter Carr was there, before and after.

Happily, there are also displayed a couple of illustrations, posters, and paintings never before seen, not by anybody but me. And, best of all, because Stout went back and apparently dug even further and deeper into the special collections archives, she found items connecting Peter’s intricate if solid through-lines, emphasizing his contributions to academic life and activism in art, posters, and chapbooks. And, yes, flyers. One in particular, a piece which so perfectly, if sublimely tells the multiple connected stories, and uses it to introduce multi-part themes. It’s a 1968 copy of an announcement of the then brand-new Comp Lit major, approved the previous year by the school. It’s obviously, lovingly hard-drawn with illustration by, of course Peter himself, in a motif you’ll see throughout his work, an invitation to study, yes, comparative literature but also an opportunity for the scholar/teacher to --- why wouldn’t he? --- invite by way of his own artistic world-view. Almost anybody who sees the paintings and drawings will also see Peter’s hand in this no doubt quickly composed flyer, which unlike a lot of the art was perfectly preserved because somebody placed it in Heather’s archives and because Erin found it. Hoorah!

If I were writing yet another essay or even a chapter (!) of a book on Peter Carr, I’d use this object to argue how easily, holistically, naturally Peter trespassed, integrated, proselytized for a worldview of connectedness. As he became more politically militant, joining anti-war marches and eventually helping found grassroots resistance organizations, the leafy, intertwined, linearly composed vision of comparative cultures and literatures, of Whitmanic transcendentalism, of nature worship, of folklore and folklife would, of course be fully realized in paintings large and small, in chapbooks including Aliso Creek, In the Summer We Go the Mountains and What Will We Leave the Children? It was all too much, and more, and all at once and here, in a simple throw-away flyer.  I don’t even know if it was photocopied or printed or if, perhaps, this is a one-off, a single sheet of paper tacked or taped to a wall. It’s a gesture, small, but so meaningful.  That Erin recognized, appreciated, and featured it inspired me to get back to writing, to listening to the tape, to examining those other archival objects.

(Oh, and check out the cost of classes before Reagan and Prop 13 and the assault on California free higher public education, when working class people really could get an Ivy League education:  "TUITION 67 DOLLARS PER SEMESTER." Peter had lots to say about that!)

 All of the above to invite you to the show, and to two events on Thursday, October 1. A rough-cut screening of Kane and Brian’s documentary, 11:15am to 12:15pm and a 3:30 talk by American Studies professor Dr. Brett Mizelle, “Long Beach and the Activist Artwork of Peter Carr.”  Free, of course, but park in the Blue Pyramid parking lot. Tell 'em Peter sent you.

Andrew Tonkovich is the founding editor of Citric Acid and longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review. His fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ecotone, ZYZZYVA, Faultline, Juked, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He wrote for both OC Weekly and the Orange County Register.  With Lisa Alvarez, he co-edited the landmark Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, and is the author of two fiction collections, The Dairy of Anne Frank and More Wish Fulfillment in the Noughties and Keeping Tahoe Blue and Other Provocations. His review of A People's Guide to Orange County appeared recently in Alta online. In fall 2025 he co-curated a show celebrating the art and writing of an influential Orange County artist and activist at the Cerritos College Art Gallery, "Peter Carr: Artist for Survival." 

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