Steven Arnold: Cocktails in Heaven

Del Vaz Projects is delighted to present Cocktails in Heaven, a landmark exhibition devoted to exploring the world-erecting, genre-bending, zeitgeist-crackling, madness-materializing, fairy-tinseled life and work of the artist Steven Arnold (b. 1943, Oakland, CA; d. 1994, Los Angeles, CA). Reflecting a kaleidoscopic practice that spanned drawing, sculpture, painting, printmaking, costuming, set design, art direction, theater, film, and photography, this installation arranges Arnold’s multidisciplinary artwork and personal ephemera to restage his legendary Los Angeles home and studio, Zanzabar. Nestled in a former pretzel factory resting beside a Victorian house at 3316 Beverly Boulevard—and named after an unconventionally spelled inscription on an antique clown mask found in a flea market in his youth—Zanzabar was an elaborate, chameleonic space where Arnold lived, hosted salons, and photographed his famed tableaux vivants (living pictures). As a queer artist who died from AIDS-related complications in 1994, and whose archive has had limited public engagement for the last several decades—now housed in the collection of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries—this exhibition offers a rare and panoramic portrait of his inimitable career, which is deserving of a profound and thorough reexamination.

Steven Arnold (b. Oakland, CA, 1943; d. Los Angeles, CA, 1994) was a visionary artist working across drawing, sculpture, painting, printmaking, costuming, set design, art direction, theater, film, and photography. He studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his BFA in 1966 and MFA in 1969. Over the course of his career, he created three short films and one feature, Luminous Procuress (1971). Arnold’s life traversed the epoch of twentieth-century counterculture, creative, and celebrity social scenes in San Francisco, New York, France, Morocco, Spain, and Los Angeles—where he established his home studio, Zanzabar. In 1988, Arnold was diagnosed with AIDS, which he died from complications of in 1994. Arnold’s artwork is in the collections of the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, Ohio; Oakland Art Museum, Oakland, California; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA).