Connor Everts, a Los Angeles-area artist and former longshoreman whose sociopolitical art was the subject of a 1960s obscenity trial, died Sunday at his Torrance home. He was 88. Everts completed his early work at night after working full days on the docks. His career was punctuated by jaunts abroad and by controversy: In 1964, sheriff’s deputies arrested him for having produced a poster displayed in a store window on La Cienega Boulevard. They said its depiction of a womb and face was a violation of state obscenity laws.
The ensuing court case became a local cause celebre as fellow artists and progressives rallied to Everts’ side. A Times’ art critic testified in his defense, as well as various other curators and experts. On the stand, these defenders of art freedom uniformly struggled to explain to prosecutors why Everts’ womb image — intended as a commentary on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy — was not an outrage to public decency, as prosecutors argued it was.
The case grabbed headlines for months. But even at the time, it was portrayed as a kind of last gasp of an old order. Hardly anyone was being tried for obscenity by that point, and contemporary observers seemed to recognize that situation was not likely to change. The jury hung, and Everts was later acquitted.
He again made headlines a couple of years later. He was arrested and said he had been beaten by two Long Beach police officers. They were, in turn, tried and acquitted. Otherwise, he settled into his role as an art teacher with a loyal following and kept producing art.
The notoriety of Everts’ trial had drawn well-known artists to his side. His connections made him well-placed to become a supporter and promoter of fellow artists locally. The whole episode — and his role in the local art scene — continued to play an outsized role in reputation, even to the point of eclipsing his art. “Sometimes an artist’s major aesthetic achievement is his life,” wrote Times critic William Wilson, commenting on an Everts show in 1969.
Everts was born in Bellingham, Wash., Jan. 24, 1928, to William and Sophie Everts. His father was a longshoreman and union organizer, and the younger Everts would follow his example — both in dock work and in leftist sympathies. He served in the Coast Guard during World War II and studied art in L.A. at Chouinard Art Institute. He traveled and studied in Latin America and was an assistant to Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siquieros.
He returned to L.A. and worked as a longshoreman to support his wife and children, and painted at night. “I’d rather paint than sleep,” he told a reporter. He soon joined the graphics department at Chouinard, but lost the job after the womb-image flap. The image was part of a series of nine lithographs he had titled “Studies of Desperation.” In the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination, the works explored the theme of a person looking out from the womb and choosing not to be born, he said.
The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery mounted a retrospective of his work in 1983, and Everts’ work was included in the Getty’s “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.” “Studies in Desperation” was the subject of a 2013 Norton Simon Museum exhibition, and Everts’ work is part of collections in, among others, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Simon and the Smithsonian Institution. He co-founded the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, created the now-defunct Exodus Group and Gallery in San Pedro, taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, USC and Caltech, and traveled to Japan and Europe. Everts’ art, post-trial, was highly praised and according to Times critic, Henry J. Seldis,, Everts’ “landscapes of the mind are set in a quasi-mathematical framework.”