Calvin Tomkins, Profile: Flying into the Light, The New Yorker, January 13, 2003. pages 62 to 71., 2003, 1974, 1972, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1966, 1965, 1961, 1960s, 1953, 1943,
"The artist James Turrell: Born in 1943 and raised by his grandmother in Pasadena after his aeronautical engineer and academic father died in 1953 and his mother joined the Peace Corps shortly thereafter. Without graduating from high school, " . . . 1961, he entered Pomona College . . . and majored in mathematics and perceptual psychology, and . . . took . . . art classes." Continued his art studies for a year, 1965-66 at UC Irvine. "In 1967, after serving some time in jail (vaguely for couselling draft resisters), Turrell moved back to Los Angeles. He had a little money saved up, which he used to take a lease on the old Mendota Hotel, a small, derelict building in what was then a sort of slum, the Ocean Park section of Los Angeles, where Richard Diebenkorn and a number of other artists had studios. Setting aside two rooms in front, on the street, for his studio, Turrell proceeded to seal them off from the outside world, blocking out the windows and painting the walls, floors, and ceilings a uniform white. Then he made some carefully calibrated openings that allowed light to enter the rooms under controlled conditions. In the daytime, shafts of sunlight would move slowly across a section of wall or floor". . . first one-man show in 1967 at the Pasadena Art Museum with the catalogue essay published in Artforum, . . He rebuilt old cars and flew airplanes for the Neptune Society and with Sam Francis. "The California light-and-space art . . . Irwin, Turrell, Douglas Wheeler and Maria Nordman-never functioned as a group, and didn't agree on much of anything. . . He worked with Robert Irwin and Ed Wortz, a psychologist, in LACMA's Art and Technology Program for a year and a half in 1968 and 1969, exploring sensory deprivation and ganzfelds. . . .
"Turrell preferred to keep on transforming rooms in the Mendota Hotel. He made dreamlike spaces divided by walls of colored light that looked solid until you came close to them. He made ganzfelds in which the viewer lost all sense of dimension. Turrell cut his first skyspace in the roof of the Mendota Hotel. His landlord found out and made him repair the damage, but Count Panza di Biumo, an adventurous Italian art collector who visited the Mendota in 1972, commissioned Turrell to do a skyspace and several other works at his palazzo in Varese. This was Turrell's first commission, completed in 1974. That same year, a group of Hollywood investors bought up his entire block in Ocean Park, forcing Turrell and several other artists, including Sam Francis and Richard Diebenkorn, to find new studios."
Richard Diebenkorn moved into a new building at 2444 Main St. in Ocean Park.