How to Resurrect a Radical Artist

Canvas burns quickly, so when a wildfire spread through Orange County, Calif., this summer, Andrew Tonkovich, a writer and editor, crammed some paintings into the bed of a pickup and sped down a mountain to safety.

“I was not going to have come all this way, and gotten so close, that I was going to risk my house burning down with the art in it,” Tonkovich said. The pieces he had ferried out of the fire’s potential path were by Peter Carr, a little-known Californian artist whose work is now the subject of a show at Cerritos College, a community college south of Los Angeles.

As Tonkovich roamed the gallery one boiling October afternoon during the installation, he was able to laugh about the memory. Modjeska Canyon, where he lives, had been spared.

On its face, “Peter Carr: Artist for Survival” is the first survey of an activist and artist who made flamboyant but regional contributions to California’s antinuclear movement, a minor poet who painted and drew incessantly and then, as Tonkovich put it, “made the strategic mistake of dying at 55, just as he might have gotten his break.” (Carr died from a heart attack in 1981.)

Peter Carr in welding gear in California, circa 1975. The photo was discovered in Carr’s archive. Credit…via Andrew Tonkovich

But for Tonkovich, who has no formal experience in exhibitions, it is also an act of deeply personal devotion that exceeds even the most compelling artist rediscoveries by professional curators.