Dave Tourjé and the preservation of Los Angeles’ creative underground



For decades, the visual identity of Southern California was being shaped far from traditional museums and academic institutions.

It developed on sidewalks, surfboards, skate decks, hot rods, lowriders, album covers, hand-painted signs and club walls. Punk musicians, graffiti artists, surfers, skaters and custom-car builders created a visual language that would eventually influence fashion, advertising, contemporary art and popular culture around the world.

The institutions came later.

Los Angeles artist, filmmaker, musician and preservationist Dave Tourjé has spent much of his career working within that gap between cultural creation and institutional recognition. His practice is rooted in the belief that the art history of Southern California cannot be understood without recognizing the underground communities that helped shape it.

Tourjé’s own work draws from seemingly separate worlds: fine art, graffiti, punk music, surfing, skateboarding, street graphics, sign painting and automotive culture. To him, however, these influences belong to the same creative ecosystem.

Rather than separating painting, music, film and preservation into distinct careers, Tourjé approaches them as parts of one continuing practice. His work examines how culture is built, how it is remembered and what happens when significant movements are overlooked by the institutions responsible for preserving history.

The California Locos

That philosophy is central to the California Locos, the Los Angeles art collective Tourjé helped establish in 2011.

The original group brought together Tourjé, Chaz Bojórquez, John Van Hamersveld, Norton Wisdom and Gary Wong. Each artist arrived with a distinct body of work, but they shared deep connections to the visual cultures of Southern California.

Their combined history reaches into graffiti, graphics, performance art, surf culture, punk, street art and the wider creative history of Los Angeles. Together, the artists represent a version of California culture that does not fit neatly within a single movement or medium.

The importance of the California Locos lies partly in that refusal to separate fine art from the environments in which it develops.

A concert poster can carry the same cultural weight as a gallery print. A hand-painted street sign may reveal as much about a city’s visual identity as a formally commissioned artwork. A surfboard, record sleeve or customized vehicle can become a moving canvas.

These forms were not always treated seriously by the established art world. Yet their influence has become impossible to ignore.

The California Locos have helped bring those histories into galleries and museums while maintaining their connection to the streets, studios, music venues and neighborhoods that produced them.

Preserving the overlooked

Tourjé’s interest in preservation extends beyond his own artwork.

As Executive Director of the Chouinard Foundation, he has worked to preserve the legacy of the Chouinard School of Art and its founder, Nelbert Chouinard. The school played a significant role in the development of California art and design, educating generations of artists before its transformation into what became the California Institute of the Arts.

For Tourjé, the Chouinard story demonstrates how quickly important cultural histories can fade when nobody takes responsibility for protecting them.

That same concern appears throughout his filmmaking. His documentary projects have focused on artists, musicians and cultural figures whose contributions frequently existed outside the mainstream historical record.

His subjects have included Los Angeles artist and designer John Van Hamersveld, the California Locos and the band Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs.

The films are not exercises in nostalgia. They are attempts to document creative communities while the people who shaped them can still tell their own stories.

Tourjé’s approach raises a larger question: who decides when a subculture becomes worthy of preservation?

Museums traditionally enter the story after a movement has already been established, absorbed and interpreted. By that point, much of the original context may have disappeared. Informal gathering places close. Personal archives are dispersed. Buildings are demolished. Artists and musicians pass away without their histories being properly recorded.

His work attempts to preserve not only the finished art, but also the relationships, environments and collisions that made the art possible. It represents the moment when cultural movements once considered peripheral are formally presented as part of the California’s history.

Punk, graffiti, surf graphics, skate art and custom-car culture were not originally created with museum recognition in mind. Their counter-culture energy often came from their distance from institutional approval.

Bringing them into a museum therefore creates both an opportunity and a responsibility. The goal is not to make the work respectable by removing its rough edges. It is to preserve its original force while acknowledging its cultural importance.

An interconnected practice

Tourjé’s career resists the traditional idea that an artist must be defined by a single medium.

He paints, plays music, makes films, restores buildings and preserves archives. He also leads Alpha Structural, a Southern California company specializing in complex foundation, hillside, seismic and structural repair.

Though these pursuits may appear unrelated, they share a common foundation.

Each begins with an existing structure, whether physical, artistic or historical. Tourjé examines how it was built, identifies what has been overlooked and determines what must be preserved before something new can emerge.

That philosophy can be seen in his artwork, in the California Locos, in his films and in his commitment to the Chouinard legacy.

It is also visible in his belief that Southern California’s creative history belongs to more than a narrow group of recognized artists. It belongs to the sign painters, musicians, surfers, skaters, mechanics, designers, filmmakers and neighborhood communities whose work changed the way the region looked and understood itself.

As these cultural languages move into museums, their history becomes easier to recognize. But recognition alone is not enough.

The deeper challenge is preserving the people, places and stories that gave the work meaning in the first place.

For Dave Tourjé, that preservation is not separate from making art. It is the art.