Rory White--Photographer, Artist, Social Activist

At a Glance

Who: Rory White--artist, photographer, social activist
What: Creator/director of The Lamp Art Project
When: 1998-2008
Where: Lamp Community, Skid Row
527 S. Crocker St., Los Angeles, Calif.
Contact: Roreewhite@hotmail.com
Websites: www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/34171-rory-white
www.lampartproject.org
Note: All pictures/art used with permission of the artists, Rory White and Magdalena Astrid Dahlen.


As a model for photographers like Lucien Clergue and Ansel Adams in the 1970s, Rory White was considered a "hottie" before "hot" was the word for "good looking."

Born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles, Calif., he spent his early childhood in Germany--just after WWII.

He studied photography in his youth and learned oil painting from his mother, the late Renee White, who had studied with Saul Bernstein and Richard Diebenkern.

While his siblings followed their parents into the psychiatric field as doctors and therapists, he charted a course through the world of painting, writing and photography.

He was on the road to a successful modeling career, a road that would ultimately lead him straight to Skid Row.

As the years sped by, White left the modeling world and lived a quiet, secluded life in the "wilderness" of Big Sur, selling historical paintings to museums and large collectors while perfecting his craft as "an artist (oil painting, etching, relief sculpture, photography), and as a writer (expository, surreal prose, epic blank verse poetry)."

His life was full.

As he was writing "a large autobiographical novel focused on man's inhumanity to man" ("Hacky-Sack Boys, Big Sur and the Sonnets of God"), however, something was happening inside. His views of God, Jesus, religion and the people around him were changing.

In our e-mail interview, White directed me to one of his websites where he shared that by 1987, he was drawn to working among those who were the victims of AIDS--the marginalized and ignored people he felt religious people were turning their backs on.

Those were the people he felt God wanted us to help.

Seven years later he says he felt "called by God to do inner-city work." However, answering that call would mean ending his 15 years of wilderness living.

Without hesitation he answered that call and moved to the inner city of Los Angeles where he found a rent-controlled apartment near the ocean in Santa Monica that was so tiny his bathroom was also his kitchen.

That's when he realized that the funds were coming in and people with aids (PWAs) were getting help, all except those who were homeless. The homeless PWAs were often transgender street prostitutes, commonly African-American or Latino/Latina, and many had mental diagnoses. They were the outcasts of society's outcasts.

And many ended up in Skid Row.

"This brought my awareness to Skid Row, the highest concentration of homeless persons in America," White says.

And he followed them right to their "home" in Skid Row's Lamp Community.

The Lamp Community, founded by Mollie Lowery, was designed to work with people who are challenged with homelessness and mental illness in downtown Los Angeles--to get them into permanent homes first, then begin undertaking the underlying causative factors of homelessness.

His intent was "to focus on the homeless, doing general advocacy work at first--food, care, shelter and medical benefits."

Then, in 1998, Lowery gave him the opportunity to combine his passion for art with his passion for helping the homeless of Skid Row. She gave him a free hand to design, implement and build a project--The Lamp Art Project--and allowed him to run it for 10 years.

He created the Lamp Art Project as "a child and integral part of" the Lamp Community. Its concept is that individuals with these challenges have a level of artistic genius equal to any other segment of the population.

"While it is a high-level fine arts project that accepts artists from 'absolute beginner' to 'highly advanced' levels in experience, all of its member-artists have been challenged with homelessness and mental diagnoses."

The project is important because, "although one can show photographs of meals being offered and shelter provided, it is difficult to show photographs of the internal healing of human self-esteem, the strengthening of mental health, and the self-actualization achieved in this atmosphere."

According to the Art Project website, however," art is the mirror of society. Art provides a visible manifestation of human worth and meaning and healing.

Art is healing in itself.

Creativity is essential, not superfluous, to human life.... Art provides a picture, almost like an X-ray, Cat-Scan, or MRI, of the invisible things of the human soul or psyche."

White hasn't made an unaffected, untouched journey, however. He says the people who have had the most impact on his life are the amazing people he met among the homeless, people rich in who they were as people and Mollie Lowery and those who blossomed as genius artists--among them Darlene Altemeier Dobbs and Magdalena Astrid Dahlen.

I spoke with Dahlen who now lives in Gresham, Ore. Even though her parents encouraged her in her artwork, she says her life was so dysfunctional she could do little more than doodle and play around with a little watercolor.

"Somehow I wound up in LA on Skid Row at Lamp Art," she says, "and that's where I met Rory."

Through art therapy, "he gave me something to do, and people to be with so I could not isolate myself to my room. If you needed help, he would stop and help you right then and there.

And, he would give you his last dime, if you needed it. He is real, not a phony.

He has empathy--whether he is talking to a prostitute or a beggar, he relates as if he were one of them--he has a heart of gold."

And yes, there were some times when working on Skid Row was dangerous.

For half of the 10 years he worked in the Lamp Community he rode the bus, which meant walking to the bus stop even when he worked very late at night. There were a few "close calls," but White says a greater danger is allowing your heart to grow hard to the poor.

He initially avoided that danger by refusing to allow it to settle in his heart. Then, he says he was "so blessed and impressed by the poor, it became easy."

However, he says the dangers from the street people are not as high as some believe. Most residents are totally peaceful. The problem is that the acts of violence are the only ones that make the news.

In 2004 White received the Eli Lilly Welcome Back Award (WBA) for Outstanding Community Service in the Field of Depression and Mental Illness for his work in Skid Row.

In May 2008 he received another Eli Lilly Welcome Back Award (WBA) "Person of the Decade" at the Willard Hotel (adjacent to the White House lawn, along with an accompanying show of his Skid Row photographs. An award for outstanding bravery and achievement in working with persons challenged with depression and other mental illnesses, it was his number one personally satisfying award.

True to his style of giving, he put the money back into the Lamp Community by designating the $10,000 grant that came with the award to and for the film "Ashes and Roses." The film, currently in post production, allowed them to use large amounts of his skid Row still photos in the matrix (and as one of the subjects of) the film.

He also won two Frederick Weisman Awards for the Art Project-an acknowledgment of the high level of art produced by formerly homeless artists.

Additionally, an Annenberg Family grant funded a high- level exhibition of the project's artists, and White's work at the downtown Los Angeles "Pharmaka Gallery."

In 2008, White left his beloved work with the Lamp Community and moved to Washington State to again live in the country and teach at a local university.

His art project continued to flourish under a new, wonderful, coordinator, Hayk Makhmuryan and Darlene Altemeier Dobbs, studio assistant, who began at the art project while living in a homeless shelter.

White says she is a major peer-staff figure at the art project. who has become a great artist. She has accomplished "a major and cohesive body of work, oil paintings portraying downtown Los Angeles and street scenes and the peoples of Skid Row."

For two years his heart longed to continue his work in Skid Row.

So, he moved back a few weeks ago and began working on his own work again while waiting for the opportunity to rejoin the project he created.

The Lamp Art Project website, which he designed and built, has been designated a "Virtual Treasure" by the University of British Colombia's Archival and Library Science's Virtual Museum Project.

The Lamp Art Project website says, "the art project is an extreme epitomization of the amazing genius, often hidden, but herein made visible, of the homeless people of Skid Row, and those now no longer homeless, through the work of Lamp Community. It remains a particularly, and poignantly, critical and visible component of Lamp."

It also remains as a tribute to the boy who chose to walk a different road.