Untitled for Joel Wachs

Medium: Lithograph and screen-print in colors on Arches paper
Year: 1993
Image: 20 x 23 3/8 inches (50.8 x 59.4 cm)
Sheet: 21 1/2 x 25 3/8 inches (54.6 x 64.5 cm)
Edition: 130
Artist’s Proofs: 20
Publisher: Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles
Literature: Gemini 1584

Signed, dated and numbered with the publisher’s blindstamp

This work was created to support the campaign of Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs

The artist made this work to support Los Angeles politician Joel Wachs’s second of three (unsuccessful) campaigns to become the city’s mayor. Wachs had become the youngest member of LA’s City Council at the age of 33 in 1971, a race that he won overwhelmingly at least in part due to his opposition against a major Beverly Hills development project. Wachs supported slow-growth development, as well as rent control, gay rights initiatives, and mandatory recycling, and he was a strong proponent for artists and the arts.

Joel Wachs with actor Gloria Swanson in 1973. Photo courtesy of Tessa/LAPL.

A gay man, Wachs served on City Council for decades before he came out of the closet in 1999, at the age of 60 – as he reflected, “You have to remember: Nobody in the history of the United States, at any level, city, county, state or federal, no one in history had ever ever been elected as an openly gay candidate.” Wachs retired from the City Council in 2001 to accept the role of President of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and more recently was portrayed by Benny Safdie in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021).

Auction Results

LA Modern Auctions: 11 January 2023
Estimated: USD 8,000 – 12,000
USD 10,080

Phillips New-York: 21 April 2022
Estimated: USD 5,000 – 7,000
USD 17,640