The phrase "medieval Los Angeles" seems inherently contradictory, but the early twentieth-century landscape of the City of Angels was littered with half-timbered Tudor mansions and apartment houses modeled on French chateaux, Mediterranean Romanesque universities and medieval-hybrid revival churches. Jousting at the Tournament of Roses, Vikings as mascots, murals celebrating California's origins in medieval romance and the chivalric values of Ivanhoe, and statues deifying female pioneers as "Madonnas" were only some of the other cultural markers of the European Middle Ages operative in rapidly expanding Southland.

In this talk, Dr. Alison Perchuk (Professor of Art History, California State University, Channel Islands) draws from her current book project, Medieval Los Angeles: Art, Architecture, and the Quest for Identity in Prewar Southland, to explore some of the different ways that medievalism — the formation and function of representations of the Middle Ages in later eras — was leveraged in architecture and architectural decoration, making particular use of resources gathered by David Gebhard and preserved in UCSB's Architecture & Design Collection.

Image credit: 

Lucile Lloyd papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum; University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lucile Lloyd (1994-1941), muralist; Photographer unknown, “Lucile Lloyd: proposed mural decoration for the Ojai Presbyterian Church (Ojai, Calif.),”UCSB ADC Omeka, http://www.adc-exhibits.museum.ucsb.edu/items/show/37.

Lucille LLoyd (1894- 1941), muralist, "Lucile Lloyd: Altarpiece, St. Mary of the Angels Church, (Pasadena, Calif.)," UCSB ADC Omeka, http://www.adc-exhibits.museum.ucsb.edu/items/show/98