Skip to main content

Brett Goldstone: He Left Law School in New Zealand and Found Himself at the L.A. River

Support Provided By
thenarrows_brettgoldstone.jpg

KCET Departures has been asking, "What's your or your family's Los Angeles arrival story?" Today, during this holiday week, we go to the video archives to hear from artist and L.A. River activist Brett Goldstone. His response predates our recent questioning, but his response fits right in.

"I live in Lincoln Heights in the studio two blocks from the east bank, just north of Chinatown. I didn't know I was an artist, but I knew I didn't want to be a lawyer. I was at law school in New Zealand.

"I've drawn all my life and had dreamed all my life. And it didn't seem that I was going to be very satisfied following a professional course.

"So I dropped out and ran away; traveled around the world for three years and ended up in Los Angeles and started practicing art.

"I was actually a cartoonist illustrating for L.A. Reader and the Weekly and the L.A Times when I first came. Did that for about a year but it was a lot of work and not a lot of money.

"So I ended up going to trade tech and learning to weld. It just seemed like a natural progression from assembling things with nuts and bolts, because I went to sculpture pretty quickly after I got a space big enough to work at it.

"I didn't have any manual skills prior to that but its really not that difficult to sort it out, you know? You're downtown there's a lot of junk lying around, you haven't got a lot of money for materials and so you make do with what you have. That's how it worked.

"We did pieces that reflected the area too. I think everyone was kind of interested in interpreting the sounds and the environmental interpretations of being in the big city.

"And L.A. was different than New York; it's an unpopulated big city. You're down there in these vast expanses of warehouses and there's no people, so its not like New York and SoHo where you have this co-mingling of people and buildings and technology. Down here was like a desert. It was like a wasteland, really. Just like the River is still today."

-- Brett Goldstone
(As transcribed from "1/3: The Gate Maker," from Departures: LA River. View the full selection below.)

brightcove-5640635749001.jpg
Telling L.A. is an hour-long special that explores the art and craft of storytelling, in order to honor and to celebate the diversity -- as well as the commonality, -- of the human experience. In four segments, subjects are asked what brought them to Los Angeles.
Telling L.A. (Trailer)

Photo: Via Departures

This post originally appeared under the headline, "Arrival Story: Brett Goldstone"

Support Provided By
Read More
Looking west over the Heart Mountain Relocation Center with its sentry name sake, Heart Mountain, on the horizon.

How Japanese American Incarceration Was Entangled With Indigenous Dispossession

Indigenous land dispossession was bolstered by the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — and vice versa.
Chiqui Diaz at work advocating to end social isolation | Courtesy of Chiqui Diaz

Youth Leaders Making a Difference Honored by The California Endowment

The Youth Awards was created in 2018 to recognize the impact youth voices have in creating change throughout California. Learn more about the positive work they're accomplishing throughout the state.
A 2011 crime scene in Tulare County, where one of Jose Martinez's victims was found. | Courtesy of Marion County Sherff’s Office via FOIA/Buzzfeed

California's Unincorporated Places Can Be Poor, Powerless — and the Perfect Place to Commit Murder

It's time to do better by communities that don’t even have local police to call, let alone defund.