Cynthia Hibbard | Flighty Towers

November 6 – 29, 2025

Opening/First Thursday Art Walk: November 6, 5-8 pm
Drop-in workshop: Make ceramic prints and visit with the artist Saturday, November 15, 2-4pm

When I grew up in Los Angeles in the ‘60s and ‘70s, towers were positive creations. Back then an ingenious and dedicated Italian immigrant Sabatino Rodia in his spare time over a 34-year period built 17 fantastical and spindly towers nearly 100 feet high out of rebar, homemade concrete and embedded pieces of ceramic, glass and random found objects—for the sheer joy of it. They became iconic and known as the Watts Towers. In the same era, a genius British comedian John Cleese spiked TV history with his wacky and beloved sitcom, Fawlty Towers. The soundtrack to the joyous ‘60s and ‘70s was enshrined at Tower Records, which rose as the US’s new commercial temple of vinyl, selling millions of titles that defined a musically explosive era. One strain of the new music was the blast of R & B funk created by the horn section of the Oakland band Tower of Power, still active today. All these towers of good feeling were besmirched when the Twin Towers came down in New York City. In this ceramics and 2-D series I stand with Sabatino Rodia to return to towers as positive, whimsical, irrational, non-functional and flighty expressions of fun.