Description
This finding aid describes four
separate collections acquired by the Getty Research Institute in 1997 and related to Robert
Heineckens's project...wore khakis, a five-year endeavor centered on the
GAP's 1990s khaki pants advertising campaign.
Background
The artist and teacher, Robert Heinecken (1931–2006), was a pivotal figure in the postwar
Los Angeles art scene. The son of a Lutheran minister, he was born in Denver, Colorado, and
raised in Riverside, California. He interrupted his studies at UCLA to spend the three years
from 1953 to 1957 as a Marine fighter pilot, after which he returned to the university,
graduating with an M. A. in art in 1960 with a specialization in printmaking, which he had
already started to combine with other media such as sculpture and photography. Heinecken
stayed at UCLA for the next thirty years, teaching in the art department and founding its
photography program in 1963. He was a founding member of the Society of Photographic
Education (1964), and chaired this organization of college teachers in 1970 and 1971. In his
teaching, as with his own work, Heinecken championed wide-ranging media and stylistic
experimentation. Many of his students – among them Uta Barth, Jo Ann Callis, Eileen Cowan,
Darryl Curran, John Dovola, Robert Flick, Patrick Nagatani, and Sheila Pinkel – established
themselves as important artists and instructors in the Los Angeles art scene and beyond.