Carlson Hatton
Carlson Hatton’s parents, both ceramic artists, immersed him in the family trade from a young age. He helped around the art studio, pouring and making molds, and painting vessels and other objects. He learned to draw from his father, from watching TV and from art classes.
“Having parents who were both artists,” he says, “was a big, big inspiration.”
Now teaching drives his creative impulses. “The way people enter into a creative field with no set idea of [art] can be really inspirational,” says Hatton, who’s taught art at Santa Monica College for about 10 years.
Hatton, born in San Diego in 1974, moved to New York when he was 18 to pursue art at Cooper Union, the thentuition-free college in Manhattan. “It was founded by the guy who invented Jell-O,” he says, “and he also invented the predecessor to the steam engine and the predecessor to the elevator.”
At Cooper Union, he studied all forms of art, but emphasized painting. And though he never officially became a printmaker, it was an art form that resonated with him. “That method of thinking, that method of layering is something that remained very constant in my work.”
After graduating, he went to Amsterdam for his MFA, where he was given “this enormous studio ... I started making big sculptures and installation projects, and work that was not painting because I felt like I had to take on this ridiculously big studio space I was provided.”
Not long after 9/11, Hatton and his then girlfriend moved to Los Angeles, a city he’s always loved. But it felt like a mistake. Jobs were scarce. They didn’t know anyone. It took time to establish himself as an artist. He discovered that the numerous jobs he took on — architectural fabrication, window and set design — all used the introductory-level skills he learned in art school.
“I found that I picked up so many technical skills in that world, and particularly architectural interiors, that I think really factor into my current work,” he says. They also helped with bigger projects, including his Metro project.
As his largest public art project yet, Hatton thought a lot about its horizontal format. He knew he wanted to create something involving “L.A.’s broad and sweeping horizons” for the Hyde Park station, but he wasn’t sure of its focus.
Eventually, he narrowed his interests to the music history of South L.A.’s Hyde Park area and its nature.
“I found it funny that there are historical palm trees in L.A. that have been here longer than most anything,” he says, “and a lot of them are throughout that Crenshaw District.”
Hatton sought the help of several of his art students to take photos in their communities to give him a different perspective of the area.
Having them “show me their neighborhood and their surroundings and their take on a city that we all share together was a really interesting aspect of the project,” he says.
The collective work resulted in a “bright, “vibrant,” “rhythmic” and richly layered project that references, among other things, jazz, the Inglewood-raised saxophonist Kamasi Washington, the late rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle, and low-rider car culture.
Though it’s been 20 years since Hatton moved to L.A., the city is still revealing itself. When he embarked on the Crenshaw/LAX project, his impressions and understanding of the city shifted.
“It’s been so interesting for me to be able to look at the city in a different way,” he says, “to look at it from a different angle, to open up research about a part of the city.”
In a place that once felt unwelcoming, Los Angeles, for Hatton, has become a place of perpetual discovery.