Melvino Garretti (b. 1946 in Los Angeles, CA) creates ecstatic ceramic sculptures, paintings, and assemblages. The artist’s multidisciplinary practice emerged out of the social fabric of South-Central Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, formally beginning during his studio with Studio Watts, a pioneering arts-driven collective created to serve the local community in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Garretti then went on to focus on ceramics at Great Barrington Pottery in Massachusetts and earned his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978.

Having adopted the moniker of an “urban and suburban anthropologist,” Garretti’s art practice expresses the eco-system in which the works are made along with the enduring symbology of the human experience.