Julia Gerard: L.A.'s one-woman peace movement
If this Sunday’s story about the holiday season’s enthusiastic embrace of the peace symbol leaves you looking to load up on peace-adorned pieces without crisscrossing the Southland, the best one-stop peace shop in our time zone might just be Julia Gerard’s Peace Gallery at 8575 Melrose Ave. (near Urth Caffe), which sells jeans, T-shirts, messenger bags, belt buckles and a wide array of accessories and housewares festooned with the counterculture logo (we swear we even saw a pair of peace sign candle sticks in there not so long ago).
Her single-minded focus on the peace symbol came in the aftermath of 9/11, she told me in a recent conversation. “That night I was going out of my brain, I couldn’t sleep at all. By Sept. 12, I had already had shirts made up.” Ever since then, she’s been a kind of one-woman peace movement, dedicated to spreading the message of peace one piece at a time, and her pieces have been worn by Ringo Starr, Prince, Patti Smith, Dave Matthews and Cher.
And it’s not just your run-of-the mill imagery either; Gerard’s designs include peace symbols with wings, shaped into hearts, grafted onto treble clefs and slapped atop the Christian cross, the Star of David and -- perhaps the most incongruous of all –- a swastika.
“I’m a child of a Holocaust survivor,” Gerard said, explaining a design many would find patently offensive. “It’s actually an ancient symbol so this is my way of reclaiming it –- I think people are finally starting to understand the swastika thing.”
Gerard says she’s amused by the recent resurgence of the iconic image as trendware.“I don’t begrudge anybody a peace symbol,” she said. “It’s a matter of it being effective, and anything we see over and over again will be effective because of conditioning if nothing else.”
-- Adam Tschorn
adam.tschorn@latimes.com
