Julia Gerard: L.A.’s one-woman peace movement
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
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