Family by Joseph Young

The elegant and sparkling family at right are facing the same problem that so many of our neighbors have gone through--they lost their home and are looking for another.

That's actually true; I am not being sarcastic.

This lovely mosaic, surrounded by many smaller images, was created by Joseph L. Young in 1964 for the Valley Cities Jewish Community Center in Sherman Oaks.

That Center (and several others, like the Silverlake JCC) closed after a long fight to stay open, in 2009.  Everything in it was auctioned off.

The artist--who created many other works, including the mosaics on the Math Building at UCLA, and the Trifonium downtown, died in 2007.

If you'd like to see more of his work, here is his Facebook page, maintained by his daughters. That's where these pictures came from, as well as the pictures from an earlier post I did on the mosaics at the Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills.

Some photos are in black and white, with members of his family, and others show installations over past decades.

Young's family was able to reacquire the mosaics from the JCC and they're now looking for an appropriate venue. This main mosaic of the nuclear family stands 7 feet high and 3 feet wide.

In the picture below--part of the Los Angeles Public Library collection--the artist is on the left, identified as Dr. Joseph L. Young.

The man second from the right is actor Herschel Bernardi.

The photographer was Bob Martin and the picture ran in the Valley Times, I think. The event was the dedication of the mosaic in the community center lobby on January 23, 1964.  Right above Joseph Young's head you can just see one of the smaller mosaics, Music, that surround the main picture. Others represent different facets of life. But the Music piece is at right.

The other folks are Mrs. Kenneth Shore, Bert Gold, Mrs. Arthur Becker, and to the right of Bernardi, Milton Malkin.

Boys and girls, once upon a time, ladies didn't have names of their own. They were known as appendages of their husbands, except among very good friends.

That's one silly custom I was glad to see the end of!