Llyn Foulkes’s Art About American Rot Is More Eccentric and Urgent Than Ever

“Maybe I have this stupid feeling that art can save the world,” the Los Angeles–based artist Llyn Foulkes said in an oral history conducted for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. That was in 1997. Now, in 2024, Foulkes, one of the original artists to show at LA’s storied Ferus gallery in the ’60s, would likely be the first to admit that it hasn’t. If anything, the world has, by most accounts, gotten worse. But our dark times seem like good ones to show