, John Baldessari. But it wasn’t until last year, when PowerHouse Books published a monograph of her collected works, that the world got its first glimpse of Kali.
A Long Island native, Kali was still Joan Archibald when she divorced and drove across the country with her two young children to remake herself in 1962, eventually settling down in Palm Springs in a house that had belonged to Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin. Once there, she took up black-and-white photography and learned how to develop her own pictures, using her pool for the task and adding painterly washes of color to her prints that chime with other psychedelic art of the time period.
The monograph, which Sam Shahid designed, gathers Kali’s self-portraits in an Instagram-ish grid, emphasizing her iterative process, and what Nannette V. Maciejunes, the Executive Director and CEO of the Columbus Museum of Art, which is currently exhibiting Kali’s work, describes as her “experimental and alternative” approach, an approach that extended throughout a series of stylistic shifts.
Later this month, a trade edition of the monograph will be released with a new essay by Tyrnauer. Kali’s daughter Susan has recently come across a new stash of film—as in moving picture film—that is slowly being digitized. Tyrnauer just may get a chance to make his movie about LA reinvention, and put Kali back in the picture at last.Kali: Artographer