Artwork copyright Dennis Olanzo Callwood. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Artwork copyright Dennis Olanzo Callwood. Photo courtesy of Washington State Arts Commission, 2017.

Happy Days, 1994

Dennis Olanzo Callwood
(American, born 1942)

Location: Republic Elementary-Junior-Senior High School, Republic

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Happy Days is part of fine art photographer Dennis Callwood's series of collaborative artworks that he calls "Photofusion." For each piece in the series, the artist photographed an inmate at a Los Angeles County Juvenile Correctional Institute, many of who were gang members. He then asked each subject to respond to their photograph by adding writing, art, and graffiti to the photo.

This artwork was acquired for the State Art Collection in partnership with Republic School District.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Photographer Dennis Olanzo Callwood's art documents and investigates the life of people of African descent in the New World. He has also focused on different communities within his hometown of Los Angeles. Callwood states that "my photography is neither photojournalism nor documentation. Rather, it brings the aesthetics of the fine arts to image structures that reveal pure human emotion. The cultural events, their locations, and the stimuli that trigger such emotion are the underlying themes, but it is the emotion itself that I am trying to capture."

Dennis Olanzo Callwood was born in the Virgin Islands of the Caribbean, and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He holds a Bachelor of Art degree in sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography from the University of Southern California. He also studied photography at the University of Veracruz in Mexico. Callwood worked as a Los Angeles County probation officer for over twenty years.