Brian Chidester
Creative Historian

Burt Shonberg (1933-1977) was probably the first visual artist I devoted any serious time to researching in my life. I first discovered him in 2001 while I was living in L.A. This article from 2011 about his beatnik coffeehouse in Laguna Beach, CA, dubbed Cafe Frankenstein, was the first thing I ever had published on him. (Only took me ten years to get around to it!) It ran in the inaugural issue of "Outré Journal," published by the Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The publisher/gallerist, Martin McIntosh, was a fellow devotee of Beat Generation art, and he gave me a lot of room to hang myself on the text to this one. I wrote it and re-wrote it a bunch of times after that, for various publications and online venues, and though it shows some solid research and no shortage of ambition, the writing is pretty bad overall. I would get another chance with Shonberg, however, when the "L.A. Weekly" published my feature article about his work in 2015, and then again when the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft & Magick, with the Stephen Romano Gallery, mounted an exhibition of Shonberg's artwork in 2021, for which I was hired to curate and write the main essay in the catalog. (See Exhibitions page on this website.) Go to the main Articles page to download the PDF of the Cafe Frankenstein article.