kamp kenny

The singular vision of Kenny Scharf comes alive in the artist's ecstatic LA garden

- MAYER RUS

From the time Kenny Scharf emerged on New York City’s downtown art scene in the 1980s, his elastic, fantastic practice has encompassed painting, sculpture, video, fashion, performance, and installation art. To these various disciplines one can now add landscape design.

The garden at his Los Angeles home is, predictably, bonkers—a giddy wonderland of palm trees, cacti, and succulents mixed with decades-spanning artworks, ad hoc Day-Glo interventions, and plenty of Flintstones iconography. Like everything he creates, the garden proffers an invitation into the world of Kenny Scharf and his fractured fairy tale of cartoon-inspired surrealism and zany delight.

A native Angeleno, Scharf returned to his hometown in 1999 after heeding the siren call of Gotham in the late 1970s, and living in Brazil and Miami in the 1980s and ’90s, respectively. He purchased a modest home built in 1959 in Culver City, hard by the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, with sweeping views of downtown LA to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Despite the date of construction, the house eschews the rigor of classic LA midcentury-modern architecture—it’s more of a charming, woodsy cottage, adorned with a smattering of vaguely Alpine flourishes. “Nothing about this place has changed. When I bought it, it had the original fixtures, lighting, and kitchen appliances, and they’re all still here,” Scharf says of the structure’s oddball allure.