LOS ANGELES — Billy Al Bengston, the artist who helped establish L.A. Cool School at the Ferus Gallery through his geometric brand of West Coast, custom car-culture inspired Pop art, has died. He was 88.
Bengston died of natural causes at his home in Venice, said his gallery Various Small Fires on Sunday.
Bengston came of age as an artist in the late 1950s, as part of a group of young West Coast contemporary art luminaries including Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin and Larry Bell who helped cement the legendary status of Walter Hopps' Ferus Gallery as a counterculture hot bed on North La Cienega Boulevard.
