Building the Scene: Dave Tourjé’s World of Art, Music and Subculture

The artist, musician, filmmaker, and California Locos founder has spent decades bringing people, movements, and subcultures into the same room

Some people enter a scene. Dave Tourjé built one instead — or helped build several, depending on how you count.

That distinction matters. Tourjé’s career was never built around one medium or a single job title. Painter, musician, filmmaker, builder, preservationist, co-founder of the California Locos — the résumé reads long, but the interesting part isn’t the list. It’s what happens once those worlds start bumping into each other. Again and again he’s found ways to pull artists, musicians, designers, builders, collectors, and whole subcultures into the same orbit — groups that might’ve otherwise stayed apart. He’s not really moving between scenes so much as setting up the conditions for them to collide.

You can see that instinct at the center of LOCOS X, the newly announced event at the Fullerton Museum Center. It brings together the California Locos and the legendary Los Angeles punk band X, mixing visual art, archival material, live music, hot rods, and lowriders into something that reads less like a conventional museum show and more like an actual gathering.

The pairing makes sense once you think about it for a second. Southern California’s most influential creative movements rarely grew up in isolation. Punk musicians knew artists. Artists surfed and skated. Car builders thought like designers. Graphic artists bounced between record sleeves, walls, boards, posters, and commercial work without much fuss. The lines were always more porous than whatever tidy categories got invented later to describe them.

Tourjé has understood that for a long time. His own artwork pulls from fine art, graffiti, sign painting, punk, surfing, skateboarding, hot-rod culture, and the broader visual vocabulary of Los Angeles — layered, symbolic, unmistakably regional without ever tipping into nostalgia. Surfers, animals, skeletons, Native American references, bold icons, typography, geometric shapes, vivid color fields — they all show up together in the same piece sometimes. The paintings feel accumulated more than designed around one clean idea, like decades of Southern California culture got pressed onto a single surface.

That visual language traces straight back to the California Locos, the collective Tourjé helped start in 2011 alongside Chaz Bojórquez, John Van Hamersveld, Norton Wisdom, and Gary Wong. The group brought together artists whose histories touched graffiti, rock graphics, performance, surf culture, punk, street art, and contemporary painting. What made the Locos compelling wasn’t the pedigree of the individual members so much as their refusal to separate so-called high art from the visual languages that actually shaped Los Angeles.

Tourjé’s role in that world has always gone beyond making his own work. He gathers people. He builds platforms, documents stories, creates environments where collaboration can actually happen. It might be the single most consistent thread running through everything he does.

Music is a big part of it. Tourjé’s played guitar since his teens and came up through the Los Angeles underground scene in the 1980s as a member of The Dissidents. It was never a side project bolted onto an art career later — music was there from the start, shaping how he thinks about energy, collaboration, live experience. A band only works when distinct personalities stay distinct while still adding up to something bigger. Same dynamic, really, as the California Locos. Same dynamic now with LOCOS X.

The Fullerton Museum event brings those worlds together fairly directly. The California Locos present historic and new work, while X brings the musical history of Los Angeles punk into the same frame. Archival material, live performance, hot rods, and lowriders push the whole thing past a typical gallery experience and closer to the actual culture behind it.

That matters, because underground movements tend to change once they step inside an institution. The moment something lands in a museum, there’s a risk it comes out tidier, safer, easier to explain than it ever was in real life. Tourjé seems more interested in keeping the energy intact than in polishing the history. LOCOS X isn’t really trying to prove punk, graffiti, surf graphics, skate art, and custom-car culture belong in museums. It’s showing that those traditions are still tied to living communities — active artists, musicians, and audiences, not just archives gathering dust.

That same philosophy shows up in his work as a filmmaker and preservationist. He’s consistently drawn to stories and people at risk of being overlooked — whether through documentary projects, his work with the Chouinard Foundation, or his efforts to preserve pieces of Southern California’s art and cultural history. It’s not nostalgia for some lost era so much as cultural maintenance: making sure the people and movements that shaped the region don’t vanish just because nobody bothered to write it down.

There’s a practical side to this too. Tourjé spent decades in construction and structural work — a career built around understanding how things fit together and what it takes to keep them standing. That mindset carries over into culture more easily than you’d expect. Scenes need structure. Spaces, people, archives, organizations, opportunities, and enough momentum to outlast a single moment.

In a lot of ways, Tourjé approaches culture like a builder. Figure out what’s already there, see how the pieces connect, put together a framework strong enough to carry something bigger.

Maybe that’s why his work feels less like self-promotion and more like scene-building. A painting matters — the exhibition around it matters too. A musician matters — so does the room where the music happens. A collective matters — and so does the audience that grows up around it over time. The objects count, sure. But the relationships between them are usually where the real cultural impact lives.

Los Angeles has always been unusually good at producing collisions like this. Fine art, punk, surf, skate, graffiti, fashion, film, and automotive culture have been feeding off each other for decades, without much concern for hierarchy. Tourjé’s creative world reflects that history — and it’s also an attempt to keep the exchange going.

Which is why LOCOS X feels less like a retrospective and more like a continuation.

It respects the past without treating it as finished business. It puts artists and musicians with deep histories into a new shared context, and invites another generation to encounter the culture in person — not through a feed, not through an archive.

At a time when so much culture gets consumed alone through a screen, Tourjé still believes in the old-fashioned power of people standing in the same room, reacting to the same art, hearing the same music, feeding off the energy of everyone around them.

That’s what a scene actually is.

And Dave Tourjé is still helping build one.

Author: Mike Falkow

Organization: Meritus Media

The post Building the Scene: Dave Tourjé’s World of Art, Music and Subculture appeared first on The Hype Magazine.