Welcome to Venice West

Welcome to Venice West is a digital exhibition of selected audio recordings from the Lawrence Lipton papers, part of the USC Libraries' Special Collections. Lipton (1898-1975) was a journalist, musician, poet, and chronicler of the "Venice West" community of Beat Generation artists based in Venice, California.

Thanks to generous support from the Council on Library and Information Resources' (CLIR) Recordings at Risk grant program, the USC Digital Library recently digitized a selection of 147 recordings from the Lipton papers. The recordings featured in this digital exhibition include Lipton's original interviews with such prominent artists as Kenneth Rexroth, Stuart Perkoff, and Langston Hughes; live readings by Beat poets of the "Venice West" scene; and experimental jazz and poetry performances with musicians like Dave Brubeck and Buddy Collette. 

The recordings highlighted in this exhibition include timestamps with clickable annotations, allowing readers to more easily browse, skip, and explore topics within each recording. Support from the Ahmanson Lab at the USC Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study made these audio navigation improvements possible. For a full list of the recordings used in this project, see the "Audio Collection" index that concludes the exhibition.