A two-foot mahogany sculpture by Elizabeth Catlett now greets visitors at the Carson library, sharing space with a 1973 painting once owned by a Los Angeles insurance company that built one of the country's premier Black art collections before it collapsed nearly two decades ago. These are not reproductions or loans passing through for a season. Los Angeles County owns them outright, and it has quietly installed roughly 120 works from the former Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company collection across public libraries and community centers, free and open to anyone who walks in.
The collection traces back to William Pajaud, who served as Golden State Mutual's art director and spent two decades assembling what became a pre-eminent gathering of Black art, according to LAist. Pajaud worked with an annual acquisition budget of just $5,000 while employed in the company's public relations department, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. Rather than relying on deep pockets, he leaned on personal relationships with artists to build a collection that championed Black talent largely shut out of mainstream galleries at the time.
Golden State Mutual itself was born out of exclusion. Founded on July 23, 1925, by William Nickerson Jr., Norman O. Houston, and George A. Beavers Jr., the company was created because white-owned insurers routinely denied coverage to Black residents or charged them discriminatory rates, according to the UCLA Library. It grew into the largest Black-owned business west of the Mississippi River, operating for decades out of its West Adams headquarters, a Paul Revere Williams-designed building later named Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 1000.
A Collection Split by Bankruptcy
When the company folded, per LAist's reporting, its art collection did not stay intact. Most of its best pieces were sold at a private auction in 2007, with some works fetching hundreds of thousands of dollars. A Swann Galleries sale in New York was scheduled for October 4, with 94 premier works expected to sell for as much as $1.5 million, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. The auction drew sharp protest from local art historians and scholars who worried the state was losing a piece of its Black artistic heritage, a concern the Times documented as the sale unfolded.
The sale had ripple effects across the broader art market. According to Culture Type, the 2007 Swann auction helped drive painter Charles White's auction record from roughly $30,000 to $360,000 and helped get the market for Black art rolling; Swann's dedicated sales changed the market. One casualty of that sale was John Riddle's 1973 painting Dominoes, which Golden State Mutual once owned before it eventually made its way into LA County's collection.
After the corporate liquidation, the County acquired over 120 works in November 2015. The Second District provided funding for the purchase.
Stewardship, access and a separate bankruptcy case
The LA County Department of Arts and Culture says works from the remaining group were removed from storage, documented, conserved, and reframed or mounted in custom cases before the current installations. The department also says three works related to Golden State Mutual’s founders and a rendering of the company’s building by architect Paul Revere Williams were returned on loan to the historic West Adams building. The county’s account describes these conservation steps and placements; public access is through the library and community-facility displays described below. A separate bankruptcy case offers a comparison, not part of Golden State Mutual’s history: WFAE reported that foundations bought Johnson Publishing Company’s Ebony and Jet photo archive for $30 million at auction in 2019. That Chicago-based case involved a photographic archive, rather than Golden State Mutual’s art collection. Sources: LA County Department of Arts and Culture; WFAE.
Where To Find the Art Today
The county placed the works in public libraries and community facilities rather than limiting their display to a museum, LAist reports. Sites include the Carson library, the A.C. Bilbrew Library, the Masao W. Satow Library, the View Park Bebe Moore Campbell Library, the Curtis Tucker Behavioral Health Center, the Willowbrook Senior Center, and the Mark Ridley-Thomas Behavioral Health Center on the Martin Luther King, Jr. Medical Campus. The Department of Arts and Culture launched an interactive map in March 2026 to help visitors locate individual works.
The Carson library holds Elizabeth Catlett's sculpture The Embrace and John Riddle's 1973 painting Dominoes. Catlett wrote that she used abstract form, color, line and space to express emotion and reach people with little or no formal experience in art principles, according to LAist. Riddle has worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, and his collectors have included Jesse Jackson and Roberta Flack.
The A.C. Bilbrew Library displays a work by Charles White, who lived in Los Angeles County for decades and mentored artists in the region. White made paintings and drawings addressing civil-rights issues during the 1960s, and his collectors included Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt, LAist reports.
Kristin Sakoda, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, told LAist that county-owned display spaces are available to the public. She also described potential benefits of the artworks for mental health, education, youth development, and inclusion and belonging.
Public Art Funding Behind the Scenes
The placement of the collection did not happen in a vacuum. LA County's Civic Art Policy, adopted by the Board of Supervisors in December 2004, requires that 1% of design and construction budgets for eligible county capital projects be set aside for civic art and collection care, according to the LA County Department of Arts and Culture. That framework sets aside funding for civic art and collection care; the county displays works like the Golden State Mutual collection in libraries and health centers rather than behind museum walls.
The county's arts funding has continued to expand since then. In September 2021, the Board of Supervisors passed the Public Art in Private Development ordinance, levying a 1% fee on private commercial development in unincorporated areas to support public art and cultural conservation, per the Art Newspaper. The policy applies in the county's unincorporated areas.
The permanent library and health center placements mark a more lasting chapter for a collection that, per the Golden State Mutual collection's own catalog, spans oil paintings, watercolors, and sculptures in clay, wood and metal by artists including Richard Wyatt alongside Catlett and White.
