Some of the first artists to create what came to be known as lowbrow art were underground cartoonists like
Robert Williams and
Gary Panter. Barry McGee,
Margaret Kilgallen, Dan "Plasma" Rauch, and Camilla Elke were amongst the first to pioneer Lowbrow as a street art, zine, fashion, graffiti, and counter culture movement. The purpose of the lowbrow movement was to take an unorthodox approach to art and to completely defy its "rules". This resulted in pushback from significant individuals and organizations in the art industry. Early shows were in alternative
galleries in New York and Los Angeles such as Psychedelic Solutions Gallery in
Greenwich Village, New York City which was run by
Jacaeber Kastor,
La Luz de Jesus run by Billy Shire and
01 gallery in Hollywood, run by John Pochna. The movement steadily grew from its beginning, with hundreds of artists adopting this style. As the number of artists grew, so did the number of galleries showing lowbrow. In 1992, Greg Escalante helped orchestrate the first formal gallery exhibition to take lowbrow art seriously: painter
Anthony Ausgang's solo show "Looney Virtues" at the Julie Rico Gallery in
Santa Monica. The Bess Cutler Gallery also went on to show important artists and helped expand the kind of art that was classified as lowbrow. The lowbrow magazine
Juxtapoz, launched in 1994 by Robert Williams, Greg Escalante, and
Eric Swenson, has been a mainstay of writing on lowbrow art and has helped shape and expand the movement. ==Etymology==