Robert Witt Ames

Robert Witt Ames was among the most distinctive artists working in Los Angeles during the interwar decades, a period of extraordinary creativity in Southern California. Born in 1896, Ames devoted his career from the 1920s into the 1970s to the exploration of form through two primary disciplines: the carving of figures and statues in wood, and the creation of large-scale murals that captured the spirit of a rapidly transforming city.

His most celebrated public work, the mural "Hollywood," completed in 1935, now resides in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The work is a testament to Ames' command of narrative composition and his deep engagement with the cultural life of Los Angeles — its glamour, its ambition and its contradictions.

His carved figures possess a stillness that is not absence but concentration — as though each form holds its breath before speaking.

— From a contemporary review, Los Angeles Times, c. 1938

Beyond the mural, Ames produced a substantial body of carved wood sculpture: figures of psychological depth, statues of saints and secular subjects, and decorative objects of refined craftsmanship. These works, many of which remain in private hands or institutional collections, reveal an artist of uncommon sensitivity and technical mastery. The purpose of this website it to memorialize Ames' work and provide a gateway to its future.