Each week ForYourArt brings you the best opportunities to SEE, COLLECT, LEARN, and SUPPORT art in Los Angeles and everywhere.
October 1st and 2nd mark the opening of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980, an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene.
ForYourArt has sifted through the exhibitions and pulled out the essentials, so you don't have to.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1
Art Fair Roundup
Downtown L.A.
Various Times
As well as the opening of Pacific Standard Time, there are many art fairs in Downtown Los Angeles this weekend. Art Platform - Los Angeles will be held at L.A. Mart through Monday, Co/Lab will be held at Angel City Brewing through Monday, PULSE will be held at the Event Deck at L.A. Live through Monday, Fountain Art Fair will be held at Lot 613 through Sunday, and Avant-L.A. will be held at 1837 South Main Street adjacent to Art Platform through Monday.
Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970
J. Paul Getty Museum, Exhibitions Pavilion (Brentwood)
10am-9pm
Opening day for this Pacific Standard Time exhibition, which leads viewers on a dynamic tour from the emergence of an indigenous strain of modernism evident in the hard-edge paintings, assemblage sculpture, and large-scale ceramics of the 1950s, to the subsequent development of iconic Pop images of the city in the 1960s, and the conceptual and material contributions of Light and Space art and process painting that fostered the advanced art of the 1970s.
Doin' It In Public: Feminism and at the Women's Building
Otis College of Art and Design (Westchester)
10am-5pm
Opening day for this Pacific Standard Time exhibition, which is comprised of an exhibition, two scholarly publications, and series of public events that document that contextualize and pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of feminist artists and art cooperatives that were centered in and around the Los Angeles Woman's Building (downtown L.A.) in the 1970s and 1980s.
Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981 and Theaster Gates: An Epitaph for Civil Rights
Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Downtown)
11am-6pm
Opening day for the most comprehensive survey exhibition to date to examine the exceptional fertility and diversity of art practice in California during a transitional time in American history. Also opening is Gates' presentation of mixed-media sculptures and installation works that use a black non-aesthetic to explore urban blight and the potency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, when hundreds of demonstrators were violently hazed by the county's police and fire departments.
Pacific Standard Time Participating Gallery Open House
Various locations
1-4pm
Join Pacific Standard Time Participating Galleries throughout the city and Southern California who will welcome visitors in celebration of the opening of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980. Enjoy the opportunity to view their ambitious exhibitions that expand on the themes of this unprecedented collaboration. For more information and a map of the Participating Galleries, click here.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2
Trespass Parade
Broadway Ave. (Downtown)
11am
The historic Broadway Theater District in Downtown Los Angeles will erupt with Trespass, a parade where artists and residents will rally together to engage in art, music, dancing, floats, community activism, and performance. Trespass is a collaborative project between Arto Lindsay, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and West of Rome Public Art (WoR) that also includes a party and a T-shirt project with call-to-action slogans. Los Angeles art luminaries including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Nancy Rubins, and Jeffrey Vallance produced calls to action expressing political or social concerns that will be worn on T-shirts during the parade.
Now Dig This!
Hammer Museum (Westwood)
11am-5pm
A comprehensive exhibition that examines the vital legacy of the city's African American visual artists. Now Dig This! comprises 140 works from 35 artists that have rarely been shown in a museum setting and includes early pieces by now well-established artists as well as works once considered "lost."
For a full listing of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 related events this week, click here.