Pacific Standard Time: Art In L.A. 1945-1980 will bring together more than sixty cultural institutions throughout Southern California to tell the story of the rise of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a new force in the art world. This unprecedented region-wide collaboration, initiated through $10 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, includes more than 60 cultural partners, 60+ exhibitions, scores of galleries, and an eleven-day performance art festival. While slated to open officially on October 1 and continue through April 2012, we count at least three-dozen exhibitions opening between now and October 1. Here are just a few you should plan to see before this Labor Day.
For more information and a calendar of Pacific Standard Time events go to Artweek.LA.
California Art: Selections From The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation | Since the 1960s, California has emerged as a center for contemporary art that rivals New York in its accomplishments and innovation. Frederick R. Weisman was a pioneering L.A. art collector whose rise as an important patron of the arts paralleled the emergence of the contemporary art scene in Southern California. He began collecting both international art and art from Los Angeles in the mid-1950s and counted many of the city's top artists as his close friends. His collection reflects these personal relationships.
Artists represented in the exhibition include Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Charles Arnoldi, Billy Al Bengston, Tony Berlant, Bruce Conner, Ron Davis, Laddie John Dill, Tim Ebner, Jack Goldstein, Joe Goode, Tim Hawkinson, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, John McCracken, John McLaughlin, Ed Moses, Ed Ruscha, and many others.
California Art: Selections From The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation opens August 27 at the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art
Serendipity: Paul Soldner, Artist and Provocateur | Innovator, artist, inventor, teacher. These are only a few words that describe Paul Soldner. The exhibition will illuminate his creative life as an artist and teacher, featuring many works he made at Scripps College, where he developed his distinctive approaches to raku and salt-fired ceramics. In addition to vessels, the exhibition will explore other aspects of his work, including wall pieces and monoprints, which demonstrate Soldner's lesser-known but lively commentary on popular culture. Videos demonstrating different perspectives of Soldner will also be on view. Workshops devoted to Soldner's special areas of expertise -- raku, bonsai, and brush making -- will accompany the exhibition.
Serendipity: Paul Soldner, Artist and Provocateur opens August 27 at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery
It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973 | From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art. There, Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator of Light and Space art, and Helene Winer, later the director of Artists Space and Metro Pictures in New York, curated landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between Conceptual art and postminimalism, and presaged the development of postmodernism in the later 1970s. Artists such as Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz, Jack Goldstein, and Allen Ruppersberg, among others, formed the educational backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years at Pomona College, including alumni Mowry Baden, Chris Burden, and James Turrell.
This unprecedented and revelatory insight into the art history of postwar Los Angeles consists of three distinct, but related, exhibitions.
It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973, Part 1 opens August 30 at the Pomona Museum of Art
Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987 | This exhibition is the first retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco (1971-1987), which began as a tight-knit core group of artists from East Los Angeles composed of Gronk, Harry Gamboa, Jr., Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez. Taking their name from the forceful word for disgust and nausea in Spanish, Asco set about through public performance art and multimedia to respond to turbulent socio-political developments in Los Angeles and within the larger international context. Geographically and culturally segregated from the still nascent Los Angeles contemporary art scene and aesthetically at odds with the emerging Chicano art movement, Asco united to explore and exploit the broad spectrum of the conceptual.
Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972-1987 opens September 4 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-72) | A powerful work that depicts the hatred many white Americans expressed toward racial minorities and interracial partnerships in the not-too-distant-past; it stands as Kienholz's major civil rights work. In this horrifying life-size tableau, four automobiles and a pickup truck are arranged on a dirt floor in a dark room with their headlights illuminating a shocking scene: a group of white men exacting their gruesome "punishment" on an African American man whom they have discovered drinking with a white woman. Commenting on the work and its theme of racial oppression, Kienholz said at the time, "If six to one is unfair odds in my tableau, then 170 million to 20 million is sure as hell unfair odds in my country."
Although our society increasingly considers itself post-racial, Five Car Stud is a harsh reminder of a shameful part of our history whose traces still linger. It was seen only in Germany in 1972 and has since remained in storage in Japan for almost forty years. This is its first public showing in the United States.
Edward Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-72) opens September 4 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
For a complete calendar of openings and exhibitions throughout Los Angeles go to Artweek.LA.
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