Tag: photoLA

OCMA Redefined with its New Space

What a roller coaster we’ve been on these last three years.Hard to believe how the world shut down in March 2020, and now California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announces that our State of Emergency will be over next Feb. 28. The museums have largely reopened—one in a brand new space, see below—and the art fairs are back in business. (The galleries stayed open throughout, due to some fortunate glitch.) During this time the rich got richer, and now have a lot more money to buy a lot more art. While some scramble to make ends meet, the art business is big business, and record prices for the works of living artists are being set.

The new Orange County Museum of Art building in Costa Mesa opened to the public on October 8 with a 24-hour event that brought people in droves. Designed by the architecture firm Morphosis and costing a cool $94 million, the tile-clad building has an undulating surface, matte beige in color. Director Heidi Zuckerman was hired in January 2021, and has given us a taste of the programming she is prioritizing—curating one of the three main opening exhibitions herself, “13 Women.”

“Something that I’ve been talking about as an overall mission” she says, “[is] this idea of looking back to look forward, and recognizing where we’ve come from, where we are currently, and where we hope to go.” “13 Women” is a show from the museum’s own collection—13 featured artists to honor the 13 women who founded the museum in 1962 in Newport Beach. The first round of artists include Joan Brown, Vija Celmins, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger and Agnes Pelton. With periodic rotations of work during the next year, the exhibition will feature as many as 100 different artists. The two other main exhibitions are the relaunch of the California Biennial 2022 and “Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World).”

It’s great to see the Biennial back—we do need it—this time curated by former OCMA Chief Curator Liz Armstrong, with co-curators Essence Harden and Gilbert Vicario. They met on Zoom and visited some 100 artists, both well-known and under-the-radar, such as Sharon Ellis, Raúl Guerrero and Ben Sakoguchi—okay, nix Sakoguchi who was disinvited after museum staff objected to the appearance of a swastika in his painting, Comparative Religions 101. The swastika references Nazi Germany, with which Japan was allied during World War II, and it appears in a section about the rise and fall of Emperor Hirohito as a revered figure. It’s regrettable that the museum decided to eliminate his work, rather than provide material that would put the work in context. Others in the Biennial include Alex Anderson—whom I’ve written about before in Artillery—Alicia Piller and Clare Rojas. The 20 selected artists work in a gamut of media including ceramics, painting and assemblage. Congratulations!

Museum Highlights

At the Academy Museum “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971” (through April 9) is a true delight, and a real learning experience for most of us. The large exhibition explores the contribution of Black directors, actors and other talents to American cinema, from silent film days to the Civil Rights era. I was especially intrigued by the early all-Black-cast movies illustrated with posters and photographs, including Richard E. Norman’s Regeneration, an attempt at a swashbuckling “romance of the high seas” in 1923. As racial barriers began to fall after World War II, Black participation in narrative cinema increased.

The Hammer Museum recently opened two shows that are exceptionally interesting, and quite smartly curated. “Joan Didion: What She Means” (through Feb. 19) is a tribute from one writer, New Yorker contributor Hilton Als, to another. It’s also a tribute to the extraordinary times through which Didion lived—most vividly the ’60s, with its hallucinatory combination of sex, drugs and revolution. The exhibition uses memorabilia, photography and video, and art—including works by Betye Saar, Vija Celmins, Maren Hassinger, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir. The exhibition was organized by Als with Chief Curator Connie Butler and Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi, curatorial assistant.

While there, don’t miss the smaller “Picasso Cut Papers” (through Dec. 31), a delightful exhibition of about 100 of his paper works—torn, cut, folded, painted, inserted into other work—in a specially designed gallery that has a box within a box. This is an original exhibition from the Hammer’s Grunewald Center, curated by Cynthia Burlingham and Allegra Pesenti, and won’t be traveling, so be sure see it here.

Art Fairs and Anniversaries

Get ready for the fairs coming up early next year. In February we’ll see the return of Intersect Palm Springs (Feb 9–12) to the Palm Springs Convention Center, the LA Art Show (Feb. 15–19) to the LA Convention Center, and Frieze LA (Feb 16–19) moving from Beverly Hills to the Santa Monica Airport. I for one applaud the latter move—it was doggone hard to park in Beverly Hills. 

Next March photoLA (March 2–5) returns after a hiatus—this time to the Barker Hangar at Santa Monica Airport. Welcome back to our longest continuing art fair! No word about another homegrown fave, Felix, however. Let’s see if they survived the return of Frieze last year, which had terrific art and appeared to be very successful sales-wise.

Ten years is quite a milestone for art projects, especially one tied to a residency.  But Bernard Liebov has stalwartly carried it through, and at times the projects I’ve seen at the Joshua Treenial which he curated were better than the ones in Desert X.  To celebrate he’s selected 10 artists/artist teams from the residencies at BoxoPROJECTS for a tenth anniversary show and celebration,  Boxo10x10 (November 19 through December 31), at his space in Joshua Tree.

Lastly, Happy 10th Anniversary, Shulamit! I remember visiting the Shulamit Nazarian gallery when it was still in Venice, in a gallery/house space—but the larger new La Brea space has enabled full-scale exhibitions of such emerging and mid-career artists as Annie Lapin, Bridget Mullen, Fay Ray, Charles Snowden, Michael Stamm, Cammie Staros, NaamaTsabar and one of my favorite contemporary artists, Summer Wheat. It’s an impressive list. This summer they celebrated a 10th anniversary show, co-organized by Nazarian and gallery co-owner Seth Curcio.