Exploring the people, places & culture of greater LA
Today two exciting new photography exhibitions open at the Getty. The first, Portraits of Renown: Photography and the Cult of Celebrity, “surveys some of the visual strategies used by photographers to picture the famous from the 1840s to the year 2000” and draws images from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive collection.
Last May LACMA held the inaugural west coast screenings of Christian Marclay’s film, The Clock, a work which subsequently won Marclay the Gold Lion for best artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The film is a cinematic mash-up that seamlessly weaves together hundreds of television and film clips into a hypnotic montage of time related imagery.
California’s creative energy and vast talent pool is well-known. The state is home to a diverse community of innovators who work in fields such as the arts, technology, public policy and entertainment, just to name a few.
Artists and musicians have long been drawn to southern California’s desert communities. One arts organization doing particularly interesting work today in the Joshua Tree area is High Desert Test Sites, which explores “…the intersections between contemporary art and life at large” within physical and conceptual spaces.
Levitated Mass, the much anticipated work by artist Michael Heizer, has finally begun the most daunting and complex phase of the installation process – transporting the 340-ton granite boulder from a Riverside, CA quarry to LACMA. Once the megalith arrives at the museum, crews will install it over a 456-foot long slot constructed on the north lawn behind the Resnick Gallery. Visitors will then be able to walk around, and more impressively under, the massive rock, which I anticipate will be an exciting and awe-inspiring experience. I can’t wait!
During the past several decades, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) has steadily expanded the region’s bus and rail systems. Recognizing that art can engage transit riders, beautify public space, and reflect the diverse communities that use these systems as well as the region’s rich history, Metro initiated an ambitious public art program in 1989 that has become an important component of its planning and construction programs.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the USSR’s demise in 1991, the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, in collaboration with the Craft and Folk Art Museum, have produced an exhibition of poster art titled “Deconstructing Perestroika: Soviet Ideology and its Discontents.” Comprised of 24 political posters produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the exhibit seeks to shed light on the ways in which some Soviet artists responded to the dramatic changes and upheaval of their society, as well as to the new found freedom of expression and insistence on transparency that were the hallmarks of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (re-structuring).
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