On March 31, 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opened its doors in a new complex with several large outdoor sculptures, among which was Calder’s monumental Three Quintains (Hello Girls). In 1962 LACMA’s Art Museum Council (AMC) had organized a “fountain committee” to acquire for the museum a significant sculpture for the new Hancock Park location. The AMC (founded in 1952) was LACMA’s first volunteer-support group dedicated to the full range of museum endeavors, including acquisitions. The fountain-committee members researched countless artists before offering Calder the commission (the museum also conferred with sculptor Isamu Noguchi). Calder agreed in June 1964, writing to AMC president Laurelle Burton, “I am, indeed, very much interested in designing you a fountain.” Burton announced the approved commission in a letter to the council: “To have a man of Alexander Calder’s prominence be the first to design a sculpture specifically for the new museum would set the standards for future efforts, on the part of the artists and donors.”

Alexander Calder, Three Quintains (Hello Girls), 1964, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Museum, Council Fund, © 2013 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

Calder visited the site and consulted with the architects, designers, and museum officials through fall of 1964. The mobiles then were made in Connecticut at the Waterbury Iron Works, one of three iron fabricators he regularly used. They sent mobiles to Los Angeles after Thanksgiving, and Calder revisited the site in mid-December to indicate the mobiles’ placements and oversee their installation. Additionally, at the AMC’s request, Calder designed a poster commemorating the museum’s opening.

Alexander Calder and ironworker Chippy Ieronimo overseeing the installation of Three Quintains (Hello Girls), 1964, © 2013 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA, photographic archives

This poster, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 1, 1965, was created by Alexander Calder on the occasion of the 1965 opening of the museum. Available at the LACMA Store.

As the photographs of the completed work demonstrate, Three Quintains (Hello Girls) is an exuberant fountain, with simple geometric mobile forms floating in the air with four water jets impelling them. The work heralded a new era for Los Angeles as the city grew in population, geography, and cultural sophistication, and marked only the second large public Calder sculpture to be installed in California—and the first on the West Coast to be specially commissioned for its site. The sculpture would become one of very few fountain sculptures that Calder realized during his long career. Three Quintains (Hello Girls) is permanently on view in LACMA’s Director’s Roundtable Garden, on the east side of campus. Its commissioner, the AMC, has provided invaluable support for Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic.

Ilene Susan Fort, Senior Curator and the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art

Korean wrapping cloths (known as bojagi in Korean) are celebrated for both their form and function. As wrapping cloths, bojagi were used ubiquitously in premodern Korea to wrap items for transport or storage, to cover food, and even to protect precious goods. Designs range from embroidered symbolic depictions of nature to patchworks of random scraps of cloth in an array of colors. Popularly used by all classes of Korean society, these square- or rectangle-shaped textiles were made from various materials such as silk, ramie (a linen- or silk-like fabric made from ramie, a perennial plant from the nettle family native to eastern Asia), gossamer, and cotton. Although historical records like the Samguk sagi (Annals of the Three Kingdoms) indicate the use of bojagi as early as the Three Kingdoms period (57 B.C.–A.D. 668), extant examples are largely from the Joseon period (1392–1910).

Covering Cloth (Bojagi), Korea, Joseon dynasty (1392–1910), late 19th–early 20th century, Costume Council Fund

Exclusively produced by women, the colorfully creative and whimsical nature of these textiles extols the artistic virtues of Korean women in a society long dominated by the Confucian hierarchy and male intellectual pursuits. Records indicate that making bojagi was a source of bonding and expression for Korean women who sewed their creations to be given as heirloom mementos to their daughters and daughters-in-law.

This craftwork is recognized as an art by Dr. Kumja Paik Kim, curator emeritus of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, who will be giving a lecture on the role of bojagi and their creators  in the Korean galleries at LACMA on Tuesday, January 14.

Wrapping Cloth (Bojagi), Korea, late 20th century, Costume Council Fund

In addition, on Sunday, January 19, Korean-born artist Youngmin Lee, who expresses her knowledge of the traditional craft of bojagi in her modern creations, will give a one-hour demonstration of bojagi-making, and will offer a workshop for people of all ages to create a bojagi their own in the Boone Children’s Gallery on Monday, January 20.

We hope you’ll join us in these illuminating events.

Wrapping Cloth (Bojagi), Korea, late 20th century, gift of Janet Francine Cobert

Virginia Moon, Assistant Curator of Korean Art

It’s the new year: start it off on the right foot with a visit to LACMA. On Friday and Saturday, enjoy tours of our collection and select exhibitions including a look at the Renaissance rivalry between Florence and Venice artists, a survey of ceramics from Korea, a detailed walkthrough of See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, and an overview of one of our most popular galleries, the Art of the Pacific. For a complete listing of tour times, visit our online calendar. But of course, we always encourage you to chart your own path and discover for yourself exhibitions like Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film (closing February 2), David Hockney: Seven Yorkshire Landscapes Videos, 2011 (closing January 20), and Masterworks of Expressionist Cinema: The Golem and its Avatars.

Mario Ybarra, Jr. and Juan Capistran, Stick ‘em Up . . . (Slanguage Bandito), 2003, © Juan Capistran and Mario Ybarra, Jr.

On Sunday, the free guided tours continue with a detailed look at the imaginative Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic and a review of LACMA’s modern Mexican silver collection. Families will be pleased to find the return of Andell Family Sundays beginning at 12:30 pm. This month children and parents will explore the use photography and light in art. Later, at 4 pm, artist Kori Newkirk stops by Art Catalogues for a book signing and raffle to celebrate the launch of his latest book. Complete the weekend with the return of Sundays Live, this week featuring for the first time at the Bing Theater pianist Vadim Monastyrski. The concert begins at 6 pm and is free and open to the public. Welcome, 2014.

Roberto Ayala

Building on the excitement of LACMA’s announcement last month of its new Art + Technology Lab, I thought it would be interesting to look back at one of the projects from LACMA’s original Art and Technology Program (A & T), which ran from 1967 to 1971.

Cover of A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art 1967–71

For the first A & T, curator Maurice Tuchman invited 64 artists to be matched with companies working in “coastal” industries such as aerospace, scientific research, manufacturing, and cinema/television. One of the 23 artists to be paired successfully with a corporation was Tony Smith—a figure familiar to many LACMA visitors for his monumental sculpture Smoke that graces the atrium of the Ahmanson Building (and was the subject of Liz Glynn’s performance The Myth of Pure Form last month).

Tony Smith, Smoke, 1967, fabricated 2005, made possible by the Belldegrun Family’s gift to LACMA in honor of Rebecka Belldegrun’s birthday

Smith initially expressed his interest in doing an inflatable soft sculpture he described as “a type of structure in which all of the compressive elements would be made of air or gas in compression.” When that proved to be unfeasible, then-associate curator Jane Livingston suggested Smith work with the Container Corporation of America, a manufacturer of paperboard products including folding cartons, paper bags, and fiber cans.

The Container Corporation turned out to be a good fit for the artist. Smith was already in the habit of making models for his large-scale sculptures by gluing together hundreds of maquette modules. These individual paperboard components were typically tetrahedrons (four-sided forms with triangular faces) or octahedrons (eight-sided forms with triangular faces).

Tony Smith next to a model composed of tetrahedrons and octahedrons (with additional maquette modules in the foreground), photo by Malcolm Lubliner

Smith’s model, constructed of four-inch paper modules, for his work at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, photo by Hans Namuth

For Expo ’70, palletized flats of precut cardboard manufactured by the Container Corporation were shipped to Japan, where William Lloyd, a manager of design for the Container Corporation, was tasked with overseeing the construction of the full-size sculpture. Over a period of five weeks, some 2,500 modular components were folded, taped, and joined together. The completed sculpture was a massive cave-like structure that viewers were able to enter and exit.

Construction in progress for Tony Smith’s sculpture at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, photo by Tami Komai

Construction in progress for Tony Smith’s sculpture at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, photo by Tami Komai

Interior view of Smith’s sculpture at Expo ’70

Smith was one of the fortunate artists in the original A & T to be matched with a sympathetic and compatible corporation—some of the participating artists did not find suitable corporate partners, and still others who did match with companies were unable to realize the works they proposed for various technical or logistical reasons. The new Art + Technology initiative, while taking inspiration from the spirit of innovation of the original A & T program, is different in structure. Rather than be matched with individual companies, participants will have the opportunity to work in residence at LACMA’s new Art + Technology Lab housed in the Balch Research Library: more details can be found in the Request for Proposals (opens PDF). Artists have until January 27, 2014, to submit applications.

Jennifer King, Wallis Annenberg Curatorial Fellow, Modern Art

People are often surprised to hear that a large-scale exhibition usually takes between two to five years to organize: years filled with a myriad of administrative and creative tasks, including negotiating loans, producing the catalogue, developing the installation design, and constructing and installing the exhibition. Our work culminates in the moment when we find ourselves alone in a finished exhibition: everything is perfectly in its place, the walls and pedestals are pristine, and, if all went as planned, the exhibition looks like what you had imagined.

It is difficult to aptly articulate that feeling when you realize that your work has finally manifested into a tangible reality. I remember the first time I experienced it: walking together through Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective before its opening, when it was still an immaculate exhibition space, senior curator and department head of Modern Art Stephanie Barron advised me to savor this precious time when the show is flawless and entirely your own. There is truly an incomparable magic in the air, almost like being the first person to explore an uninhabited island (even though you helped build that island and have been basically living there for the past month!). Stephanie confessed that this is the best part about being a curator, and I couldn’t agree more.

Being alone in Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic, I was again awestruck and very proud of what the LACMA, Gehry Partners, and the Calder Foundation teams had accomplished; the exhibition turned out to be exactly how Stephanie and Frank envisioned it during the months in which we pored over the model and tweaked the design.

Since exhibitions close after a few months, we always consider how to effectively represent the exhibition for the public and archival purposes. How can we capture the experience and emotional response that curators have in the completed space? We started by commissioning the Los Angeles–based photographer Fredrik Nilsen to photograph the exhibition before its opening. I spent two days with Fredrik, his assistant Colin Bloomfield, and expert art handler Matt Castle documenting the installation. Guided by Frank’s design of singular and intimate moments mixed with long views of monumental works drawing us through the exhibition, we tested every angle and were continually surprised by how each perspective unveiled new aspects of Calder’s genius and ability to imbue his sculptures with a palpable vitality; the works truly have a life of their own.

While taking the photograph above, we had been shifting around quite a bit trying to find the best angle, but nothing had really clicked. All of a sudden we all froze as a shadow of Black Mobile with Hole appeared on the white wall next to La Demoiselle. We then sprang into action to photograph it, hoping to capture for the public the unexpected accidents that make Calder’s work so compelling. That moment of surprise elucidated what Jean-Paul Sartre so aptly described in his 1946 essay on Calder: “His mobiles are at once . . . the tangible symbol of . . . that great, vague Nature that squanders pollen and suddenly causes a thousand butterflies to take wing, that Nature of which we shall never know whether it is the blind sequence of causes and effects or the timid, endlessly deferred, rumpled and ruffled unfolding of an Idea.”

During the shoot, we were thinking, in the back of our minds, about the photograph that we would choose to reproduce into a 20-foot photomural to be placed on the wall facing Sixth Street and Levitated Mass. In the last hours of the shoot, Fredrik switched to his Hasselblad camera. He turned and photographed Laocöon, La Grande vitesse, and Three Segments. He then looked at me, smiled, and said, “I think we got it. That’s our shot.” If you drive past LACMA on Sixth Street, I think you’ll agree that he was completely right.

Our hope is that these photographs not only accurately document the exhibition but, more importantly, encapsulate the exuberance and elegance in Calder’s sculpture and Stephanie and Frank’s unique approach. Perhaps the images will reveal how we felt walking through the completed exhibition for the first time.

Lauren Bergman, Assistant Curator, Modern Art

It is perhaps in bad form to pick favorites in any exhibition. Like children, we sometimes tell ourselves, each work is special and unique in its own way. That said, I seem not to be able to help myself when it comes to the current show Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, which I had the great pleasure to work on with LACMA curators Britt Salvesen and Rita Gonzalez and the energetic team from Fundación Televisa, led by curator Alfonso Morales. Among the 330-plus works in the show—all rich and gorgeous in their own right, to be sure—are four large color prints for which I have developed quite a fondness. Tucked in the southwest corner of the Art of the Americas Building, the enlarged film stills shot by photographer Ángel Corona Villa depict scenes from El amor tiene cara de mujer (Love Has a Woman’s Face), a film Figueroa made with director Tito Davison in 1973.

Ángel Corona Villa, still from El amor tiene cara de mujer, directed by Tito Davidson (1973), film version of the televnovela, 1973, printed 2007, © Televisa Foundation

In part, my attraction to these objects is animated by a sort of perverse contrarianism. Made in the throes of the post–Golden Age period of Mexican cinema, which saw the waning of much of the creative energy that catapulted Mexican film to global attention in the 1940s, the work represents a divergence from the type of film most commonly associated with Figueroa’s oeuvre. While he was known for his epic black-and-white tableaux, sweeping landscapes, and narratives with heavily didactic political themes, El amor tiene cara de mujer looks markedly different from the stills and projections that precede it. This is why they stand out so starkly on the wall, and, I’m certain, part of the reason why I find them such intriguing images. The film expressed a bright, candy-colored sensibility that was a clear departure from his earlier cinematographic style.

Gabriel Figueroa, film still from Enemigos, directed by Chano Urueta, 1933, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

The film’s subject matter was also quite a departure for Figueroa. Adapted from an Argentinean telenovela that had made a splash in Mexico in 1971, the film was a female-centered melodrama seemingly detached from the politicized iconography that had been such an essential part of Figueroa’s early career, and which he had developed in dialogue with the masters of Mexican muralism, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco.

Ángel Corona Villa, still from El amor tiene cara de mujer, directed by Tito Davidson (1973), film version of the televnovela, 1973, printed 2007, © Televisa Foundation

Depicting a series of scenes in an upscale Mexico City boutique, the four stills are a tour-de-force portrait of the garish women’s fashions and demonstrative interior décor of the 1970s Mexican elite (or at least their telenovela surrogates). Say what you will about the outrageousness of the characters’ choice in clothes and furnishings—there is something truly visually seductive about the bravado of those gold and black patterns, the height and solidity of those coiffures, and the sheer abundance of the candles shoved into that golden candelabra. I challenge you not to find at least some joy in looking at these images.

Ángel Corona Villa, still from El amor tiene cara de mujer, directed by Tito Davidson (1973), film version of the televnovela, 1973, printed 2007, © Televisa Foundation

These film stills also got me thinking about the place of the telenovela—and the soap opera more broadly—in the history of art and contemporary museum display. While there are marked differences between the Latin American telenovela and the American soap opera—for one, American soaps can last for decades, while the telenovela has a defined number of seasons—parallels between the two forms undoubtedly exist. Curiously, it seems that contemporary art and “the soaps” have more overlap that one might think.

My mind immediately wandered to the soap opera “performance art” of James Franco, who created the role of Robert James “Franco” Frank, a multimedia artist and, ahem, serial killer, for the American soap opera General Hospital in 2009 (appearing intermittently on the program through 2012). Coincidentally, Franco admitted that his interest in this character emerged after the performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, an artist whose work is featured in the Figueroa exhibition, paid a visit to his class at CalArts. Franco brought his character into the “real” art world in June 2010 with the event “Soap at MOCA: James Franco on General Hospital,” which saw the fictional Franco character displaying his art at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Included in the project was a performance by artist Kalup Linzy, dressed in demonstrative drag with a cartoonish flowing wig and a sequined dress that, come to think of it, might have fit in quite well in El amor tiene cara de mujer.

This collapsing of fantasy and reality, the masquerade of the soap opera and the spectacle of contemporary art, was intended to raise questions about legitimacy and artistic taste that have a long history in performance art. By placing the soap opera within the context of the art museum, Franco was asking how the art museum confers value by its very existence—does something become art simply because it is placed in a museum? What is essentially a very basic (and by no means new) question reverberates quite broadly, and spurs me to ask: have we elevated El amor tiene cara de mujer to the lofty heights of “art,” by including it in an exhibition in a world-renowned museum?

Of course, Franco is not alone in creating a dialogue between the soap opera (and the telenovela) and the art museum. Andy Warhol’s 16mm film Soap Opera (1964), perhaps most notably, predated Franco’s performance by nearly half a century. There is also an established tradition of using the telenovela—a prominent part of many Latin American cultures, and often a major cultural export—within Mexican art and photography. The photographer Antonio Caballero created fascinating narrative studies produced for the still-photography serialized fotonovelas in the 1960s and 1970s, which are intriguing objects in their own right. His images, as was typical of the genre, produced a melodramatic iconography that mirrored what was being broadcast on telenovelas. More recently, artist Yvonne Venegas was asked by Mauricio Maillé, director of the Visual Arts Department at Televisa—who was an important participant in the Figueroa exhibition—to photograph the final season of the Mexican telenovela Rebelde. The resulting series and book project offers an intriguing look into the cult of telenovela stars, as well as the enduring visual language of the form, which evidently has held on to the vivid colorful palette captured by Figueroa four decades ago.

Ángel Corona Villa, still from El amor tiene cara de mujer, directed by Tito Davidson (1973), film version of the televnovela, 1973, printed 2007, © Televisa Foundation

I suppose what I find so intriguing about these four film stills, when forced to account for my interest in them, is that they represent a conflict between competing ideas of taste and aesthetic worth. Often considered to represent the lowest point in Figueroa’s creative career, and the product of an entertainment form that is, more often than not, excluded from the refined atmosphere of the art museum, they seem oddly out of place, as if they don’t belong. In this way, the images are a prompt, asking the viewer what it is that they expect to see in an art museum. They also make us think about the creative and professional choices made by artists and filmmakers that do not fit the neat categories we create for them. Certainly not his best work, El amor tiene cara de mujer is nonetheless part of an interesting episode in Figueroa’s career. And to paraphrase a cheap tagline for a telenovela, this is an episode that is simply too good to miss.

Ryan Linkof, Ralph M. Parsons Fellow, Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography

Diane von Furstenberg: Journey of a Dress opens tomorrow at the Wilshire May Company Building, adjacent to LACMA. The exhibition, which has traveled to Asia, the Middle East, and South America, is a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the iconic wrap dress. Vintage and contemporary pieces, along with portraits of the designer by artists ranging from Zhang Huan to Helmut Newton, are featured as part of the presentation. In anticipation of the exhibition, Unframed’s Linda Theung interviewed designer Diane von Furstenberg about the show, the exhibition’s return to the States, and the artists with whom she worked.

Diane von Furstenberg and Stefano Tonchi, W Magazine‘s editor in chief, will be in conversation hosted by LACMA’s Costume Council on Monday, January 13, at 6 pm, at the Bing Theater.

How will the exhibition’s presentation in Los Angeles differ than its initial presentation in Beijing?

Well, this time it is really all about the dress. It is the 40th anniversary of the wrap dress so it is a true celebration. There are more dresses featured, vintage and contemporary wraps as well as anniversary dresses created exclusively for the exhibition.

Andy Warhol, Diane von Furstenberg, 1974, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy of Diane von Furstenberg and the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

The exhibition had its third leg of its tour in Beijing, where contemporary Chinese artists Zhang Huan, Hai Bo, Li Songsong, and Yi Zhou created your portrait specifically for the exhibition. What type of visual dialogues took place between the new work created by these artists and extant portraits of you by Francesco Clemente, Chuck Close, Helmut Newton, and others?

All of the pieces are strong individually and even more so together. They are all inspired by the same idea so there is a certain joie de vivre that each artist has really brought to life in their own way. And all together, I think the range of work really represents the four decades of the dress in a powerful, exciting way!

The exhibition’s entrance was custom-made by Francesco Clemente. It was created by fusing maps of New York and Beijing. What L.A.-specific treatment will the entrance of the exhibition have in this presentation?

Dustin Yellin created this amazing glass collage incorporating portraits and prints and it just looks like this incredible wrap dress floating. It is called A Ghost May Come, and it is so beautiful we placed it right below a neon sign at the entrance that says “Feel like a woman, wear a dress!” which is what I scribbled on a white cube when I posed for my very first ad.

Photo courtesy of Diane von Furstenberg

I understand that the exhibition is arranged by decades. If you could pick a favorite 10 years, what would it be, and why?

You know we are celebrating 40 years, but it is not really about nostalgia. I am always most interested in the present, and that is what still fascinates me about the wrap dress after all these years: its ability to shine in the present!

Are you engaging with any Los Angeles–based artists in this presentation?

Yes, Barbara Kruger created an amazing piece!

Andy Warhol, Diane von Furstenberg, 1974, © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy of Diane von Furstenberg and the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

This is the first time the exhibition will be in the U.S. after visits to Moscow, Beijing, and Sao Paulo. What are you most excited about with the exhibition’s homecoming?

I am just so excited for the 40th anniversary of the wrap dress and thrilled to bring the exhibition to Los Angeles, which is my children’s home and my grandchildren’s home. It is truly a celebration of the dress that started it all!

No matter which way you slice it, LACMA covers a lot of real estate. This weekend visit us at home or on the road with the start of the Monterey Park Art + Film Lab at East Los Angeles College. The fourth site of the LACMA9 Art + Film Lab project, the mobile art space kicks off five weekends of free programming with an Opening-Night Celebration on Friday. From 6 to 8 pm the public is invited to get an inside peek into the lab, enjoy live music, and then see a screening of Searching for Sugarman. Later in the weekend share your story during Oral History Drop-ins, which will ultimately be compiled to depict the collective consciousness of the city.

http://youtu.be/sUoBEdybOQg

On our twenty acre campus, the Bing Theater hosts a couple of events including a free screening of the sketch comedy show Kroll Show on Friday at 7:30 pm. See the first two episodes of the sophomore season followed by a conversation with creator and star Nick Kroll. On Sunday, Sundays Live presents resident group The Capitol Ensemble at 6 pm. This event is free and open to the public.

Just across the courtyard from the Bing, visitors on Sunday will encounter the weekly installment of Andell Family Sundays, this month tinkering with photography. Around the same time on Sunday visit the Hammer Building and check out the 20 minute docent-led tour of Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa or a little later join in on a 50 minute tour of our Korean Art collection. For a complete listing of free, guided tours happening daily visit our online calendar.

Ángel Corona Villa, film still from Dias de otoño, directed by Robert Gavaldón, 1962, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

Lastly, a quick survey of the surrounding buildings will reveal gems like Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film in the Art of the Americas, Four Abstract Classicists in the Ahmanson, Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic and See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection in the Resnick Pavilion, and Agnès Varda in Californialand in BCAM (and there are even more exhibitions to unearth). One more thing—on Monday come out to a special talk with internationally acclaimed fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and editor in chief of W Magazine Stefano Tonchi at 6 pm (presented in conjunction with the neighboring exhibition Diane von Furstenberg: Journey of a Dress). Plot out your weekend plans now.

Roberto Ayala

On the third floor of LACMA’s Art of the Americas Building, in a pair of glass cases, are four remarkable designs from two of America’s foremost mid-20th-century costume designers: Gilbert Adrian of MGM Studios and Howard Greer of Paramount.

Hollywood and the designers of the silver screen defined glamour, and it became the foundation of how we understand it today. Their glittering stars cast the spell of enchantment and were the avatars of the alternate universe of beauty and adventure. Gilbert Adrian and Howard Greer’s designs would set a standard for stylishness that rivaled that of Paris.

The outfits on display—a wine-colored evening gown and a black-and-cream wool dress by Adrian, and a black tulle evening gown with lace-up bodice, and skirt-and-blouse ensemble by Greer—are all dated between 1946 and 1949. The late 1940s was a period of great importance in fashion and, interestingly, quite contemporary. In 1946, the repeal of order L85, which had banned long skirts to conserve materials for the war effort, would end the rationing of fabric. Most importantly, in the spring of 1947, Christian Dior in Paris would give the world the New Look, with hourglass silhouettes and full skirts that seemed extravagant after the meager war years. Through cinema, Adrian and Greer would help make this moment in fashion possible, giving these new designs an extended context as the world of fashion became truly about modern times. (Confession: I was once a part of this cavalcade, being the head designer of the House of Worth in London.)

Howard Greer (1896–1974) started his career working with established designers—first for Lucile, in New York, and after the First War, for Paul Poiret and Edward Molyneux in Paris. Back in California, while designing for the theater, the company he was in made a key merger and became Paramount Pictures. He was known for his glamorous, sophisticated evening gowns and dresses. In a 1929 issue of Photoplay Magazine Katherine Albert gushed over one of Greer’s costumes: “This is the most sensational costume in Hollywood this season. When it was displayed at Howard Greer’s exclusive opening, gentlemen gasped and ladies fainted.” Though the fashion establishment in Paris deemed Hollywood clothes vulgar, too-tight, and louche, Greer, dressing Joan Crawford and Rita Hayward, would at one point confess, “The truth is that Clara Bow, Billie Dove, and Joan Crawford are actually setting the styles.” As he told Lois Shirley in her book, Secrets of the Fitting Room, “Hollywood leads Paris in Fashions.” Greer would go on to design for 33 films and write an autobiography, Designing Male (1951).

Gilbert Adrian (1903–1959) trained at New York’s Parsons School of Design, and transferred to the branch the school then had in Paris. While there, he created the costumes for an Irving Berlin musical, The Music Box Revue, after which Rudolph Valentino’s wife hired him for a project. Adrian went on to work with Cecil B. DeMille, for whom he designed costumes for 11 films, becoming the head designer of MGM. Often credited as “Gowns by Adrian,” Adrian designed the costumes for more than 200 films over the course of his career.
Adrian became a giant in Hollywood lore. He would give us Dorothy’s red-sequined slippers in The Wizard of Oz, and the grandeur of period gowns in Camille and Marie Antoinette. Famous for his evening gowns, he worked with Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow, and Katharine Hepburn. He was behind Joan Crawford’s signature outfits, with the large shoulder pads that spawned a fashion craze. And who could forget Hepburn in the Woman of the Year or The Philadelphia Story? Adrian’s influence on our collective memory and fashion cannot be underestimated.

The designs of Greer and Adrian remind us of a time when the silver screen’s celluloid dream of beauty and style was the mirror in which everyone viewed themselves, regardless of their individual status. And the dark palaces of the screen’s magic glowed through the entire culture. In the hyper-glare of the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, through the Depression and two World Wars, Hollywood would burn brighter, sizzle sexier, and recast the vision of the heroes, heroines, and villains that shaped the world of the screen. Costume designers like Greer and Adrian—and there were many more—were the artists who visualized this made-up world in black and white, and later, in color. They did so in such physical terms that film became our reality, our failed memory, our lost time.

Hylan Booker

Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, focusing on Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, is a prismatic exhibition that offers a slightly different experience each time you view it. Selections from Figueroa’s films play on a series of large screens, and as you walk through the exhibition, the imagery constantly changes. Each sequence of film clips is organized around a theme, such as landscape, revolution, and the metropolis, and forms the centerpiece for an exhibition-within-an-exhibition of linked imagery—paintings by related artists, film and production stills, art photographs, and ephemera such as letters and posters. The effect is like entering an intricately designed web that is always fluctuating. As you move through, you pick up a unique array of impressions, echoes, and connections. On a recent walkthrough, here were a few of mine:

Gabriel Figueroa, film still from Enemigos, directed by Chano Urueta, 1933, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

1. Sombreros! I’d never given much thought to this basic type of hat, with its round crown and wide floppy brim, but watching Figueroa’s many shots featuring this iconic Mexican design—lone men in sombreros with shadows cast over their faces, gangs of revolutionaries in sombreros, with heads echoing the rolling hills of the rural Mexican landscape—I realized how indispensable this portable piece of shade was. Figueroa treats the sombrero like a piece of sculpture, with its simple shape and the graphic, circular shadows it casts on faces and bodies central to many of his compositions. Figueroa is known for helping to define an idealized, heroic, sympathetic conception of Mexico—in his words, “una imágen méxicana”—and the sombrero is a key motif in this vision.

Gabriel Figueroa, film still from Enamorada, directed by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, 1946, © Televisa Foundation

2. Agave and eyelashes. This was a fortuitous connection, since I happened to watch a scene in a film by Sergei Eisenstein, a Russian contemporary of Figueroa’s, shot in Mexico and included in the exhibition, in which a man leading a party through the desert pins back the leaves of a giant agave by curling each one backward and sticking the point into the fat part of the leaf, and a minute later I turned to a larger screen to see one of Figueroa’s close-ups of a woman’s eye with teary lashes. The jagged shapes of agave cactus and thick, dark women’s eyelashes both recur often in the exhibition—and in Figueroa’s films—forming a kind of visual counterpoint to smooth forms like sombreros, desert hills, and faces. Figueroa’s imagery is full of these kinds of connections between people and landscape, as if knitting personality and emotion into the land, and the land into the people, stitch by stitch.

Gabriel Figueroa, film still from Una cita de amor, directed by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, 1956, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

3. Seventh and Alvarado Streets. A contemporary short film by Rodrigo Garcia shows modern-day Hispanic residents of L.A. suited up like the revolutionaries in Figueroa’s films, shot in slow motion as they ride on horseback through this busy intersection near downtown—Figueroa’s idealized vision transplanted to present reality. This film is about intersections in more ways than one, and it’s a fitting addition to an exhibition about a man who turns out to represent quite an amazing intersection himself—of Mexico and Hollywood, cinematography and painting, revolution and art, rusticity and glamour, romanticism and realism (and surrealism).

Still from La 7th Street y Alvarado, by Rodrigo Garcia, courtesy of Canana films

4. A burro, an egg, and a pigeon. These elements appear at various points in Los Olvidados (1950), one of the seven films Figueroa shot for French surrealist director Luis Buñuel when Buñuel was in Mexico between 1946 and 1965. The burro peers in a girl’s bedroom window, the egg flies at the camera and spatters on the lens, and the pigeon is used as a massage tool on a woman’s bare back. In the next gallery, a wall text recounts an anecdote from the set of Nazarín (1959) about Buñuel seeing Figueroa’s camera positioned to frame a sweeping romantic landscape and turning the camera in the opposite direction at a mundane view: “I scandalized Figueroa, who had framed a shot for me that was aesthetically beyond reproach. . . . I have never liked prefabricated cinematic beauty.” The intersection between Figueroa and Buñuel is especially fascinating, and it also illuminates another intersection, that between a director and a cinematographer—you can see how Figueroa stretched his aesthetic to wrap around Buñuel’s ideas.

In shining a light on Gabriel Figueroa, this exhibition turns out to illuminate all kinds of unexpected crossroads. Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film is up through February 2, 2014. There’s still time for you to visit—and revisit!—and collect your own impressions.

Katherine Satorius

Artist Liz Glynn’s series, [de]-lusions of Grandeur, closes this Saturday with a final performance, The Myth of Permanent Material, which focuses on Donald Judd’s Untitled (for Leo Castelli) a 1977 sculpture comprising five concrete cube-like forms currently on display near the tar pit in Hancock Park. Glynn’s performance plays around the idea of potentially recreating Judd’s work. Unframed wraps up the performances with an interview with Glynn conducted by LACMA’s social-media manager Maritza Lerman Yoes.

Maritza Lerman Yoes: I’m excited (and sad) to be witness to your final performance as part of your [de]-lusions of Grandeur series at LACMA. How does it feel to be wrapping up this performance cycle?

Liz Glynn: It will be strange not to be at LACMA so often. Over the past year, I’ve worked with a number of people across the staff—security guards, conservators, registrars, and curatorial assistants—and it’s hard to walk across the campus without seeing someone I know.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time

MLY: Can you tell me what you will be doing with the Donald Judd work?

LG: This action, The Myth of Permanent Material (after Donald Judd) delves into the conservation issues surrounding Judd’s Untitled (for Leo Castelli), 1977. This is one of Judd’s earliest works in concrete, and over the time, the material has eroded, and been subject to the typical wear and tear of a sculpture installed outdoors on public view.

In LACMA’s curatorial files on the piece, there has been some debate about whether the work should be refabricated, though this issue proves complicated given Judd’s uneven history regarding the conservation of his work during his lifetime. I have recreated the formwork necessary to recast the concrete piece, and we’ve hired a cement mixer. We will debate the arguments for and against recasting the work, and the outcome of the debate will determine whether the concrete is poured.

MLY: What is the significance of the Donald Judd given that this is your last performance?

LG: Donald Judd’s work, and particularly his early plywood pieces, was one of my first entry points into making sculpture, so personally, it’s a fitting end. On a more conceptual level, I think the question of permanence, and the implications of creating something permanent, is one the most significant issues all of the performances in the cycle have touched on in one way or another.

MLY: How did you pick the five works for your five performances?

LG: The initial impetus for the project was to explore issues of human ambition, monumentality, and permanence through LACMA’s collection. I began by identifying the works in the collection that might qualify as “monumental,” and started researching each through academic journals, catalogues, LACMA’s files, and in conversation with members of the curatorial and conservation staff. Rodin and Calder initially both seemed like outliers, as I had initially wanted to focus on Minimalist works, but the research unearthed some unexpected parallels to contemporary sculpture.

MLY: Why were all five pieces by men who did monumental work?

LG: Interesting, the only “monumental” work by a female artist in LACMA’s collection is the amphitheater by the artist Jackie Ferrara. Many visitors don’t realize the structure is in fact an artwork. I did consider this piece early on, but felt that the issues I was interested in exploring were better expressed in other pieces from the collection.

Artist Jackie Ferrara’s amphitheater. Photo courtesy of Urban Art Commission

MLY: How complicated was it to arrange materials for your performances?

LG: Scale is a logistical challenge, particularly in the cases of Judd and Serra. My initial concept for the Serra work was to bring the weight of Band, 2006, in sand, and work with participants from the museum audience to move this weight to the site where the work was installed. However, no sand and gravel distributor in the greater Los Angeles was able to bring this quantity! I opted to order the weight of one of the ten plates (18 tons), and this still required 2 trucks.

Performance also functions with a completely different sense of temporality than monumental sculpture. While artifacts remain from the performances, such as the plaster sculptures created during The Myth of Singularity or the theatrical props from The Myth of Getting it Right the First Time, the materials must be designed to be mobile.

Rehearsals for Liz Glynn’s The Myth of Getting It Right the First Time

MLY: What did you learn about museum infrastructure?

LG: The museum is a fundamentally social organism, and much of its history is held in the minds of its staff. While the museum appears monolithic from the outside, in fact, it is the product of an incalculable number of decisions made by talented individuals every day. It’s a highly evolved network, and yet few of the rules of engagement are formalized on paper.

A lot of my best research came from conversations with members of the staff.

Stephanie Barron’s Museum as Site show was a significant influence on this project and it was great to get her perspective on how the expansion of the museum’s staff and departmental structure has changed the process of curating and producing an exhibition since the early 1980s. LACMA today has a massive infrastructure, and the curatorial department is only one of many moving parts in the production an exhibition.

MLY: What’s behind the title of the entire series and the individual performances?

LG: The performances seek to disrupt some of the grander ideas about permanence and the artistic genius traditionally associated with monumental work. I wanted the audience to think about not only the process of construction, but also the process of maintenance, and the continued life of a sculpture after it leaves the studio. As a sculptor, I spend most of my time in the world of production, but as a museum visitor, one only access the artwork in its finished state. I wanted to merge the two worlds, and try to forge a continuum between them. I am interested in what happens to these large works physically, what this says about cultural value, and the meaning of an artwork can shift over time.

MLY: What’s next for you?

LG: I’m very excited to be working with José Luis Blondet to document the project in book form. Rather than a traditional catalog, the book will serve as a collection of fragments: images, texts, and interviews compiled from performers, members of the museum staff, and my own research.

The Monterey Park Art+Film Lab at East Los Angeles College enters its second week of FREE public programming, including oral-history drop-ins and a screening of Little Fugitive on Friday evening, a composition workshop on Saturday, and an instant film workshop on Sunday. All of these workshops offer area residents of all levels of know-how the opportunity to learn hands-on filmmaking and storytelling skills with professional equipment and at no cost.

Beyond workshops and film screenings, the final component of the Art+Film Lab invites participants to visit LACMA. This Sunday, Art+Lab participants from Altadena, the previous lab site, are invited to LACMA for a free day. Screening throughout the day is Nicole Miller’s Seeing Is Believing, a compilation of personal stories told by Altadena locals, which demonstrates who and what makes up the city.

Art+Film Lab, Jorge Pardo Sculpture, photo © Museum Associates / LACMA, by Duncan Cheng

Saturday at 1 pm, see the final part of [de]-lusions of Grandeur by Liz Glynn in The Myth of Permanent Material. This time Glynn takes a look at concrete and the challenges posed by the material associated with permanence and stability, like in Donald Judd’s Untitled (for Leo Castelli). Later that day at 2 pm, author James Oles discusses one of the least familiar periods of Mexican art history in a talk, From Mexico’s Forgotten Century: 19th-Century Costumbrismo and the Paintings of Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez. On Sunday at 1 pm, artist Youngmin Lee presents the traditional craft of Korean art in a Bojagi Demonstration. Weekly installments of Andell Family Sundays and Sundays Live round out the busy schedule.

David Hockney, May 12th 2011 Rudston to Kilham Road 5pm (detail), from Seven Yorkshire Landscape Videos, 2011, courtesy of and © David Hockney

In the galleries, LACMA bids a farewell to David Hockney: Seven Yorkshire Landscape Videos, 2011 on Monday. Fret not, in a matter of days, Hockney’s video work will return in a different form with David Hockney: The Jugglers. Next door in BCAM, see Murmurs: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions for a look at some of LACMA’s newest pieces. In the Ahmanson Building, explore the fourth floor and see Hassan Hajjaj: My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume 1, 2012 and Princely Traditions and Colonial Pursuits in India. Lastly, on the east side of campus, view the legacy of Mexican filmmaker Gabriel Figueroa in Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film before it closes on February 2. And if we don’t see this weekend be sure to come for Target Free Holiday Monday in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day.

Roberto Ayala

My initial viewing of My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume I was a case of love at first sight. Whatever it was that first drew me to study Islamic art—possibly the unique combination of color and design, the oscillation between abstraction and figuration, and especially the inclusion of Arabic text—is also what attracts me to Hajjaj’s work, which is not only inherently familiar but also terrifically original. It seemed to me that if music videos had existed in the medieval Islamic world, this is how they would have looked and sounded. My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume I merely underscores Hassan Hajjaj’s enormous and universal appeal, making him one of my rock stars.

There is another telling story that goes with the first time I saw My Rock Stars Experimental, which was in 2012 at Rose Issa Projects on Great Portland Street in London. Three teenage boys came in, all of African descent, awkward not only with their newly adult bodies but in being around art, which they explained they needed to see for a school project. They immediately gravitated to the video, relaxed and sat down on Hajjaj’s iconic red plastic Coca-Cola crates, then whipped out their phones and began recording and giggling. They asked and were happily surprised to learn that this was indeed art.

Hassan Hajjaj, still from My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume 1, Helen Venus Bushfire, 2012, purchased with funds provided by Art of the Middle East: CONTEMPORARY, courtesy of Rose Issa Projects

I think they immediately connected with the video installation for a number of reasons: it is a familiar format and medium, it is “really cool” (their words), and all of the performers in the video are people of color—perhaps not what the students expected to see walking into a tony London gallery. When I asked them why they were giggling, they shrugged shyly and one fellow said it was because they liked it. It was their reactions—which I recorded on my own phone—that convinced me we had to have My Rock Stars Experimental for LACMA.

Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East

On Saturday, January 25, Stanford Professor Marc Levoy will be presenting a talk titled “What Google Glass Means for the Future of Photography” at LACMA. The event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. In anticipation of the event LACMA’s Elizabeth Gerber asked him a few questions for Unframed.

For people not familiar with Google Glass, could you provide a short description?

Some people describe Glass as a cell phone you wear on your head. Like a cell phone, Glass has a display, camera, touchpad, motion sensors, radios, and a plug for charging its battery. I prefer to think of Glass as a new kind of digital assistant. In fact, one typically tethers Glass to a cell phone, and the two work together.

Glass can do things a cell phone can’t, such as taking a picture just by winking, or sending a text message while driving without taking your hands off the wheel or your eyes off the road. And Glass can’t do everything a cell phone can, like sharing a funny video with a friend. (Only one person can look through Glass at a time.)

Google Glass has been getting increased media attention this past year. What do you find most exciting about Google Glass?

I’m giving this talk as a Stanford professor, not a Googler, so don’t expect a marketing pitch for Glass. In my view, the project’s goals were to produce a device that is lightweight enough, unobtrusive enough, fashionable enough, and useful enough, that one would wear it all day. Does it fulfill these goals? Not yet, but it’s getting better with each new release. (And I do wear it all day, partly because it’s also a comfortable pair of prescription photography sunglasses.)

Everybody who uses Glass has their own favorite feature. My specialty at Stanford is computational photography, and the feature I find most exciting about Glass is its ability to take high-quality, first-person, point-of-view pictures and videos on the spur of the moment—whenever you see something worth remembering. How Glass changes the game for photography is what I’ll be talking about on Saturday.

You teach a digital photography class at Stanford and photograph during your free time. Are there specific photographs or photographers that are inspirational to you?

I teach both the art and science of photography, which I suppose comes from my mixed background in architecture and computer science. So I’m particularly inspired by photographers who deeply understand photographic technology, and by photographs that push the boundaries of what the human eye can see.

Ansel Adams produced beautiful photographs of nature, but he also wrote a three-volume treatise on photographic technique. If he were alive today, I’ll bet he would embrace digital photography.

Harold Edgerton—the father of high-speed photography—is another favorite of mine. He pioneered strobe illumination, and he took some of the most striking and beautiful pictures ever captured. (Think of the milk-drop corona, or the bullet passing through an apple.)

The exhibition See the Light explores parallels between the history of photography and the history of vision science. In your view, what is next in those two fields in the next 10 years?

The principles of photography have remained largely unchanged since its invention by Joseph Niépce in the 1820s. A lens focuses light from the scene onto a photosensitive plate, which records this information directly to form a picture. Because this picture is a simple copy of the optical image reaching the plate, improvements in image quality have been achieved primarily by refining the optics and the recording method. These refinements have been dramatic over the past few decades, particularly with the switchover from film to digital sensors, but they’ve been incremental.

Computational photography challenges this view. It instead considers the image the sensor gathers to be intermediate data, and it uses computation to form the picture. Often, it requires multiple images to be captured, which are combined in some way to produce the final picture. Representative techniques include high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging, flash/no-flash imaging, coded-aperture and coded-exposure imaging, photography under structured illumination, multiperspective and panoramic stitching, digital photomontage, all-focus imaging, and light-field imaging.

As the megapixel wars wind down, camera companies will begin competing more and more on whatever fancy (and useful) computational photography features they can fit into their devices. This revolution has just begun, and it will completely transform photography over the next generation. Except in photojournalism, there will be no such thing as a “straight photograph”; everything will be an amalgam, an interpretation, an enhancement, or a variation—either by the photographer as auteur or by the camera itself—under manual control or fully automatically.

We’ll also see increased experimentation at the boundary between still photographs and videos. Think of cinemagraphs, or Vine’s six-second video clips, or Harry Potter “talking pictures.” Lots of people and companies are experimenting in this space. Some of these experiments will be successful, a few will be beautiful, many will be useful, and some will take advantage of wearable devices like Glass. The fun has just begun.

Marc Levoy is the VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Click here for more information about this talk.

Elizabeth Gerber, Education and Public Programs

“Abstract painting is all art. It’s pure in a way, simply canvas, paint and a brush.” —Artist Kaz Oshiro

Kaz Oshiro was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1967. Growing up in the 1970s, Oshiro recalls an early interest in contemporary art after he encountered a reproduction of a photorealist painting by Robert Estes. The memory stuck with him as he was left to ponder whether or not the work was in fact a painting or a photograph.

Kaz Oshiro, Lateral File Cabinet (White #1), 2013, photo courtesy Joshua White/JWPictures.com

With this early encounter, perhaps the seeds for Oshiro’s complex practice were planted. Early in his career, Oshiro became known as a master of deception. He recreated ordinary household objects such as kitchen cabinets, microwaves, mini fridges, guitar amplifiers, and stereo speakers. What first appears to be a three dimensional object reveals itself, upon closer looking, to be a painting on canvas.

Kaz Oshiro, Marshal Speaker Cabinet (pair), horizontal, 2013, courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong

Kaz Oshiro, Speaker Cabinets and Gray Scale Boxes, photo by Steven Hull

Complete with markings resembling ordinary wear and tear endured by objects that figure into everyday life, Oshiro’s works are made using a realist technique, which is so convincing that the paintings can be easy to miss as they blend into the environment. Assembled from stretched canvas, Oshiro’s paintings are complete with painted fixtures, which aid in the deception. The unraveling of deception only happens upon inspection behind the façade and through openings in the back of the work.

Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art, and 17th-century still-life canvases, Oshiro uses painting to explore spatiality. His practice is conceptually driven, and the resulting work appears to be straightforward and minimal. The complexity of his practice is riveting, as he pushes the confines of painting by straddling the principles of both abstraction and representation. His desire to make discreet paintings is a way to intersect the principles of conceptualism, abstraction, and representation.

Kaz Oshiro, Untitled Still Life, 2013, photo courtesy Joshua White/JWPictures.com

 Kaz Oshiro at Honor Fraser, photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com

Oshiro’s latest body of work represents a formal shift from the representational to the more abstract. Moving away from the illusionary tricks employed by trompe l’oeil techniques (seen in his earlier works), the recent minimalist canvases fold the corners of the walls or collapse onto the floor. Here Oshiro plays with the spatial politics of painting, extending the conceptual practice, challenging the conventional two-dimensional picture plane and further objectifying its physical components. These works are what Oshiro describes as “still life of a broken painting.”

I spoke with Oshiro in preparation for the opening of his exhibition Kaz Oshiro: Chasing Ghosts, which takes place this Friday, January 24, at the gallery at Charles White Elementary School.

Kaz Oshiro, Dumpster (Yellow with Blue Swoosh), 2010, gift of Steven Hull and Tami Demaree, Yasmine Benyamini, and Samuel Kashani

Nancy Meyer: Can you discuss the title of the exhibition Chasing Ghosts? Where did the idea come from?

Kaz Oshiro: My motivation to continue my art practice originates from the sense of defeat that I experienced by looking at works made by the great Abstract Expressionist painters such as de Kooning, Rothko, and other great artists in the past. The title Chasing Ghosts represents both my agony and joy of continuing my practice chasing and challenging those phantoms. I wanted to share this idea and also find the process of making art with the students in this exhibition.

NM: You’ve included some influential painters in the exhibition. Are there others not represented in the show that have had a major impact on your practice?

KO: Too many artists to list, but just to name a few, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, and John Cage have been great inspirations.

NM: Can you talk about the process of choosing the works in the exhibition and how they work in conversation with your new body of work?

KO: For this exhibition, I needed to choose work that can be made by working with students. The Dumpster is the work that projects my view on both Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism. That sounds a bit academic; on the contrary that’s an accessible object for many people. I liked the idea of painting a Dumpster with students since there is no right or wrong way to paint a Dumpster. If my Dumpsters represent my idea of painting about object, my broken canvases, Untitled Still Life represent my take on sculpture about painting. The directions seem to be completely opposite, but in fact the fundamental ideas are the same. The both are still life paintings/objects or abstract paintings/objects.

Artist Kaz Oshiro works with a student on a collaborative painting project.

NM: Your work straddles the principles between abstraction and representation. What do you think about how painting is defined in this way? Do you think it’s still relevant to distinguish the two?

KO: I try not to separate abstraction and representation because I think it’s just matter of how we look at it through either macro- or micro-perspective. Probably, the reality only exists in our heads.

NM: This is the first time you have worked collaboratively and with children. Can you elaborate on your experience working with them?

KO: To be honest, I was confused when I was offered to participate in this project with students, because I haven’t had any experience working not only with students but other people much. I usually work alone in my studio without seeing anyone around me, but it turned out to be a very good learning experience. On reflection, I would make some improvements in organizing workshops and exhibitions plan if I have another chance . . . that’s probably a good sign. I enjoyed watching the students having a fun painting with nontraditional tools to create a big mess.

The stars align this weekend at LACMA. Beginning at the third weekend of the LACMA9 Monterey Park Art+Film Lab at East Los Angeles College contribute to a bank of stories about your neighborhood during Oral History Drop-ins on Friday from 3 to 5:30 pm (and then again on Sunday, 12:30–4 pm) and later in the evening see Up at 7 pm. Saturday at the lab join the Mini Docs Workshop at noon to learn the ins and outs of creating a compelling, real-life narrative on film. All events at the Art+Film Lab are free and open to the public.

Jorge Pardo Sculpture, LACMA9 Art+Film Lab photos © Museum Associates/LACMA, by Duncan Cheng

Elsewhere off campus, you’re invited to the opening night reception of Kaz Oshiro: Chasing Ghosts, the latest installment at LACMA’s satellite gallery at Charles White Elementary School, on Friday from 6 to 8 pm. Known for his painted sculptures of household objects, Oshiro’s work blurs distinctions between media. Also on view in the exhibition is a collaborative project by Oshiro and students and a selection of works from LACMA’s collection, including pieces by John Altoon and Sam Francis. It all comes together with complimentary food and drink while DJ and composer Elan Polushko spins a curated selection of vinyl inspired by the show.

Saturday is another Free Day at LACMA, part of Museums Free-For-All. With free general admission visitors can see exhibitions like the expansive Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, the hard edges of Four Abstract Classicists, and over 200 photographs in See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection. In the afternoon, sit in on conversation with Marc Levoy, professor at Stanford University, in What Google Glass Means for the Future of Photography starting at 2 pm in the Bing Theater.

Frederick Hammersley, Around a round, 1959, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, bequest of Fannie and Alan Leslie, © Frederick Hammersley Foundation

Complete the weekend with Andell Family Sundays at 12:30 pm on Sunday, A Conversation about Muslim Cultures Today at 1 pm with Dr. Amyn B. Sajoo of Simon Fraser University, and Sundays Live at 6 pm, featuring a special chamber ensemble of talented students from the Elizabeth Mandell Institute.

Roberto Ayala

As an encyclopedic art museum, we have an astonishing array of art from around the world on view at any given time, and the must-see list changes as we rearrange the selection in our galleries. So how cool would it be if you could receive an alert letting you know what’s nearby as you make your way around the museum?

Now you can, if you use the most recent version of our app for iPhone. We’ve added contextual awareness – that’s tech-speak for messages specific to your exact location. For example, pass through the second floor of the Ahmanson Building, and you might see this:

And it might let you know about great works of art nearby, like this one:

The app will also let you know when you near a special exhibition for which we have a free tour included in the mobile app. For example, right now, the See the Light exhibition includes a free tour featuring interviews with LACMA curator Britt Salvesen, as well as scientists, psychologists, and friends and family of the collectors.

Tour See the Light

In the coming months, we plan to roll out alerts across campus, making it a little bit easier to wander the galleries and find out what’s on view today.

Enjoy!

Amy Heibel, Vice President of Technology and Digital Media

Contemporary Friends started in 2013 with a goal of acquiring contemporary works of art that complement LACMA’s collections of objects that span the globe. To this end, this year’s ten acquisitions fit the bill in their diversity in not only media, but also in the parts of the world represented. Now in its second year, chaired and led by LACMA trustee Viveca Paulin-Ferrell, Contemporary Friends recently made nine important acquisitions by artists new to LACMA’s collection.

Agus Suwage, Social Mirrors, 2013, purchased with funds provided by Contemporary Friends, 2013

The first work by Agus Suwage to enter the collection of an American museum, Social Mirrors, from 2013, features a small figure of the artist dressed in traditional prayer attire in front of a brass cornet that plays the Muslim call to prayer. The sound, emitted from a car-audio system embedded into the pedestal,  is assumed to come out of the bell of the cornet. The Suwage figure appears to have its hands behind its ears to receive the sound coming from the instrument—perhaps this is a commentary the artist’s neighborhood, which has a large concentration of mosques.

Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013, purchased with funds provided by Sue Tsao through Contemporary Friends, 2013

Also entering the collection is Grosse Fatigue, the Silver Lion winner at the 2013 Venice Biennale, by French artist Camille Henrot. The work takes up the history of the world as its subject, featuring a narrative that is co-written by the poet Jacob Bromberg and set to hip-hop beats by Joakim Bouaziz. Henrot attempts a feat with Grosse Fatigue—she aims to tell the story of the creation of the universe.

Amy Sillman, Untitled (Purple Bottle), 2013, purchased with funds provided by Contemporary Friends, 2013

Maaike Schoorel, Ian met turban (Ian with turban), 2011,
purchased with funds provided by Emily and Teddy Greenspan through Contemporary Friends, 2013

Two paintings, one by Amy Sillman and another by Maaike Schoorel, explore different strategies in composition and subject. Amy Sillman’s work, Untitled (Purple Bottle), challenges the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, while demonstrating her skills as a formidable colorist. The canvas is comprised of various ambiguous forms and lines rendered in bold and pastel colors—pinks, greens, purples, and grays. There are gestures toward representation: the handle of the “Purple Bottle,” for instance, is implied by the green handle, but lines around it disrupt the figurative. Schoorel’s work, Ian met turban (Ian with turban), initially appears all black, but, upon closer observation, a figure—that of a head—reveals itself. The viewer is required to invest time and to focus in order to see the form in the otherwise minimalist canvas.

Edgardo Aragón, La Trampa, 2011, purchased with funds provided by Jeanne Williams and Jason Greenman through Contemporary Friends, 2013

Edgardo Aragón’s La Trampa tells the story of an Oaxacan village and looks at the landscape of this Mexican state for inspiration. Mohamed Bourouissa’s Temps Mort records a yearlong dialogue between the artist and a friend who was incarcerated for a minor offense. The video installation features mobile-phone recordings made by his friend. These two acquisitions, along with Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue,  not only add to the depth of our holdings of video and time-based media, but also complement LACMA’s Art+Film initiative, which aims to present the moving image in the context of an art museum.

Choi Jeonghwa, Flower, Flower, 2008, purchased with funds provided by Contemporary Friends, 2013 

LACMA has been able to build its collection of contemporary Korean art thanks in part to generous support by AmorePacific. This year, Contemporary Friends was able to add Choi Jeonghwa’s Flower, Flower, two objects made both for indoor and outdoor environs. Known for his playful use of existing objects, Choi’s work adds to the holdings of Korean art that span the Three Kingdoms, Goryeo, and the Joseon periods and also complement contemporary works by Korean artists such as Haegue Yang, Lee Bul, Yeesookyung, and Do Ho Suh.

Kemang Wa Lehulere, Five Figures and Three Bottles (Even if I Bleed2), 2011, purchased with funds provided by Wyatt and Marlowe Kline, and Jay and John Lassiter through Contemporary Friends, 2013

The young artist Kemang Wa Lehulere’s 5 Figures and Three Bottles (Even if I Bleed 2) combines two drawings with collage into one singular piece. The first drawing, at top, features a white figure that appears to be rendered in a form of a bottle. Adjacent to that figure are black-and-white layers featuring mesh-like patterns, crude scribbles, and watercolor gestures. In the second half of the piece (the bottom), a black figure, seemingly in the guise of an angel, tilts his head above, looking over a black and a white form. The push-and-pull of the forms exemplifies Lehulere’s strategies in his work, which encourages the viewer to make multiple, differing interpretations as it attempts to reconcile the past and present in South Africa.

Rashid Johnson, Four for the Talking Cure, 2009–12, purchased with funds provided Contemporary Friends, Holly and Albert Baril, Allison and Larry Berg, Viveca Paulin-Ferrell and Will Ferrell, Linda and Paul Gotskind, Jennifer Hawks and Ramin Djawadi, Laura and James Maslon, Phil Mercado and Todd Quinn, Candace and Charles Nelson, and the Kerry and Simone Vickar Foundation, 2013

Rashid Johnson’s Four for the Talking Cure comes from the artist’s first solo exhibition in London, where he presented an entirely distinct body of work. The piece is inspired by an imaginary space offering free psychotherapy, and challenges conventional notions of the art object and our shared cultural experiences. In using materials such as zebra skin, shea butter, and metal in Four for the Talking Cure, Johnson alludes to materials that are connected to a cultural past.

These acquisitions of work by nine artists new to LACMA’s collection reflect Contemporary Friends’ advocacy of art that spans geography, media, and cultures. The works not only reflect the encyclopedic nature of the museum, but also the commitment of our patrons to the dialogue of contemporary art. Through active engagement and vigorous dialogue, members of Contemporary Friends have added pieces that enrich Los Angeles’s holdings of art from around the world.

Franklin Sirmans, Terri and Michael Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art

Chinese New Year begins tomorrow, January 31, 2014. To celebrate, we will talk about several pieces from LACMA’s permanent collection of Chinese art that feature the auspicious horse, which is this year’s zodiac. For thousands of years, equines have been one of the most popular animals depicted in Chinese art, and the following examples only provide a glimpse into the rich historical and symbolic significance of horses.

In the early history, it appears that the horse was considered a close kin of dragons. Equipped with imaginary powers, horses would carry the soul to an imagined land after death. An Eastern Han dynasty horse, probably excavated from a tomb in the Sichuan province, displays such a celestial quality. Its left front leg is about to move forward, with the hoof barely touching the ground. Its tail flies upward, rendering the solid body a sense of elevation, as if the horse was dancing or flying. In fact, flying horses are often found in Han dynasty tombs, remarking on the belief its ability to carry the soul to the afterlife realm.

China, Sichuan Province, Eastern Han dynasty, Funerary Sculpture of a Horse, A.D. 25–220, gift of Diane and Harold Keith and Jeffrey Lowden

The animal was also a military necessity. The strength of a cavalry was important to defend kingdoms and empires from the threat from northern and Central Asian nomads. Essential to securing territorial integrity and maintaining sovereign independence, it is natural that horse was soon connected symbolically with power. By the Tang dynasty, the horse’s symbolism as an imperial power became even more pronounced.

China, Middle Tang dynasty, Funerary Sculpture of a Horse, about 700–800, gift of Nasli M. Heeramaneck

China, Tang dynasty, , Funerary Sculpture of a Horse and Rider, 618–906, the Phil Berg Collection

In addition to the tribute horses brought to the Tang capital by the neighboring states, it is said the imperial court had a herd of over 700,000 horses. The sancai (three-colored glaze, brown, green, and cream) horse in the LACMA collection was found in a Tang dynasty tomb. It has a saddle on top of a coverlet. Its crupper and breastplate are decorated with tassels. So is the bridle piece, demonstrating the status of the tomb owner. Its tail is also carefully braided, showing its military or ceremonial function. Equestrian and polo became popular sports in the Tang dynasty, played by both men and women, displaying the wealth and status of the riders.

China, Chinese, Qing dynasty, Kangxi period, Square Dish (Die) with Figure on Horse, 1662–1722, gift of Miss Bella Mabury

For the Chinese scholars educated in the Confucian classics, the characteristic of horses were equated with one’s virtue and ability, as recognized in the story of Bole, a man with extraordinary understanding of equines. Without Bole’s recognition of its talents, a horse will only pull a cart in the market. Similarly, a Confucian scholar’s refinement and virtue need to be discovered and employed by a benevolent and enlightened ruler.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the horse appeared less frequently as an independent art genre. Instead, it subsided to the role of mounters in the depiction of popular fictions and dramas, such as the lacquer square dish carefully inlayed with shell and gold leaf, where an official riding a horse is about to enter the city gate. A repeating form, however, is a monkey riding on the back of a horse, a visual rebus meaning “immediate advancement in officialdom,” an auspicious wish for scholars with ambitions.

China, late Qing dynasty, Buckle in the Form of a Monkey on a Horse, about 1800–1911, gift of Patricia G. Cohan

In the 20th century, the most celebrated horse painter is no doubt Xu Beihong. Trained in Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris, Xu’s galloping horses combine the free and unrestrained expressions he was exposed in France and the traditional Chinese art of the brush and ink. The horses, always in vigorous sprinting gestures, embody a powerful political message: the noble and heroic spirit of China during the turbulent years of Sino-Japanese war.

Private collection, © Chen Art Gallery

In the popular culture of the Chinese zodiac system, each 12-year cycle is associated with a particular animal. For more than 2,000 years, people have believed that the attributes of each animal is reflected in those born in the corresponding year, affecting his or her personality and future. The horse is praised for its energy, strength, and intelligence, and cautioned against impatience and stubbornness.

Happy the Year of the Horse!

Christina Yu Yu, Assistant Curator, Chinese Art

Pass on the big game this weekend in favor of the world’s game. Opening to the public on Sunday, February 2, Fútbol: The Beautiful Game explores the sport, players, and spectators involved in the international obsession that is soccer. Represented through paint, sculpture, photography, and video works, the exhibition touches on issues of nationalism, globalism, and mass spectacle. Members have free, early access to Fútbol on Friday and Saturday. For more feats of synchronized athleticism see David Hockney: The Jugglers, a video artwork showing a procession of jugglers (accompanied by John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever”) through the lenses of eighteen fixed cameras on a multiscreen grid. The Jugglers opens on Saturday, February 1, in the Resnick Pavilion.

Kehinde Wiley, Samuel Eto’o, 2010, Roberts & Tilton Gallery, © Kehinde Wiley, Image courtesy of Kehinde Wiley, and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California

Nearby, Monterey Park residents and neighbors score big this weekend at the LACMA9 Monterey Park Art+Film Lab at East Los Angeles College. On Friday take part in Oral History Drop-ins in the early afternoon, see the LACMA9 Shorts Program at 7 pm on the big screen, and join in on the free Composition Workshop on Saturday at noon. This is the second to last week of free programming in Monterey Park before the Art+Film Lab heads to Hacienda Heights on February 21.

Gabriel Figueroa, film still from Una cita de amor, directed by Emilio “El Indio” Fernández, 1956, © Gabriel Figueroa Flores Archive

Back on campus, the clock winds down on Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa—Art and Film, which closes this Sunday. Figueroa was among the most important cinematographers of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, and his distinctive and vivid visual style crossed genre lines as well as country borders. For more art and cinema check out Masterworks for Expressionist Cinema: The Golem and Its Avatars and learn about the mythical figure from Jewish folklore. Lastly, take a timeout to enjoy Andell Family Sundays beginning at 12:30 pm (this month investigating memories and storytelling as seen in Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa) and Sundays Live with the Jolivet Trio at 6 pm in the Bing Theater. Now take the ball and run.

Roberto Ayala