For the Los Angeles sister blog, María Margarita López went to the March opening of “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective" at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The stories of Latino history are Los Angeles centric, but the impact of this mural's history belongs to the Southwest. The story was first posted at viewfromaloft on March 10.
By María Margarita López As a Girl Scout walking through the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, Barbara Carrasco never dreamed her work would one day grace its walls. After 25 years of being stored away, Carrasco’s controversial 1981 mural, “L.A. History: A Mexican Perspective,” will be on view in Los Angeles for the second time. It was a highlight of “¡Murales Rebeldes! L.A. Chicana/o Murals Under Siege,” co-curated by LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes and the California Historical Society as part of the Getty-led Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. It hung in Union Station. This time it will be featured at the Natural History Museum’s (NHMLA) for “Sin Censura: A Mural Remembers L.A.” It runs from March 9 through August 18, 2018. Carrasco stood mid-room, absorbing the impact of her mural displayed as she had never seen it before, wrapped around three walls giving it a more intimate feel. She is excited how the piece is uncensored and and it can be seen at the institution that helped make the mural possible in the first place. The late NHMLA curator William Mason helped Carrasco when she first researched subjects in the vignette, and loaned her photographs for source material. Much of the imagery was used in the final work. “This was my chance to show what I wish was in the history books.” said Carrasco. It was the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), the same agency that commissioned it in the first place, that objected to fourteen of the depicted scenes. Some of those stories do not place the city of Los Angeles or the CRA in the best light. Both had histories of injustice in under served communities. These are the L.A. stories you will be hard pressed to find anywhere else. “As she grew older she became more aware of her surroundings and really started to open up her eyes regarding the injustices that surrounded her and our communities and many of us growing up.” said Supervisor Hilda Solis of the artist. “I think her art has a way in which she shared those lived experiences meanwhile drawing attention to problems in our society. Barbara is a community champion.” Supervisor Solis went on to suggest that NHMLA is the best place to give this mural a permanent home. A highlight of the exhibition is the 70-inch digital touchscreen that details the people, places and events in each of the vignettes. From an image of Juan Francisco Reyes, LA’s first black mayor, to the lynching of 20 Chinese residents to memories of Grand Central Market, Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit," and a group portrait tribute to LA that includes Dolores Huerta, Jane Fonda, Ricardo Montalban, Martin Sheen, Rick James and other artists, activists and politicians. The interactive touchscreen gives full details of people and place in English and Spanish. Los Angeles has many untold stories. This mural beautifully depicts Los Angeles’s past, and present with a nod to the future, also including portraits of the interns who helped make the mural. It’s a history lesson worth visiting. María Margarita López has covered arts and performances for viewfromaloft since 2011. On behalf of viewfromaloft, her photos have also appeared at KCET.org, the LATimes, and Hyperallergic. As a film producer, she is co-founder ofAjuuaEntertainment, plus consulted and produced media under her company ValorFilms since 2005.
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In the downtown Las Vegas Arts District, this wall with bold pinks stepped away from the usual abstract typography of graffiti. C. Moon Reed on Tokyo-born printmaker Yoshiko Shimano's exhibition "Engraving on Land" at CSN's Fine Arts Gallery. "Through a variety of printing methods—woodcut, silkscreen, stencil, monoprint, linoleum cut—an abstract portrait of a place and people emerge from the layers of prints" I Las Vegas Weekly Opening today, March 30 in, Washington DC, is Renwick Gallery's exhibition that includes six Burning Man sculptures "a stone’s throw from the White House" I Hyperallergic NEXT DAY ADD "The Smithsonian’s Burning Man Art Show Is Actually Quite Good"I Bloomberg Sarah O’Connell, Las Vegas-based theater director and publisher of culture site eatmoreartvegas, is featured in this report on "brave delegation of art-loving Nevadans" who traveled to Washington, D.C. to take part in Arts Advocacy Day I Las Vegas Weekly More coverage of the trip and outcome at Review Journal. If you missed it, Trump signed spending bill that increases NEA funding. Also: "Earlier this month, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis and the NEA released a report that found that the arts contribute $763.6 billion to the US economy, which is more than the agriculture, transportation, or warehousing industries. It also stated that the cultural sector employs $4.9 million workers across the country who earn more than $370 billion" I ArtForum. Curated Instagrams of the local arts community. ELSEWHERE: Roger Gastman, the graffiti historian who helped assemble that MOCA's Art in the Streets, returns to to L.A. for a new show that takes over 40,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor displays in Chinatown. Beyond the Streets looks at global street art movements by over 100 artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Takashi Murakami, Jenny Holzer, Martha Cooper, Shepard Fairey, RETNA, Ben Jones, CHAZ Bojórquez, and Gajin Fujita I LAMagazine + LATimes 'Photographers Harry Gamboa Jr. and Luis Garza on pushing back against 'bad hombre' Chicano stereotypes" I LATimes "The Chicano Art of a Red-Blooded American Sangre Colorado, an exhibition by Carlos Frésquez, reminds viewers that 'American' is an abstract and malleable concept" I Hyperallergic In a topic PtD had covered before, "social media isn't just changing the way we interact with each other; it's driving the culture, especially in cities full of tourists eager to beef up their photo feeds with dispatches from elsewhere. At the same time, it is redefining the nature and intent of public art" I The Globe Ancient statue of a winged bull destroyed by ISIS recreated by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz. It is the "latest public art installation to sit on a sculpture platform here known as the Fourth Plinth, on Trafalgar Square" I NYTimes + ArtNet There was buzz about Justine Ludwig's move from Dallas Contemporary to New York art nonprofit Creative Time. In an interview with ArtNet News, Ludwig spoke with ArtNet on the importance of public art. She said: "Public art is an integral part of New York City’s urban landscape. It’s a city that lives and breathes art, and public art is central to that—greatly expanding the art-going audience by enabling greater accessibility. A major issue facing cultural institutions right now is the sense so many people have of not belonging: the feeling that they don’t have access or that these institutions are not tailored to them. Central to public art is the idea that art should be part of the everyday, of everyone’s life. It’s a very different way of presenting art. Everyone has access and everyone belongs, because it’s a part of the urban fabric itself." Banksy recently invaded New York with politically outspoken works I Art Newspaper Artist Haifa Subay used street art to mark the third anniversary of full-scale war in Yemen I The Interept The best public art opening in New York this Spring I Observer
The UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art gets edgy with "Subversive Saturday." This is a "Zines & Feminism Workshop" that will be held in the lobby from 1 to 5 p.m. in the lobby. The Feminist Zine Workshop & Lecture is held by Gemma Marmalade, who will performing prose from 5 to 5:30 in the auditorium. From the website.
At UNLV, parking on Saturday is always free in all metered, staff, and student spots.
Cory McMahon Photo PaintThisDesert
FIELD NOTES: Cory McMahon is a painter who carries a peaceful aura. Don’t be fooled. His experimental work is a fury of strategic risks. Coming in the UNLV MFA Studio Art program he was known for his large-scale abstraction. One time he has an earlier work, a large painting, on the back wall of then CAC gallery for a group show. It caught the eye of art critic Dave Hickey, who was sitting on his throne across the room waiting to chat up “25 Women: Essays on Their Art.” Hickey looked up from his cup of coffee, saw the large canvas with fierce brush strokes and, in that Southern one-part-warm two-part-grumble, asked whoever was listening: “Who the hell did that? . . . It’s good.” During his time at UNLV McMahon looked to go further. When the graduate students held an open house, he checked out hardbound dissertations from the UNLV library and stacked them in a display window. He called the installation ‘An Investigation of Analysis of. . .” McMahon even left his safe house of painting for his midway to explore ideas. That exhibition wasn’t what was expected. So, what? I thought. That’s the point, isn’t it? To take chances. McMahon's thesis show opens February 26. From his description, he is exploring the ideas of artist intent. I am looking forward to what he says about that through his art. The reception is March 9. Cory McMahon “Perfect Form” February 26 - March 10 Reception March 9, 2018 Douglas Emery's Midway Exhibition at Grant Hall.
FIELD NOTES: Although UNLV MFA candidate Douglas Emery took a one-year leave from his studies, he was still researching robot culture and industry. It is the theme of his midway show, “Automation and Robotics in a Neoliberal iSociety” and the photographer takes some broad ideas and presents it with simple execution. On the floor of Grant Hall Gallery are color prints of the working class, seemingly looking up at the gallery viewer. The walls have black and white images of robot product and infrastructure at eye level. Just below the ceiling line are large prints with images representing class that benefit from robot profit. Those images are high above the viewer, and you look at them with the same POV as the images of working class symbols you are standing on. “Automation and Robotics in a Neoliberal iSociety” Runs through Feb 24. The reception is Friday, February 23. Grant Hall. 6-ish. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1967. Encaustic and collage on canvas (three panels). 84.138 x 142.24 cm. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY By Jian Huang How many objects do we come across in a day? A few hundred? A few thousand? Think about the desk from which you are sitting as you read this article. What are the objects around? A pencil? A computer mouse? A cup of coffee? And of those objects with which we cross paths daily, how many do we see? This critical thinking of the everyday, where we can look at many objects to make a whole, fits in the overall saturation of media. We were prepared for it by Jasper Johns. His retrospective at the Broad museum, “Jasper Johns: ‘Something Resembling Truth,’” begins with his most well-known piece, “Flag,” (1967). The 100 works in the exhibition span across six decades. “It all began with the American Flag,” Johns famously said. Now age 87, his work weaves through the defining decades of Modern Art, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and is still influential to artists today. The art movements followed him. Like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, Johns’ body of work points to objects and the meanings with which we, as readers of objects, project onto them. Johns gained notoriety during a unique time in US history. With World War II ending and the American economy bouncing back from a depression-era conservatism came the advent of modernity: prefab homes for the single-family, personal automobiles, and television sets. The world was limitless for us Americans; we even put an American flag on the moon. “This exhibition is thematic rather than chronological,” said Joanne Heyler to the NY Times.Heyler, the Broad’s founding director who co-curated the exhibition stated, “With an artist like Johns — who returns many times, over decades, to motifs and ideas — is a very rewarding way to understand the work.” As potent today as it was then, the curators organized the exhibit with “Flag” as the headlining piece. As the I meander through the exhibit from one room to the next, I get a sense of Johns’ arc as an artist from his earlier works, charged with the powerful politics of the time, to the intimate pieces he made during his relationship with Rauschenberg, to cross-genre collaborations with writers like Samuel Beckett, and ending on his contemporary paintings with recurring motifs of contemplation--rulers, eyes, the things we use to measure, the things we use to see. Crossing the courtyard after the exhibit, I found myself asking, “What did I see?” Years of seeing these works in photographs cannot do proper justice to them. Two hours was hardly enough time to take in the extraordinary body of work of Johns--I would recommend at least two hours a day for two weeks. Even then, we can only begin to grasp as casual visitors the bigger question:who is Jasper Johns beyond the Flags? Jasper Johns, "Untitled," 1992–4. Encaustic on canvas. 199.4 x 300.7 cm. The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY
Jasper Johns 'Something Resembling Truth' Feb 10 – May 13, 2018 The Broad museum Downtown Los Angeles Jian Huang is writer and a 2016 PEN Emerging Voice recipient. Raised in South LA, Jian graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Art History and Communication and been involved with arts organizations, including LA County Arts Commission’s Civic Art Program, LA County Museum of Art, and Inner-City Arts. Jian served as past Chair for the Public Art Coalition of Southern California and Senior Editor for Angel’s Flight Literary West. The highlight of “on the fence,” Brandon Lacow’s MFA Thesis exhibition, is the replica of Dorothy Gale’s house from MGM’s Wizard of Oz (1939). It is an entry point for the artist to question the meaning of home, and if home is comfortable or a constricting space during a transition to adulthood. It is the artist making a statement exploring domesticity and discovery, and how personal realities are questioned. The craftsmanship of the house sitting on the ground floor of The Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery is as detailed as Lacow’s work as a photographer. The house as a sculpture has even captured the imaginations of UNLV facility workers. When I was there three workers drove up in carts to admire the installation. I secretly thought they were the UNLV version of Hunk, Hickory and Zeke. For those not prepared for Wizard of Oz trivia, those three characters were later seen in the film as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion.
Brandon Lacow 'on the fence' MFA Thesis Exhibition Closing Reception: Friday February 9th, 6 -9 p.m. Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery Photo: PtD
Holly Lay's Midway Exhibition is untitled. That is appropriate for an installation using themes prompted by online images curated by, as she says, an "amateur cyber anthropologist." You may not know the sources of the digital archives she uses to create "memes, cyber culture, representation, appropriation, circulation, femininity, craft and kitsch." It is a collaboration with the unknown and untitled sources, so to speak. The centerpiece is "Myth," a series of latch hook tapestries, and a mural, sourced from pixelated images to revisit how the female form is still objectified for viewing. Holly Lay Midway Exhibition UNLV Grant Hall Gallery Through February 9 Closing Reception Friday February 9, 6 - 9 p.m. Cinema graphics is a playground for YKMF, aka You Killed Me First, the Las Vegas-based street artist who masterly mimics the poster style that ruled before Photoshop drove movie Key Art. In this piece, presumably titled “The Man with the Golden Paste,” legend graphic designer Saul Bass is channeled in this wheat-paste homage to simple geometric form. The arm holding the tool of visual deconstruction adds charm to the selling of the target product; the street art process of water, flour, boil, and paste. It’s an addictive method of art, almost as bad what a junkie in an 1955 Otto Preminger film feels.
FIELD NOTE: The ship of this alien couple was shot down, perhaps mistaken for a clay pigeon. They have been stranded since May. As the winds whipped up the incoming winter the staff at the nearby Clark County Shooting Complex wrapped the two drop-in guests in holiday garland to keep out the chill.
Jesse Carson Smigel “I Told You Not to Paint It Hot Orange!” Centered / Clark County Public Art |
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