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Unusual Art Spaces in Los Angeles

posted by December 22, 2008

Los Angeles boasts a number of unusual art spaces and museums that are definitely worth checking out during the 2009 Annual Conference, taking place February 25–28, 2009. CAA News has profiled six: Farmlab/Under Spring, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, LAXART, Ooga Booga, the Wende Museum, and the Institute for Figuring. After reading the article, check out each space’s website for details on exhibitions, special events, and directions.

UNUSUAL ART SPACES IN LOS ANGELES

posted by December 22, 2008

FarmLab/Under Spring

The sun sets behind a water tower located inside the Farmlab Agbin Garden (F.L.A.G.) (photograph © Joshua White and provided by Farmlab)

The seed of Farmlab/Under Spring was planted in the summer of 2005 when the artist Lauren Bon began transforming a thirty-two acre industrial brownfield in the historic center of Los Angeles into a cornfield. Over the course of one agricultural cycle, Bon cleared the industrial debris, brought in 1,500 truckloads of earth, planted one million seeds, and programmed community events throughout the growing and harvesting phases. After handing back the keys to the California Department of Parks and Recreation, Bon and the “Not a Cornfield” team moved into a warehouse across the street to continue their investigation of the nature of public space, urban ecology, civic engagement, contemporary visual art, and proactive philanthropy.

In their current location, just north of Chinatown, Farmlab/Under Spring functions as think tank, art-production studio, and cultural-performance venue, hosting weekly salons, lectures, and discussions, as well as periodic exhibitions and art actions around the downtown area and beyond.

Visit http://farmlab.org for activities and projects and to join the Farmlab cause of sustainable cultural practices and community mobilization.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

“The Museum of Jurassic Technology,” says this organization’s website, “is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.” Rather than displaying dinosaur bones or leaf-imprinted fossils, this Culver City space showcases strange, diverse collections of objects that could be found in a cabinet of curiosities. Recent exhibitions have included incredibly tiny sculptures, called microminiatures, by the virtuoso musician Hagop Sandaldjian, and a collection of “Napoleana”—relics of the late French emperor (e.g., a piece of fabric, wood from a bookcase, rocks from the Invalides)—that the American civil engineer Charles Evans Fowler (1867–1937) amassed during his lifetime. Neither art nor cultural history, exhibitions at this space will make you rethink what museums are all about.

Lawrence Weschler profiled the Museum of Jurassic Technology in his book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet Of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995). Visit the museum’s quizzical website to learn more.

LAXART

Lauri Firstenberg is a former curator at Artists Space in New York and pulls off her Culver City space, LAXART (or LA><ART), with the same savoir-faire as any venerable “alt space” in New York and beyond. Firstenberg pushes a program focusing on emerging artists and large-scale projects that bring out the art set and the glitterati for festive openings and events. LAXART has truly led the pack in making Culver City a place for art. Neighboring galleries like Blum and Poe and Anna Helwing lend market gravitas, while the funky and strange Museum of Jurassic Technology also makes a cozy neighbor. Billboard projects—apt for a city of freeway stop and go—are often part of the exhibition, so keep an eye out if you’re in the area. See www.laxart.org for the current schedule.

Ooga Booga

Located in Chinatown in the midst of Los Angeles’ leading contemporary art galleries, Ooga Booga displays and sells limited-edition multiples, artist’s books, and more (photograph provided by Ooga Booga)

Located in Chinatown, close to a handful of hip contemporary-art galleries, is Ooga Booga. Opened in 2004 by Lucy Yao, the space is a uniquely curated commercial enterprise that sells books on art and by artists, as well as prints, posters, and ephemera. You can find zines by Raymond Pettibon and Laura Owen and limited-edition artworks such as Mike Kelley’s talking Little Friend plush toy, Tauba Auerbach’s 50/50 buttons, and postcard sets by Ryan McGinley. Clothing by the avant-garde fashion designers and artist-designed totes are also available, in addition to hard-to-find DVDs, CDs, and records by musicians and noisemakers both in and outside the art world.

Ooga Booga also hosts gallery exhibitions and special events, including a recent show on the Zurich-based zine publisher Nieves, which was reviewed in caa.reviews earlier this year.

Wende Museum

The Wende Museum acquires, preserves, and presents cultural and political objects, personal histories, and documentary materials of cold war–era Eastern Europe: household products, clothing, folk art, diaries and scrapbooks, political iconography, photograph albums, posters, films, textbooks, paintings, sports awards and certificates, and children’s toys. Items were salvaged after the end of Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a time when monuments were toppled, documents destroyed, and consumer products discontinued.

See a 2.6 ton piece of the Berlin Wall painted by the muralist Thierry Noir; the complete run of Neues Deutschland, the official East German daily newspaper; and artifacts from the recently demolished Palast der Republik in East Berlin. A recent donation from a former East German border guard includes official documentation that describes the construction and maintenance of the Berlin Wall, as well as the logbooks, stamps, and facial-recognition systems used on the eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie.

The Wende is host two events during the conference. An open house and tour take place on Friday, February 27, 12:30–2:00 PM and 5:30–7:00 PM, where participants can get a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum’s extensive collections and see the exhibition Facing the Wall: Living with the Berlin Wall. On Saturday night, attend Wende Flicks, a film screening and reception at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, where The Tango Player (1991) will be shown. For full details, visit the CAA conference website.

Institute for Figuring

The Institute for Figuring is the brainchild of Margaret and Christine Wertheim. Twin sisters hailing from Australia, the two offer staggeringly cerebral and stimulating programs and projects that meld their areas of expertise in science and art. Recent lecture series have included “On Seeing and Being: A discussion series about neuroscience and the perception of space” and presentations with Shea Zellweger, a former hotel switchboard operator who developed a “Logic Alphabet” that maps the underlying geometry of formal logic.

The Wertheim sisters and the IFF have gained attention with their traveling Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a project that explores the intersection of higher geometry, feminine handicraft, and the effects of climate change on the marine world. As itinerant programmers, the IFF organizes collaborations with museums, galleries and spaces all over the world.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:

Career Services Guide Published

posted by December 18, 2008

The Career Services Guide is designed to inform job seekers and employers about career services that are available at the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. Examine this guide carefully so that you will know what to expect from conference interviewing and how best to prepare for a successful experience.

The Career Services Guide will also be published in the January 2009 issue of CAA News as a colored-paper insert; copies will also be available at Orientation and in the Candidate’s Center at the conference.

All Career Services will take place at the Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, California. For more information about job searching, visit the Career Services section of the conference website.

Since the mid-1950s, Los Angeles has been a hotbed of new art and groundbreaking galleries, museums, and other art spaces and institutions. Throughout the greater Los Angeles area are many pockets of art-world panache, from Malibu to Culver City to Chinatown. With CAA’s 2009 Annual Conference headquartered at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown LA, CAA News features the robust gallery culture there and in its subdistricts.

Recent Deaths in the Arts

posted by December 18, 2008

CAA recognizes the lifetime professional and personal achievements of the following artists, art historians, curators, educators, and critics, who recently passed away.

  • George Brecht, an artist who was a principle member of Fluxus, died on December 5, 2008, at age 82 in Cologne, Germany, where he had been living
  • Mildred Constantine Bettelheim, a former curator of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a CAA member since 1938, died on December 10, 2008. at her home in Nyack, NY. She was 95. A special obituary from Linda Downs, CAA executive director, has been published
  • Derek Davis, a self-taught British ceramicist and painter, died on September 3, 2008, at age 82
  • Lawrence Fane, an expressionist sculptor who worked with steel, bronze, wood, and concrete, died on November 28, 2008, in New York at age 75
  • François-Xavier Lalanne, a French artists who created surrealistic animal sculptures in bronze that doubled as functional objects, and who was also well known in the fashion world, died on December 7, 2008, at his home in the village of Ury, south of Paris. He was 81
  • William H. Pierson Jr., a member of the “art mafia” at Williams College who, with Whitney S. Stoddard and S. Lane Faison, Jr., helped to shape a generation of museum curators and directors, died on December 3, 2008, in North Adams, Massachusetts. He was 97 and resided in Williamstown
  • Warren M. Robbins, founder of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, died on December 4, 2008, in Washington, DC. He was 85
  • Kathleen Michelle Robinson, an art historian of nineteenth-century art and a curator at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, died on November 16, 2008, in Leavenworth, Kansas. She was 57
  • Willoughby Sharp, an artist, curator, teacher, and publisher of Avalanche magazine, died on December 17, 2008, in New York. He was 72
  • Terry Toedtemeier, a photographer, professor, geologist, and curator of photography at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, died on December 10, 2008, at the age of 61
  • Jorn Utzon, an architect who designed the Sydney Opera House in Australia, died in Copenhagen, Denmark, on November 29, 2008, at the age of 90
  • Cornelius C. Vermeule III, a curator of classical antiquities at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for over four decades, died on November 27, 2008, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was 83

Read all past obituaries in the arts on the CAA website.

Filed under: Obituaries, People in the News

Since the mid-1950s, Los Angeles has been a hotbed of new art and groundbreaking galleries, museums, and other art spaces and institutions. Throughout the greater LA area are many pockets of art-world panache, from Malibu to Culver City to Chinatown. With the 2009 conference headquartered at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown LA, we thought we would start with a focus on the robust gallery culture there and in its subdistricts.

CHINATOWN

Claudia Parducci, Shatter-5, 2007, oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 72 in. (artwork © Claudia Parducci)

A short walk or cab ride from the conference, Chinatown has a long history of culture and commerce dating back to the late nineteenth century. In the 1930s, Chinatown’s central plaza saw development as a tourist attraction with the creative help of Hollywood set designers. The cinematic simulacrum of Chung King Road is now the high street of the area’s gallery scene. While the art that is shown is cutting-edge contemporary, the galleries still pay tribute to the culture and history of Chinatown, often repurposing the original storefront names to give us spaces called China Art Objects, Black Dragon Society, and the Happy Lion.

Recommended Galleries

A nonprofit organization since 2003, Telic Arts Exchange serves as a platform for exhibitions, performances, screenings, lectures, and discussions on art, architecture, and media, with an emphasis on social exchange, interactivity, and public participation. From its basement location, Betalevel similarly operates as a studio, club, stage, and screening space. Its members are artists, programmers, writers, designers, agitprop specialists, filmmakers, and reverse engineers.

The bad-boy scenesters of contemporary art, including Dash Snow, Dan Colen, Bruce Labruce, and Terence Koh, are represented by Peres Projects. Here you’ll find edgy, trendy, abrasive, and provocative art, often collaged from detritus and other nonart materials—the stuff recent biennials are made of.

Installation view of Christopher Michlig’s exhibition Negations at Jail in 2008 (artworks © Christopher Michlig; photograph by Peter Lograsso and provided by Jail)

Black Dragon Society is another uber-hip gallery that focuses largely on painting, such as the faux-naïve, Mad magazine–inspired work of Steve Canaday and the informal portraiture of Raffi Kalenderian. China Art Objects features artists such as Walead Beshty, Pae White, and Bjorn Copeland, who also performs in the noise band Black Dice.

Presenting installation, video, new media, and technology-minded work, Fringe Exhibitions opened in 2006 with work by Survival Research Laboratories. The gallery’s website features a Net art project each month.

Kontainer has a painting-heavy roster, and Acuna-Hansen Gallery presents a number of drawing specialists, such as Eric Beltz and Tracy Nakayama, in addition to artists who work in photography and sculpture. The Fifth Floor Gallery and David Salow Gallery were two of nine Chinatown venues that hosted CalArts’ MFA exhibition, We Want a New Object, in May 2008. Both feature artists working in diverse mediums.

Mesler and Hug Gallery is big on multimedia installation, and Bonelli Contemporary maintains an Italian presence in Chinatown, showing mostly painting and drawing. High Energy Constructs is an exhibition and performance venue, and the Mountain Bar, a nightclub and gallery space, is a central hangout spot for artists and anchors the area.

Other recommended spaces include Farmlab/Under Spring Gallery; Mandarin; Happy Lion Gallery; LMAN Gallery; and Sister. Cottage Home is a unique venue run by Sister, China Art Objects, and Tom Solomon Gallery, with monthly solo and group shows alternately staged by each gallery.

GALLERY ROW

Another area downtown, located just a short walk or bus ride from the convention-center complex, is Gallery Row. A seven-block concentration of galleries in the very center of downtown, Gallery Row was designated by city council in 2003 as a thriving, pedestrian-friendly, culturally abundant, urban locus of art and nightlife. In a few short years, this experiment in urban planning has changed these blocks into a spontaneous laboratory of street art and creative culture, with fashion shows, live music, spoken word, and traditional art exhibitions. The following galleries are located in or near this area.

Recommended Galleries

Pharmaka is a nonprofit gallery in downtown Los Angeles

Located in the main lobby of the Banco Popular Building, *BANK has developed a distinctive curatorial platform showcasing emerging and midcareer artists, such as the work of Paul Butler, known not only for his own work but also for his Collage Parties. MATERIAL, a critical arts journal, is a creation of the *BANK artist Kim Schoen and Ginny Cook. Similarly, a new nonprofit organization called Phantom Galleries LA places temporary art installations in vacant storefront windows throughout Los Angeles County; its call for proposals is open ended.

Established in spring 2007, Morono Kiang Gallery promotes contemporary art by both recognized and emerging artists, focusing on Chinese art from the last decade. Recently shown artists include Xu Bing, Ai Weiwei, Li Jin, and Liu Qinghe.

Jail presents solid curated group shows, including Hef, dedicated to the founder of Playboy magazine, as well as solo exhibitions by emerging artists such as Christopher Michlig. Bert Green Fine Art focuses on contemporary painting and work on paper. Recently shown were works by the underground fanzine legend Dame Darcy and the horror novelist Clive Barker.

Founded in 1979, LA Artcore is an established nonprofit with two gallery spaces for solo, two-person, and thematic group shows. The space also hosts international and regional exchange shows. The newer Pharmaka, another nonprofit space, stages curated exhibitions while also programming lectures, panel discussions, podcasts, and accessible community events.

Other neighborhood highlights include Compact Space, which recently moved to the area, and De Soto, which is strong on photography. The work of gallery artist Connie Samaras appeared on the cover of the Summer 2008 issue of X-TRA, a Los Angeles–based quarterly art magazine.

Rounding out the recommended downtown galleries is the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, which in addition to staging group exhibitions offers large-format printing from artists’ and photographers’ digital files with an Epson 9800 archival printer.

MORE TO COME

There’s lots more to downtown Los Angeles, with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the REDCAT Galleries and Theater, and the Frank Gehry–designed Walt Disney Concert Hall. Keep an eye out in upcoming issues of CAA News and at www.collegeart.org to see the growing list of galleries, previews, and highlights of the Los Angeles scene, a West Coast bastion of culture and cool.

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:

The 2008 Nominating Committee submits its slate of six candidates to serve on the CAA Board of Directors from 2009 to 2013. Please read each candidate’s statement and biography—and watch their special video introductions—before casting your vote. Voting begins on January 5, 2009, and ends on February 27.

The candidates are:

Voting begins on January 5. For full details about the election, visit the board-election webpage. Questions or comments? Please contact Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive assistant, at 212-691-1051, ext. 261.

Salary Data on Art-History Majors

posted by December 12, 2008

From the Art History Newsletter:

In the Wall Street Journal, we read that according to “a year-long survey of 1.2 million people with only a bachelor’s degree by PayScale Inc.,” art-history majors have a median starting salary of $35,800. Ten years after graduation, their median salary is $64,900. In that respect, they beat majors in anthropology, biology, criminal justice, drama, education, English, forestry, graphic design, health care administration, hospitality, interior design, music, nutrition, psychology, religion, sociology, and Spanish. That said, philosophy majors are earning a median $81,200 ten years out.

Filed under: Education, Surveys, Workforce

Conference papers from the 32nd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), which convened in Melbourne, Australia, in January 2008, will soon be published by Miegunyah Press. Entitled Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, the book is edited by the conference convenor Jaynie Anderson.

Art and its history are not only created but are also discussed in one form or another on all the inhabited continents of the earth. Globalism has also assumed an art-historical aspect: indeed it has been described as art history’s most pressing issue. The themes are conflict, migration, and convergence in the visual, symbolic, and artistic exchanges between cultures throughout history. This publication will explore these themes.

This bound book is only available via a preorder form. It will not be available from any other outlets. Orders for this publication will be accepted until February 27, 2009—don’t miss this opportunity! Individual chapters of the book will also be available to purchase and download online in June 2009.

Filed under: Books, Libraries, Publications

Conference Job Interviewing Advice

posted by December 09, 2008

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article on what “Conference Rookies” should expect while on job hunts at academic conferences. Two academic career experts—Julie Miller Vick of the University of Pennsylvania and Jennifer S. Furlong of Columbia University’s Center for Career Education—provide tips and pointers on scheduling interviews, eating, organizing materials, and more.

CAA will soon publish its Career Services Guide on the conference website. The document will also appear in the forthcoming January issue of CAA News and be available at Orientation and in the Candidate Center at the 2009 Annual Conference in Los Angeles. In the meantime, both job candidates and interviewers are encouraged to review CAA’s two Standards and Guidelines dealing with the job search—Etiquette for CAA Interviewers and Standards for Professional Placement—as well as to read CAA’s recommendations for preparing CVs and résumés for artists, art historians, and museum professionals.