LACMA

In Color: New American Stories from LACMA’s Photography Collection
Art of the Americas Building, Plaza Level
February 28–May 23, 2010
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photography has told stories: stories about family and alienation, joy and adversity, landscapes and cities. Often described as a democratic medium—and now practiced almost universally, with camera phones and similar devices—photography is ideally suited to the depiction of our democratic nation, with all its promise and problems. These nine photographs, selected from LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, begin to suggest the medium’s rich potential for storytelling in our own time. They represent a particular approach to narrative, using scale, chromatic intensity, and sharp resolution to draw the viewer’s attention to precisely arranged details and spatial relationships.

While these artists use new technologies, they also rely on an age-old truism: people respond to people. In nearly every photograph included here, the subjects meet the artist’s (and the viewer’s) gaze. These people assert their identities, but they are not autonomous—as the artists demonstrate by situating individuals in larger contexts suggestive of complex stories.

Joel Sternfeld and Tina Barney portray their subjects in domestic surroundings, surrounded by possessions indicating taste and social status, while Christina Fernandez, Larry Sultan and Taryn Simon show individuals in semi-public, semi-familiar environments: a laundromat, a suburban house being used as the set of an adult film, a dive bar. Andrew Bush and Sharon Lockhart create suggestive episodes with minimal accessories: a man drives his car, a girl holds a rodent. In each case, the photograph—deliberately and inevitably—tells only part of the American story. It is our task to imagine the possible beginnings and endings.

Andrew Bush, Man Driving Southwest at Approximately 72 MPH on Arizona Interstate #40 on an Afternoon of the July 4th Weekend of 1989 (Possible Air Conditioner Malfunction), 1989, printed 1991, chromogenic development (Ektacolor) print, 28 x 40 in., M.91.293, LACMA, purchased with funds provided by Graham and Susan Nash, © Andrew Bush.

Japanese Paintings: Twenty Years of Acquisitions
Pavilion for Japanese Art
February 1, 2010–June 2010
LACMA is currently celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Pavilion for Japanese Art, the only free-standing building outside of Japan dedicated solely to the display of Japanese art. This installation of works from the permanent collection celebrates not only the twentieth anniversary of this unusual building, designed by Bruce Goff, but also highlights a number of outstanding recent acquisitions of paintings. All of the screen and scroll paintings on display have been acquired since the opening of the Japanese Pavilion in 1988.

Mori Sosen, Japan, 1747–1821, circa 1800, Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk, gift of Camilla Chandler Frost, M.2009.20.

Pueblo Pottery 1800-1900
Art of the Americas Building, 3rd Level
December 19, 2009–July 25, 2010
These virtuosic examples of historical Pueblo pottery were made at Acoma, Acomita or Laguna, Hano, Tesuque, Zia, and Zuni, American Indian villages in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. The labor-intensive process used to create the vessels—typically made by Pueblo women—has been followed for centuries: digging the clay, gathering organic materials for the clay's temper and for slip and paint to decorate the pottery, crafting tools to shape and finish the vessels, and collecting and drying fuel to fire the pottery. Ropes of tempered clay were layered by hand to create a coil vessel, which was then shaped, finished with slips and paints, and fired. A potter's wheel was never used. Collected by longtime LACMA supporter and trustee Camilla Chandler Frost and generously presented to the museum in 2008, this rare group of Pueblo pottery is the first of its kind at LACMA and broadens the scope of the American art collections.

Storage Jar, United States, New Mexico, Zia Pueblo, c. 1900, earthenware and pigments, gift of Camilla Chandler Frost.

Ernst Barlach as Illustrator: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies
Ahmanson Building, Plaza Level
November 15, 2009–March 28, 2010
Driven to transform the ineffable into visual form, German Expressionists seemed to be instinctively attuned to illustration. The illustrative impulse was particularly strong for the Expressionist Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), who sought to give visible form to humanity's desires for a better, higher form of existence. Attaining acclaim not only as a sculptor and printmaker, but also as a dramatist, Barlach had an acute sense of the literary, which inspired and structured many of his endeavors. This exhibition provides an overview of the full range of Barlach's work as an illustrator. Drawing from works in the Rifkind Center's collection, it features approximately forty-five lithographs and woodcuts from the artist's illustrative portfolios, along with a representative selection of illustrated books..

Art of the Pacific
Ahmanson Building, 1st Level
November 7, 2009–
In summer 2008 LACMA acquired one of the most significant private collections of the Art of the Pacific Islands to be assembled in the twentieth century. Representative of the wide range of arts from the Pacific regions and with historic provenance, the collection’s greatest strengths lie in the areas of Polynesia and Melanesia, and includes objects from Micronesia. The future display of these works will follow a variety of strategies. In this first exhibition, working with the Viennese artist Franz West, the museum has created geographical groupings following population migration patterns, west to east, in the general sequence of the settlement of the Pacific Islands.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Lecture—Art of the Pacific: Exploring LACMA's New Treasures
Mar 6 | 2 pm

Installation view, Art of the Pacific galleries, installation designed by Franz West.

The Hand of the Artist: Sketches by Japanese Print Masters
Pavilion for Japanese Art
November 5, 2009–March 2, 2010
Color woodblock prints of the Edo period (1615–1868) were produced by a team. A publisher would commission a design from an artist, and upon receipt of an acceptable drawing would assign carving and coloring specialists in his studio to create the final print. Unless the artist was held in exceptionally high regard, even the color and costume pattern selections for the print were determined by the publisher. Thus, our most immediate experience of the artist is through drawings, and this exhibition features rare, remaining drawings that reveal the artists' approach to design. In portraits of actors or beauties, personality is often portrayed through the delineation of the mouth, nose and brows. Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861), in his numerous drawings, most often emphasized pose or group dynamic. Kuniyoshi's best known student, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839–92), continued to explore interrelated action among figures, updating his images with Western-style perspective, pose and realism. Teisai Hokuba (1771–1844), a student of the influential master Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), lovingly delineated events from daily life, which he might tuck into the minor details of his full-color paintings.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (Japan, 1839–1892), Sketch of Hanai Oume Killing Minekichi, circa 1887, ink on paper, Herbert R. Cole Collection.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (Japan, 1839–1892), Hanai Oume Killing Minekichi, 1887, 8th month, print, color woodblock print, Herbert R. Cole Collection.

Alfonso Ossorio
Ahmanson Building, Plaza Level
October 10, 2009–March 14, 2010
This installation features all the works in LACMA's collection by Alfonso Ossorio (1916–90). Born in the Philippines into a wealthy and devoutly Catholic family and educated at Harvard, Ossorio spent most of his adult life in New York City and environs. He was an artist in his own right as well as a champion and collector of Abstract Expressionism (including de Kooning, Pollock, and others). From 1952–62 Ossorio housed the French artist Jean Dubuffet's collection of art brut (literally, "raw art," as art by the insane and the untaught is known) at The Creeks, Ossorio's Long Island estate; and his work reflects the influence of this collection and art brut in general. LACMA's holdings, which span Ossorio's career from the 1930s through the 1980s, include nineteen works on paper in various media and one large-scale mixed-media assemblage.

Joseph Beuys: The Multiples
BCAM, 3rd Level
September 19, 2009–July 18, 2010
Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) is perhaps the most influential postwar European artist; his sensibility challenged American domination of the art world in the 1950s and 60s with art that confronted recent German history. This exhibition features 572 of the artist's works from the collection of The Broad Art Foundation. At the heart of Beuys's practice was a particularly European form of multiples in which two- and three-dimensional objects are issued in editions. In myriad formats, Beuys’s multiples were intended to be widely circulated and cheap to acquire. Ranging from small-editioned objects to mass-produced political flyers and postcards, in materials as different as felt, wood, found objects like water bottles and tin cans, instruments, records, film, video, and audio tapes related to performances, these works, rich with allusions to his biography and personal iconography, provide a complete picture of his diverse oeuvre.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Joseph Beuys and Paul Thek: Glamour and a Woman's Touch
Jan 31 | 2 pm

Korean Art Galleries
Hammer Building, 2nd (Plaza) Level
September 10, 2009–
LACMA’s collection of Korean art is recognized as the most comprehensive outside of Korea and Japan, despite a relatively short history of collecting. Representing work from the fifth through twentieth centuries, the installation features a hundred objects from the Three Kingdoms, Goryeo, and Joseon periods, including Buddhist and literati art, ceramics, lacquer, paintings, and sculpture.

The Early Work of Edward Kienholz
Ahmanson Building, 2nd (Plaza) Level
February 1, 2009–March 21, 2010
Long associated with the assemblage movement that distinguished Southern California art of the 1960s, Edward Kienholz created works that incorporate social and political commentary. Often shocking in their realism, these sculptures are scathing narratives that confront social hypocrisy.

COMING SOON

Houra Yaghoubi Prints
Ahmanson Building, Level 4
February 27, 2010–July 4, 2010
Azar Nafissi wrote in Reading Lolita in Tehran that she did not know who she was when she was wearing a veil. So too, perhaps, Houra Yaghoubi's images of faceless, chador-draped women are intended as a literal metaphor for a loss of identity. Because her veiled women are all visually linked to nineteenth-century clichés of women, Yaghoubi's seeming social criticism is perfectly acceptable in contemporary Iran. The Persian texts that appear in several of the prints are drawn from the Iranian national epic, the Shahnama, a one-thousand-year-old poem, which includes references to women as the backbone of their nation, as quoted in Yaghoubi's work and in stark contrast to the doll-like figures she depicts. Like other Iranian artists whose work LACMA has recently exhibited, including Shadi Ghadirian and Sadegh Tirafkan, Yaghoubi contemplates a society caught between the present and the past. 2010 marks the thousandth anniversary of the completion of the Shahnama or Book of Kings and this installation demonstrates how the heroic poem still resonates with Iranian artists today.

LACMA's Treasures Revealed: Masterpieces of Mughal and Deccani Painting
Ahmanson Building, Level 4
March 21, 2010 through March 16, 2011
Distinguished by its high aesthetic quality and comprehensive holdings, LACMA's Indian painting collection is world renowned. Among its strongest works are the opaque watercolor paintings produced under court patronage in the Mughal Empire of northern India and present-day Pakistan and in the Islamic kingdoms of the Deccan in southern India during the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. This exhibition presents the museum's finest examples of Mughal and Deccani painting, which are rarely displayed because of their sensitivity to light exposure and have not been shown as a group for many years.

Ed Ruscha's Gunpowder and Pastel Drawings
Ahmanson Building, Level 2
April 3, 2010 through August 1, 2010
Ed Ruscha first began using gunpowder around 1966–1967, and in 1968 he combined pastel with gunpowder, finding the two mediums to be "very compatible." They were both dry, like "dirt or dust," Ruscha explained, and enabled him to create "smoky" surfaces and "edgeless" letters. The five gunpowder and pastel drawings in LACMA's collection demonstrate Ruscha's acute facility with the mediums to render characteristic subjects such as words, books, and flying aspirin.

Japanese Paintings: Twenty Years of Acquisitions

Pueblo Pottery 1800–1900

Ernst Barlach as Illustrator: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies

Art of the Pacific

The Hand of the Artist: Sketches by Japanese Print Masters

Alfonso Ossorio

Joseph Beuys: The Multiples

Korean Art Galleries

The Early Work of Edward Kienholz