Mail Art at the Getty

They currently are having a mail art exhibit at the Getty in Los Angeles.  You will not find a mail art show on their website.  The curators are not describing the work as mail art but it is there as part of the show Manet and Modern Beauty.  

The exhibit begins with a gallery full of Manet’s dough-faced portraits.  The highlight in the gallery is not a portrait but a painting of a plate of oysters.  Are we allowed to make fun of any Manet portrait?  I clearly was in the minority – the gallery was packed with visitors stepping over themselves to gawk and photograph.  

In the next gallery the crowds thin and you find delicate watercolors along with Manet’s illustrated letters sent from Bellevue.  Manet the impressionist, and Manet the Mail Artist.  The exhibit continues with a gallery filled with flawless still lives of fruit and flowers.  With exception of Georgia O’Keeffe, I don’t usually get excited about paintings of flowers.  The trick with Manet is look at vases. Manet’s crystal vases are magic, pure magic.

Three Museum Weekend

Any visit to Southern California offers a huge choice and variety of art museums to see.  I got a look at four excellent shows this weekend in three museums.

Proyecto Queer Icons, Gabriel Garcia Román

Long Beach’s Museum of Latin American Art  was the first stop.  This summer the entire museum is devoted to Gráfica América, a comprehensive showcase including artist collectives, print shops and publishing houses.  The exhibit features work by over 100 U.S. and Latin American artists.   It’s an opportunity to get a sampling of a wide variety of print work ranging from historic and traditional print methods to digital processes.  The only regret was, in many cases, that I wanted to see more work from some of the artists shown.  I was snapping photos of prints and museum labels with my phone for the purpose of looking up many of these artists online.  Of course I was excited to see map themed prints from artists like Lorena Pradal   and Maria Villanueva  and the final gallery offers print making opportunities for visitors that include making postcards (yay!).

Self Portrait, Patrick Angus

I enjoyed all the shows I saw over the weekend, but the one that blew me away was the Patrick Angus retrospective at the Long Beach Museum of Art.  I was unfamiliar with Patrick Angus until this past Saturday.  He was a painter’s painter with work that is unmistakably Californian in light, style in palette.  His life was sadly cut short when he died from AIDS in 1992.  The two New York cityscapes shown are something akin to California meets Hopper.  The influence of many artists from Diebenkorn to Picasso to Hockney comes through in his work.  The work is far from derivative but shows an artist with an observant eye who makes each painting his own.  The Galerie Thomas Fuchs has a good sampling of Angus’s work on their website.  I wish this exhibit was going on tour after it closes — Patrick Angus’s work needs to be seen.

Bob Mizer, historic costume

There was a smaller show of Bob Mizer’s work at the same museum.  From books, film and the internet I am no stranger to Mizer’s work.  But what made this show special, beyond the photography, was the collection of props, costumes and memorabilia — oh the stories those jockstraps could tell.  I really want to see it all find a home in the Smithsonian.

Sunday afternoon found me wandering the historic heart of Los Angeles with a visit to La Plaza de Cultura y Artes.  After some L.A. history, it was time to explore Linda Vallejo’s large solo exhibition Brown Belongings.  Her mandala-like and graphic pieces seem straightforward and stand alone on their visuals but look closely and read the labels and see each one is embedded with meaning and statistics documenting Latinx demographics and culture. In these times, it never hurts to remind us we live in multicultural and diverse society.  The second floor included many pieces from her Make ‘Em All Mexican series with the latinxafication of many of cultural and historical icons.  With some brown paint and pigment, you get a revised perspective on everyone from Marilyn Monroe, to Bob’s Big Boy, to George Washington to “Mateo” Damon.   The pieces have a serious message, but they are great fun.  It’s the sort of show that would trigger the deplorables — but they would not even get out of their cars if they found themselves in that part of L.A.  The ceramics are safe.

Make ‘Em All Mexican series, Linda Vallejo

A weekend with three museums reaffirms why Los Angles (and environs) is one of the world’s great art cities.

Pasadena Highlights

However you add up the numbers, the Los Angeles metropolitan area has somewhere around 18 million people.  And when a city has that many diverse people, many from all over the world, it is hard to be bored.  There is no shortage of interesting things and urban exploration opportunities in L.A. — even if some freeway time is involved.  I find that I-hate-L.A. San Francisco provincialism so tiresome.

Today’s L.A. adventure included Glendale and Pasadena, a mission I had never visited, a delightful little Polish restaurant and a trip to a delicious Armenian bakery for dessert.  But the main goal of the day was a return to a favorite museum – the Pasadena Museum of California Art.

I’ve seen a number Gustave Baumann prints on trips to New Mexico but this was my first opportunity to see his lesser-known California work.  I’ll spare you my poor snapshots when you can review the exhibit brochure here.  It was a nice surprise seeing a view of my own neighborhood in San Francisco circa 1930.  The show also includes some of his wood blocks and press (see above). 

The Baumann show is one of the three exhibits at the museum right now that includes Joseph Kleitsch’s paintings and Interstitial, a multi-artist installation of sculpture including my personal favorite, Joel Otterson’s American Portable Pottery Museum (shown above).

All three show are up until August and worth a visit for your upcoming L.A. trips.

The Arctic in LA

Lawren Harris, Lake and Mountains, 1928

Normally when the temperature dips below 50° people start to hibernate in Los Angeles, and Sunday morning it was below 40° breaking records (a temperature of 36° was recorded at USC).  It seemed the right type of day to go see some awesome and icy Canadian art.  Taking a break from holidaying it was time for a visit to one of my L.A. favorites — the Hammer Museum.  After checking in to say hello to Dr. Pozzi, it was time to see the special exhibits. 

A few years back I discovered Canada’s Group of Seven landscape painters and added a wonderful book to my personal library.  I’ve been itching to see more of the work in person.  On a chilly LA day it was time to get better acquainted with Lawren Harris.  It’s the first major exhibit of his work in the United States.  As a fan of both Rockwell Kent and Georgia O’Keeffe, Harris’s arctic landscapes and scenes of the shore of Lake Superior were naturally appealing to me.  The show at the Hammer is up until January 24, 2016.  If you don’t have a chance to get to L.A., I strongly recommend checking out the museum’s website which has done an excellent job previewing the show.  I wish more museums were this thorough. 

The day remained chilly and at lunch in Santa Monica.  Many people could be seen dressed in scarves, hats and gloves.  It was finally a day where those Uggs might make sense, might….

California Dreamin’

California Dreamin’, mixed media on canvas, 24”x24”, 2012

In the past year I have been working on a series of mixed media collages I call postcard deconstructions.  This is the latest one.  Until now I have mostly used vintage postcards from between the 1920’s and 1950’s.  This new piece is later postcards, mostly the 1950’s to 1970’s – colorful, glossy and all California.  There are approximately 1,500 little pieces in all.

California Dreamin’, (detail) mixed media on canvas, 24”x24”, 2012

Favorites at the Museum

I’ve been a regular museum visitor all my life. One of my habits is always to “visit” my favorite paintings on each visit. I can’t go into the de Young without saying hello to Elmer Bischoff’s Yellow Lampshade. I have a handful of must sees every time I pop into the de Young. I miss Charles Burchfield’s Spring Flood. They haven’t had it up since the new museum opened. If they don’t want to display it, I would gladly give it a home.

I have a few favorites at pretty much any art museum I regularly visit, even museums beyond the Bay Area. I was just down in Los Angeles at the LACMA. I took the opportunity to introduce my nephew and young cousin to a few of my friends at the museum. Thomas Hart Benton’s The Kentuckian is a perennial favorite.

If I wasn’t an artist, I’d want to be a curator. I would love an opportunity to curate some museum shows. I have a head full of ideas. Maybe one day the world will come to see Tofu’s Favorite Works and then everyone can endlessly analyze why I chose what a chose for the show. But I am getting ahead of myself, I haven’t even designed the coffee mugs for the gift shop.