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Mass moca map12/11/2023 The trimmed story it tells unfolds slowly - and almost surreptitiously. The second exhibition, “Long Story Short,” was organized by the museum’s Anna Katz and Paula Kroll. The show represents the MOCA debut of chief curator Clara Kim, appointed last year, along with museum colleagues Rebecca Lowery and Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo. Floor sculptures such as an oozing Lynda Benglis “blob” of poured polyurethane foam or Mike Kelley’s black funerary boxes for burial of childhood stuffed toys should be on very low pedestals to assuage security concerns, not corralled inside clumsy wire stanchions. Object labeling is down to earth and informative, but a few installation missteps have been made. aesthetic clichés like sunshine-and-noir or the Dream Factory. There’s a modest, nonhierarchical quality to the presentation, and it avoids the usual corny ruminations on L.A. In a way, that’s the ultimate subject of “Mapping an Art World,” which offers an intriguing curatorial structure for considering the post-1960s emergence of Los Angeles as a profound art center. ![]() Joe Friday - “Just the facts, ma’am” - than the extravagant portrait fictions of Rembrandt and Frida Kahlo or the intense refinement and sophistication of Don Bachardy. A kind of makeshift silent movie crossed with the materials of a school’s lecture hall, it’s more “Dragnet’s” Sgt. Each slide of a portrait bust is followed by a title card with the sitter’s name, some now famous and some obscure, plus their place of residence within L.A.’s vast suburban sprawl. ![]() (The slide projector jammed twice during my visit, as technology old or new often does.) Straightforward to the point of being business-like, the quotidian portrait drawings are not what you might call penetrating, stirring or dynamic, and they don’t come close to prompting the usual clichés about an artist revealing a subject’s deeper inner life. ![]() All are also cast on the adjacent wall by slides from an old-fashioned whirring projector, one by one. Each of those gets a gallery where very different works by very different artists cohabit.Īn anticipation of that inevitable development flickers in the 1976 Lamelas installation.įorty drawings are displayed in an organized grid, eight across and five down, like a formal genealogy or maybe a corporate flow chart. Those relationships include having once had in common a studio neighborhood (the Westside), gallery representation (Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park), a private collection (Panza), a growing public collection (the Lannan Foundation), school mates and faculty (at CalArts) and more. “Mapping” takes an unusual but engaging route, using social relationships among artists, rather than styles or subjects found in their art. MOCA has nearly 7,000 works in its collection, and questions multiply around how to organize selections for their display. The two will fill all its galleries until spring. The result is one fulcrum for “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s,” a show that is one of two rewarding current exhibitions drawn from the celebrated permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art. So, once he settled in, he began to invite artists to his Hollywood studio to sit for a portrait drawing, expanding his pool of new acquaintances by word-of-mouth.Īrt was the mechanism to build a web of relationships. Martin’s School of Art, he knew virtually no one in Southern California. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, and educated there at the National Academy of Fine Arts and in London at St. ![]() In 1976, when he was 30, David Lamelas moved to Los Angeles.
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