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September 8–November 18, 2000 |
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This landmark exhibition of contemporary Chicano art from private Chicano
collections in Southern California, portrayed Chicano art and culture
through the eyes of the community of collectors who support and preserve it.
Guest curator Chon Noriega, assistant professor at UCLA, presented art that
addressed aesthetic, sociopolitical, and economic issues. With works drawn
from seven distinguished Los Angeles collections, the exhibition also
focused on the practice of collecting itself, highlighting approaches as
diverse as the range of art represented. Among the artists included were
Carlos Almaraz, Alfredo Banuelos de Haro, Marietta Bernstorff, Barbara
Carrasco, Victor Durazo, Elsa Flores, Jose Galvez, Diane Gamboa, Roberto Gil
de Montes, Yolanda Gonzalez, Salomon Huerta, Joseph Maruska, Daniel J.
Martinez, David Serrano, and John Valadez.
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June 20–August 2000 |
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This exhibition, cocurated by Bruce Hainley and Carole Ann Klonarides,
featured work exploring the use of process, widely divergent materials, and
formal concerns, as influenced by Hollywood and popular culture. Works by
Los Angeles sculptors Liz Craft, Evan Holloway, Jason Meadows, Jeff Ono,
Paul Sietsema, Torbjorn Vejvi, and others responded to Los Angeles as a
resource, a history, an ideal, a state of mind—even a negative force and
nonsite. Mise en Scène gave viewers their first opportunity to see these
local sculptures in relation to each other. Because many of the works were
recent commissions, the Santa Monica Museum of Art was their first venue of
exhibition.
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May 24–June 10, 2000
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Mounted in cooperation with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, this project
was an almost photograph-by-photograph reconstruction of the seminal 1988
ICA Philadelphia exhibition The Perfect Moment, which ignited a censorship
controversy and subsequent reexamination of First Amendment rights. Moving
beyond the sociopolitical issues that surrounded the original exhibition,
Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment enabled an informed public to
experience first-hand the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest
American photographers. |
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March 24–May 20, 2000 |
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Yoshitomo Nara is one of Japan's most recognized sculptors within a new
generation of hybrid artists including Takashi Murakami, Mariko Mori, and
Tao Chiezo. Weaned on American consumerism and daily Japanese cartoons,
these artists create works that demonstrate an ambivalent relationship with
mass culture. Nara's work combines the idea of mass consumerism of popular
culture with the simple forms and colors of traditional Japanese art
caricatures. With children and animals as perpetual motifs, his cartoon and
manga comics-inspired art takes the form of sculpture, drawings, and
painting, as well as T-shirts, watches, posters, and books. His
children—with their large heads, vacant eyes, and adult expressions—express
a unique and complex psychology in which cuteness, melancholy, and cruelty
are linked. The scale and presence of these teasingly psychological works
suggest a darker side of childhood memories even as they are pleasantly
reminiscent of a preverbal infancy. This was Nara's first exhibition in an
American museum. |
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December 17, 1999–March 4, 2000 |
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Kerry James Marshall's exhibition was a requiem for the 1960s, a decade
synonymous with the Civil Rights movement. Conceived as an installation,
Mementos featured three new paintings, two sculptural components, and a
video projection. Presenting an angelic pantheon of African-American
cultural and political figures who died between 1959 and 1970, Marshall used
the genre of history painting to reread the legacy of the Civil Rights
movement and the whole of African-American history in relation to a very
complex present. Complementing the exhibition, a day-long symposium at UCLA,
cosponsored by the Center for African American Studies and Cultural Studies
in the African Diaspora Project, addressed themes of memory and social and
cultural history in art. Mementos was organized by the Renaissance Society
at the University of Chicago.
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