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September 28–November 18, 2001 |
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The Santa Monica Museum of Art was the only West Coast venue for Freestyle,
a survey of work by twenty-eight emerging African-American artists,
organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and curated by its
Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, Thelma Golden. The
exhibition's title sprung from popular culture and the world of
hip-hop—"freestyle" refers to the mutable space where individuals improvise
music, creatively mixing on the DJ turntable or dancing in their own groove.
The exhibition demonstrated how these talented artists, most born after the
Civil Rights movement, have assimilated and reformed the discourse of "black
art" to represent the current moment. |
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September 2–September 22, 2001 |
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This exhibition brought together more than fifty posters produced by the
preeminent graphic artist Milton Glaser—from his iconic Dylan to his series
for the Palermo Opera House. One of the most influential figures in the
history of international design, Glaser has worked in a great variety of
forms, including posters, book jackets, album sleeves, CD covers, store and
restaurant designs, toy creations, magazine formats, and logotypes.
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July 28–September 2, 2001
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Renowned in the 1960s for abstract and figurative painting, for this
exhibition Pang returned from a long sojourn in Tokyo to unveil a renewed,
redefined body of work. Pang's site-specific installation, a vast, handwoven
net cast over the museum's main exhibition space, explored duality in the
medium of bamboo—at once simple and complex, flexible and strong.
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July 28–September 2, 2001 |
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Dutch artist Lara Schnitger produces large, site-specific installations
using a variety of mundane materials such as stockings and chopsticks. In
this exhibition, her sprawling, tentacular installation transformed the
Project Room into a bat cave. |
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April 14, 2001 |
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Las Vegas-based artist and ordained preacher, the Reverend Ethan Acres,
delivered his Blessing of the Arts & All Creative Endeavors and a sermon on
the Parable of Mothra. Known for his sermon/performances, this unabashed
showman combines and challenges organized religion, evangelism, and
contemporary art. The images in his work and the subjects of his sermons are
derived from popular culture; they are used to illustrate the divine in the
everyday. Though humorous, Acres's preachings are nonetheless serious calls
for passion, truth, and spiritual energy in an over-commodified and
empirical society. |
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May 25–July 8, 2001 |
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From the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, Los Angeles artist Raymond
Pettibon produced more than 100 booklets developing his image-text drawings,
which convey loose, often disjointed narratives. He self-published these
booklets as "zines"—photocopied, folded and center-stapled 8 1/2" x 11"
pamphlets issued in small editions. This exhibition featured many of these
rare works, along with original wall drawings with various newspaper and
magazine clippings attached, a selection of old and new videos, and two
recent portfolios. Curated by German curator and writer Roberto Ohrt, The
Book Show appeared previously at the Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, the
MAK in Vienna, and the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. |
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March 9–May 6, 2001 |
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Unlike her contemporaries, the Viennese Actionists, the seminal Austrian
artist VALIE EXPORT created distinctly feminist works intended to provoke
social change and to overturn prevailing attitudes towards women. Her early
performance art demanded the involvement of the audience on a visceral
level. She used her body as a medium—as a challenge to erotic hypocrisy, as
a way of perceiving and codifying information, and as a means to counter the
horrifying political realities of the past. This exhibition presented a
thirty-year survey of photographs and videos documenting VALIE EXPORT's
early performance works, digital and conceptual photography, expanded
cinema, large-scale video installations, and films. Ob/De+Con(Struction) was
organized by Elsa Longhauser for the Goldie Paley Gallery at Moore College
of Art and Design, Philadelphia.
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February 15–February 17, 2001 |
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Presented by the University of Southern California School of Art, the second
annual International Festival of Time-Based Media, exhibited new works by
artists from around the world—interactive games, websites, CD-ROMs, sound
pieces, and short films organized around the theme "The Vanishing Author?"
In the twenty-first century, new technologies have multiplied access to
authorship and reinvigorated the concept of authorship. As the author's role
is perpetually destroyed and recreated, so too are our perceptions of
"authority," "self," "meaning," "value," and "originality"—which contribute
so significantly to the determination of our future.
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December 1, 2000–January 28, 2001 |
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Using an assembly-line, performance-based painting style, Keene produced
more than 10,000 works of art for this exhibition, including benches,
lanterns, and tablecloths, as well as paintings. He also set up a studio
inside the Museum to let people view the performance of his painting. Keene
chose images of works from catalogs of Los Angeles art collections and then
duplicated them simultaneously on thirty or forty plywood boards he had set
up around the gallery. The paintings were hung throughout the Museum salon
style, then sold for prices ranging from $3 - $25. Keene compares his
paintings to souvenirs, trading cards, and music CDs: "It's art, it's cheap,
and it changes your life, but the object has no status." This was Keene's
largest show to date and his first exhibition on the West Coast.
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