| Black Belt |
||
 |
||
|
The Santa Monica Museum of Art's presentation of Black Belt offered an in-depth look at an intersection between African American and Asian American cultures from the 1970s and 1980s. The nearly fifty works in different media by nineteen contemporary American artists of diverse backgrounds interpreted political and philosophical connections among people of color, as well as explored their resonance in pop culture and urban life. Back in the day when Carl Douglas's song Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting was a hit, and Bruce Lee was making his last film Game of Death, co-starring Kareem Abdul Jabar, young people were creating the foundation for hip-hop culture with their break dancing and rhyming in the Bronx. The Asian immigration boom was changing the urban landscape of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Black Belt reflected this unique cross-cultural fascination with Bruce Lee, Kung Fu, and Eastern martial arts imagery in a wide range of works in different media. Black Belt was organized by Christine Y. Kim, The Studio Museum in Harlem. |
|
|
||
| First Annual Incognito Sale and Exhibition |
||
|
||
|
Incognito, Santa Monica Museum of Art's first annual art exhibition and sale, was the most successful benefit in the museum's sixteen year history. The line to get in began to form at 9:30 a.m.; VIP tickets sold out entirely; and when the doors opened, patrons flooded into the museum, purchasing art at an unprecedented rate. Sales continued briskly as the exhibition continued on Saturday. Incognito featured over 573 original works of art by 432 contemporary artists. The works created were in an identical 8 x 10 inch format and signed on the back. All were for sale at $250; only after purchase were artist identities revealed. See all the works in Incognito by visiting the Incognito 2004 online catalog designed by Kristin Calabrese. The next Incognito is planned for Saturday, December 10, 2005. Make sure to receive timely information about this next event by signing up on the SMMoA mailing list. |
|
|
||
| Pat O'Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain |
||
|
||
|
From September 11 through November 13, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Pat O'Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain, the first museum exhibition to provide a complete film retrospective in conjunction with a survey of the visual artworks by this important Los Angeles artist. Combining a range of media-sculpture, photography, photographic composite prints, film projection, film installation, drawing, and interactive DVD-ROM-Pat O'Neill: Views from Lookout Mountain brought to light the artist 's major works from the early 1960s to the present. Julie Lazar, director of International Contemporary Arts Network, served as guest curator. Although O'Neill's films enjoy a devoted following in the avant-garde film community, the exhibition at SMMoA located these works in a visual arts context where they can be most fully appreciated as powerful projections of temporal painting, aural composition, and visual poetry. For the majority of visitors, the exhibition was an edifying introduction to the work of an artist whose unique vision engages all the major aesthetic progressions of the post-war era, and whose techniques anticipated technological innovations before their time. In the accompanying catalog, artist Erika Suderburg sums up: "He deploys co-existing strata of obsolescence, repose, revolution, consumption, and anarchic agitation. Ultimately he engages us in seeing." |
|
|
||
| Ant Farm 1968 - 1978 |
||
|
||
|
From June 5 through August 14, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Ant Farm 1968-1978, the first major museum retrospective of the underground architecture, video, performance, and installation of Ant Farm. Committed to working outside traditional systems, the collective’s core members Doug Michels, Chip Lord, and Curtis Schreier, riffed off of, puckishly chided, and embraced the themes of the contemporary pop culture-especially cars, space exploration and the future-in a way that presaged the work of many artists and radical thinkers who came after them. Ant Farm was responsible for such iconic works as: Cadillac Ranch (1974, Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels, site-specific installation, Amarillo, Texas) - a modern Stonehenge of ten 1949 to 1964 model Cadillacs buried nose down in a row - and Media Burn (July 4, 1975, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Tom Weinberg, performance at the Cow Palace, San Francisco), where "artist-dummies" Michels and Schreier drove the Phantom Dream Car, a customized 1959 Cadillac El Dorado Biarritz convertible, through a wall of flaming televisions. They created a series of inflatables, such as the ICE-9 (1970, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez, W. Douglas Hurr, Pepper Mouser) and designed many futuristic projects, including The Dolphin Embassy (1974, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, W. Douglas Hurr). Sometimes they also had the opportunity to transform their designs into reality, as with the award-winning, ferro-cement House of the Century (1972, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Richard Jost, W. Douglas Hurr, Mojo Lake, Angleton, Texas). The exhibition included the ICE-9 inflatable, a visual timeline of the collective, blueprints, publications, drawings, collages, architectural models, illustrative video clips, and a video retrospective from the Pacific Film Archive, as well as other documentary material and ephemera. |
|
|
||
| Project Room I
|
||
|
||
|
From June 5 through August 14, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presented This Garden - making salt and evaporation drawings, a site-specific installation created by Hugh Pocock. Pocock’s work investigates the history and metaphor of human relationships with natural resources, space, time, art, and language, often representing what he terms "an expression of involvement with intense labor and the dynamics of nature." In This Garden, Pocock used water as his primary medium. Having collected 180 gallons of seawater from the Santa Monica Bay, Pocock employed solar-powered lights and fans to evaporate the seawater in a specially cast, shallow concrete pond, in order to leave behind a salt crystal residue. Throughout the exhibition, the pond was regularly harvested and refilled with seawater, augmenting the salt supply making it accessible for viewers to taste. Pocock also charted and displayed the atmospheric changes in the museum and the levels of natural evaporation of the seawater through a large-scale pencil drawing. A projection of photographs documenting the water collection process was included in the exhibition. |
|
|
||
| Project Room II
|
||
|
||
|
From June 5 through August 14, 2004, Project Room II of the Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Alex Slade: Vacant Lot, a series of photographs exploring transitory spaces in the city of Los Angeles and throughout the United States. The series is a continuum of Slade’s interests in mapping and topography that is evident throughout his work. The vacant lot is temporal real estate created by abandonment, loss, significance, and change. At first glance, Slade’s site selection appears devoid of content, yet upon closer inspection these locations are full of meaning, charting the ebb and flow of financial fortunes, shifts in population, and dynamic and ephemeral history of neighborhoods. His subjects are entropic places reflecting the natural world, built environment, and human dramas in their chaotic slides towards disorder. |
|
|
||
| Terry Allen: DUGOUT II (HOLD ON to the house) |
||
|
||
|
From February 28, 2003 through May 15, 2004, Santa Monica Museum of Art presented DUGOUT II (HOLD ON to the house), which was the most recent episode in an ongoing epic by artist, musician, and playwright, Terry Allen. DUGOUT II is a love story set in the context of 1950s America, which investigated the invention of memory through sculpture, music, film, and theater. Terry Allen describes DUGOUT II (HOLD ON to the house) as "An audio/visual investigation into the end of the world, how memory blows up and changes everything, and how atomic monsters take over the earth...a kind of Supernatural-Jazz-History-Ghost-Blood-Fiction." The exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art was presented as a larger, multi-media, collaborative project, DUGOUT, which included a complementary exhibition at L.A. Louver Gallery, a performance at L.A. Theatre Works, and a lecture at The LACMA Institute for Art and Cultures. |
|
|
||
| Project Room
|
||
|
||
|
From February 28 to May 15, 2004, the Project Room of the Santa Monica Museum of Art presented Adrian Meraz: DONOR (IN THE DRIFT, COQUET, DAB, GLACIS RELISH) TRACKING BUTCHER WRINKLE, BONESETTER (POLE POSITION ERASURE). Adrian Meraz transformed the Project Room into a paper-walled, cocoon-like environment inhabited by a series of intricate and unlikely sculptures that "gather unsequentially, emerging like the ruins of cities that have come and gone." Infused with humor and wonder, both poetic and absurd, Meraz’s multifaceted landscape included improbable architecture, wheeled rovers, barbed maces, and an army of wax-sealed barrels, all constructed of such unassuming materials as Popsicle sticks, felt, toothpicks, and plywood. The range of complex and fragile forms, as well as the memories and experiences they evoke, were reflected in Meraz’s amalgamated and fractured title. |
|
|
||
