| INCOGNITO: |
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Santa Monica Museum of Art hosted one of the most popular and innovative LA art events of 2005 with the Second Annual INCOGNITO art exhibition and sale. INCOGNITO featured 701 works created by 469 contemporary artists in an identical 8 x 10 inch format and signed on the back. All works were for sale at $250. Only after purchase were artist identities revealed. This year's INCOGNITO grossed over $190,000, surpassing last year's total and proving to be the most successful fundraising event in the history of SMMoA. |
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| SEMINA CULTURE: WALLACE BERMAN & HIS CIRCLE |
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A key artist of his generation, Wallace Berman (1938–1976) was an enigmatic, underground figure whose collages and assemblages articulate an important strand of dark mysticism in post-war American culture. Berman’s hand-printed, personally distributed literary journal, Semina (1955–1964) stands as an iconic document of its time. The first major museum exhibition to examine the significance of the charismatic Wallace Berman, Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle featured the complete loose-leaf run of Semina, as well as artworks, photographs, and publications by forty-nine artists that manifest the scope and interests of the new “Semina Culture.” Over seventy photographic portraits from Berman’s archive were also shown for the first time, revealing the close-knit nature of this underground community. These participants in an important emerging counterculture, the Beat movement of the 1950s and 1960s, pursued an alternative way of thinking about the purpose and formal nature of art, infusing their works with nostalgia, lyricism, feeling, and a sense of the ephemeral. They include: Robert Alexander, John Altoon, Toni Basil, Paul Beattie, Ray and Bonnie Bremser, Charles Brittin, Joan Brown, Cameron, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, Jay DeFeo, Diane DiPrima, Kirby Doyle, Bobby Driscoll, Robert Duncan, Joe Dunn, Llyn Foulkes, Loree Foxx, Ralph Gibson, Allen Ginsberg, Billy Gray, George Herms, Jack Hirschman, Dennis Hopper, Billy Jahrmarkt, Jess, Lawrence Jordan, Patricia Jordan, Bob Kaufman, Philip Lamantia, William Margolis, Michael McClure, Taylor Mead, David Meltzer, Henry Miller, Stuart Perkoff, John Reed, Arthur Richer, Rachel Rosenthal, Jack Smith, Dean Stockwell, Ben Talbert, Russel Tamblyn, Aya (Tarlow), Edmund Teske, Zack Walsh, Lew Welch, and John Wieners. For them, art was a joyful and creative expression for these iconoclasts, not a means to an art world career. Their approach to the purpose and formal nature of art and culture existed on a vastly different track from the canonical traditions of abstract expressionism, minimalism, and postmodernism. Semina Culture traveled to the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah (January 10–March 15, 2006); the Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas (April 21–July 9, 2006); the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California (October 17–December 10, 2006); and The Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, New York (January 16–March 31, 2007). |
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| Project Room I: |
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Exene Cervenka: America the Beautiful was the first comprehensive museum exhibition of journals and mixed media collages dating from 1974 through 2005 by an icon of the Los Angeles music scene and one of the founding members of the seminal Los Angeles punk group, X. A musician, poet, and visual and spoken word artist for more than thirty years, Cervenka created journals that combine rough drafts of songs and personal reflections rendered in a baroque calligraphic script, with photographs, drawings, and scraps of ephemera that she found while traveling as a musician. Similarly, the collages are created from found materials to form an interpretative composite portrait of the country she came to know through her life experiences on the road. |
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| 3 x ABSTRACTION: NEW METHODS OF DRAWING |
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3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin juxtaposed 100 rarely, if ever, seen paintings, drawings, and watercolors by these three artists of different generations. This major historical exhibition illuminated the extraordinary contributions Hilma af Klint (Sweden, 1862 - 1944), Emma Kunz (Switzerland, 1892 - 1963), and Agnes Martin (Canada, 1912 - 2004) made to abstract art. Each used distinctive formal devices - particularly line, grid, and geometry - to visualize and transform complex philosophical, scientific, and metaphysical ideas into powerful and transcendent works of art. The exhibition focused on a specific period of production within the life of each artist - af Klint’s spare and evocative compositions made between 1895 and 1920 - Kunz’s complex large-scale drawings based on mathematical geometries - and meditative early grids by Martin primarily from the 1960s when the grid was first emerging as a focus of her work. 3 x Abstraction introduced a wider public to the seminal, inspirational work af Klint and Kunz, and presented intriguing new perspectives on the oeuvre of Agnes Martin. 3 x Abstraction was organized by co-curators Catherine de Zegher, director of The Drawing Center, New York, and writer and independent curator Hendel Teicher. |
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| Project Room I: |
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This exhibition explored the work of Roger Herman, acclaimed expressionist painter, as he developed his interest in ceramic as the ground on which to explore his gestural draughtmanship. Roger Herman: Pots was the first exhibition in the United States to feature his humorous and bold work in clay that playfully referenced the history of the medium - from the traditional Japanese teapot to the Greek vase. Herman’s pots come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and finishes that reveal his commitment to extensive experimentation on the wheel and in the kiln, and are decorated with painted images derived from Manga comics, advertisements, porn magazines and films, as well as from a host of art historical sources. |
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| Project Room II: |
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For Penetrable Vessels at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, artist Jill Bonovitz used the thinnest wire to create in her words "the edges of what's not there." These intimate, ethereal, and personal vessel forms, at once intriguing and playful, reveal how the shapes between the wires are just as important as the wires themselves. Inspired by the random scribbles of her year-old grandchild and the intricate weaving of a spider’s web, Bonovitz created a body of work that both embodied and defied the vessel form. She explored a range of aesthetic interests - the process of drawing, the physicality of sculpted objects, and the translucency of materials - that have engaged her over the past twenty-five years of working in porcelain and clay. |
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| George Herms: Hot Set |
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George Herms: Hot Set featured forty-four works of sculpture, collage, and assemblage by this celebrated artist made between 1959 and 2005, selected by legendary curator Walter Hopps. Hopps, who first met Herms in 1956 one year before he opened the legendary Ferus Gallery, placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Keinholz. Included early on in the ground-breaking exhibition The Art of Assemblage at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, Herms continued to work across disciplines, using poetry, film, theatre, and assemblage as his mediums, as well as starting the LOVE Press in the early 1960s. Herms was a member of the West Coast Beat movement, and credits Wallace Berman with teaching him that any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly. This ability to reclaim, recycle, and recreate found objects remains central to Herms's work from his first "secret" show in a deserted area in Hermosa Beach to the present. Hot Set featured a range of his celebratory and elegiac work, enlivened by Hopps's lyrical and idiosyncratic installation. |
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| Project Room I
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Blue McRight's Morandi's Lawn illustrated her ecological and environmental concerns in an installation comprising 682 objects and 13 digital photographs. Each day for a year - from April 1, 2003 to April 1, 2004 - McRight collected and arranged into a still life the recyclable glass, plastic, and metal containers that she and her husband generated in their household. She digitally photographed each still life and then dismantled it. Next, she painstakingly covered the containers with artificial turf and added them to an ever-expanding floor installation - which literally grew into a huge still life that imitated both topiary and natural lawn in color texture, and scale. Although Morandi's Lawn documented McRight's own personal daily ritual, it addressed larger contemporary issues of consumerism and consumption, trash production and recycling. The title of the piece alludes to the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), who painted such simple household containers as vases, wine bottles, cups, and bowls, in an exquisite celebration of the everyday object. The installation therefore venerated and poked fun at the art historical genre of still life, while also referencing landscape and garden design. |
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| Project Room II
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Kota Ezawa's work explores the appropriation and mediation of current events and images. He translates found film, video, and photographic footage into simplified drawings and animations that reduce complex imagery to its most essential, two-dimensional elements. For his slide installation On Photography, created specifically for the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Ezawa selected twenty images representing various examples from the history of photography - from the 1860s to the present, and from the iconic to the unrecognizable, ranging in source from journalism, to performance documentation, to art photography. His choices were then manually traced, turned back into 35 mm slide format, and projected on a continuous loop. Mimicking the feel of a university slide lecture, On Photography functioned as a visual critical essay, using digital drawings instead of words to explore and reveal the history of the medium. |
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