Museums

It’s officially “Pacific Standard Time”

Pacific Standard Time starts this week in earnest, examining L.A.’s role in the postwar arts scene in venues as vaunted as the Getty Center and as modest as a Westside school for the arts.

Although choice sneak previews have been open for a few weeks at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at smaller museums, this weekend marks the official opening of the massive arts initiative centered on Southern California. Whether you love art or just love L.A., the range of shows opening this week should, like the city itself, have a little something for everyone.

Highlights include the first major study of modern California design at LACMA, with an accompanying side exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum honing in on the work and philosophy of Charles and Ray Eames. The LACMA show, California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” will start with the origins of California modernism in the 1930s and include, along with important work by Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, a vintage Airstream Clipper and a reconstruction of the Eames’ living room, which was dismantled piece by piece and moved to the museum from the Eames House in Pacific Palisades.

Another must-see show will be at the Getty Center, where Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Paintings and Sculpture will look at those two art forms in Southern California from the 1940s until the 1970s. The exhibition, featuring some 50 important L.A. artists, is in some ways the ground zero for the Pacific Standard Time initiative, which was launched as a joint initiative of the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Foundation.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles will also be in on the PST action, with a show that highlights its role as the city’s contemporary art venue before its art exhibitions were moved to LACMA in the mid-1960s. Among the featured artists will be John Baldessari, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha.

The Hammer Museum will examine L.A.’s African American visual artists, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives will look at the gay and lesbian art scene here and a show at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary will show how L.A. art reflected the foment of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Era.

Meanwhile, a small show at the Sam Francis Gallery at the Crossroads School will explore the role of women art dealers in L.A. in the 1960s and 1970s.

And that’s only a taste of PST’s opening week of shows, talks and happenings. For a more complete calendar, click here, and for information on the initiative, click here.

Posted 9/26/11

Dinosaurs roar back to life at exhibit

Their body temperatures were almost the same as a human’s. Some had plumage and the ability to make noises. Some had footprints and tail shapes about which we were wrong until recently.

We’re fairly sure about what killed them (fallout from a meteor crash) and what they evolved into. (Hint: It has feathers).  But much of their 230 million years on the planet remains a mystery.

You could fill an encyclopedia with what scientists are still discovering about dinosaurs. But for the past several years, Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, has had something even bigger in mind.

This month, a newly renovated, 14,000-square-foot Dinosaur Hall will open, doubling the dinosaur display space at the museum. The permanent exhibition, which opens to members July 10 and to the general public July 16, will feature some 20 new major mountings from the museum’s expanded collection—from an extraordinary trio of young Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons to the smallest dinosaur ever discovered in North America. It also will reflect the ways in which technology has revolutionized paleontological research.

“This is not a chronological journey through time, and this is not setting animals in dioramas,” says Chiappe, who led much of the fieldwork responsible for the exhibit and curated it as an invitation to visitors to regard the towering fossils with a scientific eye.  

“This is, ‘How do we know what we know? How do we reconstruct the life and, in the end, the death of these animals?’ This is an up-to-date, state-of-the-art understanding of the lives of the dinosaurs.”

In other words, this is not your father’s dinosaur museum. The new Dinosaur Hall will fill two rooms with nearly 300 specimens collected over nearly a century, with at least a third of the major pieces never before having been shown to the general public.

Displays will include background on how technological advances such as CT scans and particle accelerators have, for example, helped scientists understand the internal organs of dinosaurs and deduce the original colors of their skin and feathers. Many of the pieces have yielded important new discoveries and resulted in published research.

“Some amazing things were unearthed in the course of doing this hall,” says John A. Long, vice president of research and collections at the museum, which operates not just as a showcase, but also as a major research institution.

And, Long adds, because of improvements in conservation methods, “you can see the bones better—they’re better prepared.”  

Among the showpieces will be the dramatic grouping of young T. rex skeletons—baby, early adolescent and teenager—that, taken together, make up the world’s only depiction of the famous carnivore’s growth pattern.

Also featured will be one of the most anatomically accurate depictions to date of the massive Triceratops, culled from several finds that included a completely articulated set of front leg, or “arm”, bones—a rarity that has contributed a fresh understanding of how the massive creature walked and lived.

Both the Triceratops bones and the oldest T. rex—a gangly, 33½-foot-tall teenager nicknamed “Thomas” that boasts one of the most complete skeletons in existence—were collected by Chiappe and his crews during field work in Wyoming and Montana. But the displays also include the museum’s very first specimen (a lower jaw from a Canadian duck-billed dinosaur that was collected in 1919), and a number of significant finds collected for the museum by the late Harley Garbani, a self-taught fossil hunter from Hemet who died at 88 in April.

 ”He toured the galleries a couple of months ago, but it would have been wonderful if he could have been around for the opening,” Chiappe says wistfully.

Additionally, there are killer sea reptiles known as Mosasaurs, who, upon closer inspection by Chiappe and his colleagues were recently found to have had flukes, not long, tapering tails as scientists once imagined. Chiappe and Long say the information was there all along, but no one noticed it because the fossils had been in storage since they were found in Kansas and acquired during the 1960s.

“We have one of the best specimens in the world,” Long says, “and it had been locked up until we dusted it off and prepared it for this gallery. In doing so, we found skin and pigments and bronchial tubes and a wealth of new information, including a big tail fluke, like a tuna or a shark, that changes what we know about the way they swam and hunted.” (Stay tuned for further developments on this front. Museum sources say another blockbuster announcement about this part of the exhibit could come within the next few weeks.)

The Dinosaur Hall is part of an ambitious plan to expand and modernize the Natural History Museum, which celebrates its centennial in 2013. A groundbreaking “Age of Mammals” exhibition opened last year; a new California history hall and several other permanent exhibitions, including a 63-foot-long fin whale specimen, are anticipated before the end of next year.

Chiappe, an internationally renowned paleontologist who was recruited 12 years ago from New York’s American Museum of Natural History to supervise Los Angeles’ dinosaur collection, says the permanent exhibit had been under consideration almost from the moment of his arrival, “but we’ve worked intensively in the last five or six years.”

A native of Argentina, Chiappe says he grew up as “a city boy” in Buenos Aires, but learned from his grandfather to love the outdoors.

“We’d go hunting and fishing,” he recalls. “For a while, I wanted to be a biologist, and I went to university with that in mind. But then I met a classmate who was into paleontology, and we started going out on weekends, collecting Ice Age fossils, like saber-toothed cats and mastodons, amazing animals that don’t exist anymore. I thought it was incredibly cool.”

Chiappe has since done extensive fieldwork and research, particularly into the evolutionary links between dinosaurs and their modern counterparts, birds. The Dinosaur Hall also will address those connections.

“We will have a taxidermy pelican in a glass case, and a swan, an ostrich and a pelican skeleton,” he says. We will have a mural featuring emus, and we’ll talk about hummingbirds as dinosaurs—the idea that dinosaurs are in your backyard, and if you want to see one today, they’re right outside their window. You only need to look.”

Chiappe’s favorite displays? Well, he says, his favorite dinosaur is T. rex, and his 4 1/2-year-old son’s is Triceratops. But No. 1 on his Dinosaur Hall hit parade is the “Fossil Wall,” a 43-foot display case with nearly 100 specimens, from dinosaur bones and droppings to dinosaur eggs and skin.

“It’s beautiful from an aesthetic point of view,” he says, “and it expresses the wealth of our collection—it’s really an art installation using dinosaur body parts.”

What does he hope the public will glean from the museum’s scientific take on his favorite subject?

“I’d like people to understand that they were living animals,” he says. “We know them as skeletons. We see their bones in museums. But they were alive once. They suffered and had illnesses and diseases, and found mates and reproduced and did everything we associate with living animals, whether they are our pets or ourselves.”

Long, a fellow paleontologist who came to the museum two years ago from Australia, calls the new Dinosaur Hall “one of the most exciting dinosaur exhibits in the world,” and says it has been “a dream come true to be part of a team presenting a gallery like this.”

But, he adds, “this really is Luis’ baby.”

“It’s obviously once in a lifetime that a curator is essentially setting the course on the steering wheel for a major exhibit like this,” agrees Chiappe. “I know I won’t have another opportunity like this.”

Posted 7/7/11

 

Tim Burton’s art—and artists—at LACMA

If you can’t wait for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s upcoming Tim Burton retrospective, just remember: Before there was “Edward Scissorhands” or “The Nightmare Before Christmas“, there was the French symbolist Odilon Redon.

Redon may not be as familiar as the director whose show opens May 29 at LACMA. But a special parallel exhibition there opening April 16 will confirm the suspicions of any art lover who ever saw a connection between the two. Entitled “Burton Selects,” the show was guest curated by Burton himself from the museum’s permanent collection and offers a glimpse of the inspiration behind his goth-whimsical point of view.

“It’s art that Tim Burton responds to visually,” says Britt Salvesen, the LACMA curator who is organizing both “Burton Selects” and Burton’s much larger main show, which drew record crowds when it opened last year at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Running through November 13 at LACMA’s Rifkind Gallery, the sidebar show will feature 38 prints and drawings picked by Burton from a long list of art already housed at LACMA. (Check out a gallery of Burton’s art, and some of his art selections, below.)

“It’s an eclectic range of things,” Salvesen says. “You can see motifs—skeletons, figures transforming from one thing into another—that transition into his own work.”

Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters will be there, Salvesen says, as will important pieces from the 1920s by German artists Otto Dix and George Grosz. Burton made special mention, she says, of Redon’s “The Eye”, “Like A Strange Balloon”, “Mounts Toward Infinity”, which Salvesen calls “a great image,” and the museum was glad to supply it. More than 25 artists are represented, she adds, ranging from a huge poster for the 1931 Fritz Lang thriller “M” to tiny, 4-inch-tall caricatures by the 17th century baroque printmaker Jacques Callot.

“He seemed to be drawn most to work from the late 19th and early 20th century, which wasn’t entirely surprising. I knew he had an affinity for German Expressionism, of which LACMA has one of the world’s best collections,” Salvesen says.

Although the Burton retrospective, which features more than 700 pieces of his own art, has already traveled to Melbourne and Toronto, “Burton Selects” is unique to LACMA, Salvesen added. “We’re the only venue that’s an encyclopedic museum, rather than just a museum of modern art or the moving image.”

The show also will help bridge the gap between the fine art more commonly associated with institutions like LACMA and the work of someone like Burton, whose professional training was as an animator at CalArts and who is perceived more as a purveyor of popular culture.  “This is really a way to tie him into the broader museum context,” Salvesen says.

Burton is among an increasing number of Hollywood figures whose art has recently crossed over into museums, which have benefitted from the chance to attract more mainstream art lovers, but faced questions about the potential for the artist’s celebrity to trump the importance of the art works.

Last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art featured a survey of Dennis Hopper’s photography and paintings curated by the painter-director Julian Schnabel, and the Max Ernst Museum in Germany presented 150 paintings, drawings and lithographs by the director David Lynch.

Burton’s May show will feature more than 700 individual works from Burton’s own archives and those of his collaborators, including paintings, photographs, film and video. Running through Halloween at LACMA’s new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, it will include a giant topiary deer from the 1990 film “Edward Scissorhands”, a 21-foot-tall creature called “Balloon Boy” and a special room with a yet-to-be-announced installation by Burton.

Reviews of the New York show complained about the cramped quarters at MOMA. But LACMA is expected to easily accommodate its three sections—“Surviving Burbank,” “Beautifying Burbank” and “Beyond Burbank”—which were named for the community where Burton grew up.

LACMA also will present screenings of all Burton’s feature films in its Bing Theater during the run of the exhibition. And the director is expected to make an appearance, though it will be brief because Burton still has his day job: He’ll be shooting a new film version of “Dark Shadows“, the gothic soap from the 1970s.

Salvesen says the show “could be loosely compared to an exhibition we did at LACMA about the films of Salvador Dali—Dali did come to Hollywood for an intriguing period—and that project sort of gave us some experience with this kind of show. We’ll be looking at similar projects in the future. One in the works for 2013 is the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter. It’ll be a little bit different from Tim Burton, but it will bring film and experimentation into our galleries.”

Tickets to the main show go on sale May 2, but LACMA members get priority ticketing and admission, and can make reservations starting March 30. The museum also is offering new members two free tickets if they join today.

Here’s a gallery of Tim Burton’s art and some of his LACMA picks:

Posted 3/22/11

Film at LACMA ready for its close-up

It’s been a real nail-biter for fans of LACMA’s beleaguered classic film program, but it looks like this saga may have a Hollywood ending after all.

Not the cavalry, but Film Independent and the New York Times are riding to the rescue, and in true cliffhanger fashion, just in the nick of time.

This could be the start of a beautiful friendship, with Film Independent handling the film programming side of things and the New York Times underwriting the effort. The new arrangement comes as the museum’s film program has struggled in recent years to find its financial footing and build an audience.

Both organizations bring a lot to the table. L.A.-based Film Independent is the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. LACMA’s tapping the outfit for its programming and curatorial expertise, its marketing and audience-building acumen, and its ties to prominent cutting-edge filmmakers (Film Independent’s president is Bill Condon, director of “Gods and Monsters” and “Kinsey;” its board members include actors Laura Dern, Forest Whitaker and Don Cheadle.)

Plans call for Film Independent’s programming department and a new lead programmer, yet to be named, to work with LACMA’s director and curatorial staff to assemble film series that both showcase artistic achievement and contribute to the cultural conversation about movies.

And, as the sole presenting sponsor of LACMA’s new Film Series, the New York Times will be bringing the national newspaper’s heft and prestige to the project while increasing the paper’s visibility in the world’s film capital.

Speaking by phone from London, Michael Govan, LACMA’s chief executive, explained that the Film Independent-New York Times partnership will be starting out as a one-year commitment, but that Film Independent already is busy developing a 3-to-5-year plan. “It’s been happening pretty quickly,” Govan said. “We’d been doing our analysis and looking at what we should be doing moving into the future. We’d talked to Film Independent early in the beginning, and lately we kind of circled around again and decided they were the perfect choice.”

Govan said the arrangement is “open-ended.” “The idea is to grow the program,” he said, adding that the New York Times has signaled its interest in expanding its initial first-year commitment into a longer relationship.

LACMA’s new partnership is effective immediately. Look for some new programming in September, set to include a wide variety of offerings including dramatic features and documentaries; rarities from the archives; themed series showcasing particular artists; conversations with filmmakers; international showcases; family films; and special guest-curated programs. LACMA is also laying plans for monthly post-screening receptions to create a salon-like setting in which aficionados, artists and the general public can mix and mingle.

LACMA’s current consulting curator in the Film Department, Ian Birnie, is moving on, but patrons will soon enjoy his final series for LACMA, a Tim Burton summer film festival offered in conjunction with a major exhibition and retrospective of Burton’s dark and droll art, sculpture and production design work that opens May 29.

The museum’s popular Tuesday film matinees and individual film programs keyed to special exhibitions will continue.

The new partnership comes as LACMA prepares to host an expanded version of a traveling exhibition and film festival, currently showing in Paris at the Cinémathèque Français, featuring the works of Stanley Kubrick, whose works ranging from “Dr. Strangelove” to “A Clockwork Orange” are widely considered among the most influential in the history of cinema.

LACMA’s longer-range film programming plans are gradually coming into focus. Govan’s goal is to develop “a larger footprint for film” at the museum, in which screenings and exhibitions are at the center of a rotating galaxy of related curatorial, scholarly and social activities.

The new venture situates LACMA in the heart of L.A.’s cultural scene, but as part of an ensemble, not as a soloist. “We’ve been thinking about it a lot, that as times have gotten tougher, non-profit organizations should be doing more collaboration, “ Govan said, calling it “ a viable and exciting strategy in a time when resources for the arts are shrinking.”

Posted 4/7/11

Calling all junior nature lovers

Will kids go wild for a machine that mimics the mouth of a pill bug? How durable should a soil sifter be if you want it to last for more than a field trip or two? Will people examine a compost pile without an invitation?

Inquiring minds at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County want to know.

In less than a month, the museum’s wildly popular Butterfly Pavilion will open for the spring and summer. In past years, the action has all been inside, in the fluttering realm of some 55 species of moths and butterflies.

But this April 10 when the Pavilion opens, the creatures with wings won’t be the only ones under observation. In an effort to perfect displays planned for the new North Campus gardens that will open in 2013 at the museum, an assortment of prototype gadgets and interactive science exhibits will be tested throughout the summer in the outdoor space around the greenhouse-like structure.

And museum workers are looking to visitors, young and old, for help.

“We’ll be making observations on how people use these interactive exhibits,” says Lila Higgins, the museum’s manager of citizen science and live animals. “We’ll be talking to visitors, listening to their feedback.”

New displays will be set up, one or two at a time, to see how visitors use them and to pinpoint aspects that need tweaking. Pint-sized focus group (aka kids) are especially invited to weigh in.

Museum officials hope the new garden—part of a sweeping renovation that began last year with the “Age of Mammals” exhibition and that this summer will double the museum’s dinosaur exhibits with a new Dinosaur Hall—will teach visitors more about Southern California’s natural environment and give the museum experience a novel outdoor component. Proposed areas include a Home Garden with vegetables and fruit, an Urban Wilderness featuring many native California flora and fauna and a “Get Dirty Zone” where kids can, for example, play in a dirt pile.

Interactivity, however, is considered to be key, and museum staffers have spent months brainstorming ideas for displays, Higgins says.

“I personally love looking through compost piles and finding little beetles and grubs in there,” she says, “but will other people want to do that?

Ideas that have made it to the prototype stage include a butterfly counter, a periscope that will give children a birds-eye view of the landscape, a gizmo that will let kids sift soil and—dear to Higgins’ heart—a heart machine that will demonstrate how pill bugs break down leaves to help create compost.

“Everybody knows that worms aerate the soil, but not everyone knows what pill bugs do,” says Higgins. “So we were all around the table, with ideas flying around, and we knew we were going to have this Get Dirty Zone, and so we started talking about what pill bugs do. Well, they shred leaves. So what if a kid could have the chance to be like a pill bug? Maybe turn a crank and see that a pill bug’s mouth is like a leaf shredder?”

Within a few months, they had a prototype from Cinnabar California Inc, the Los Angeles firm that designed and built the Age of Mammals exhibit. Devised so that children as young as 5 can access it, it’s a metal mechanism in a wooden box that demonstrates the mechanics of the bug’s mouth.

“I don’t know if I’ve seen anything like it anywhere in the world,” says Higgins. “Maybe it’s a bit wacky, but the first time I saw the mock-up—well, when I see a kid use it, I’m going to be so excited.”

Posted 3/22/11

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