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The Los Angeles County Museum Of Art-LACMA

4/1/2018

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA, is the largest art museum in the Western United States.  LACMA boasts a permanent collection of over 130,000 pieces of art.  There are various buildings to explore as well as outdoor areas with sculpture.  It is located adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits, so you can perhaps schedule a visit to both for the same day.  It's also a block away from the Peterson Automotive Museum.

At the time of my visit, a number of exhibitions were turning over, so I was only able to see a small sampling of what LACMA has to offer.  For visitors information, please check their website:  ​www.lacma.org/.
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Here's a photo of me at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in front of Chris Burden's sculpture, "Urban Light" installed in 2008.  Burden restored over 200 cast-iron streetlamps to create this work of art.  Burden was fascinated with urban life and how streetlamps are one of the fundamental building blocks of an urban metropolis.  I found it interesting that the streetlamps were recently converted to LEDs, reducing the installations's annual energy consumption by 90%.  The conversion to LEDs was funded by the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation this year.  Chris Burden was commissioned by Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum to create a similarly themed sculpture.  You can see it by CLICKING HERE in an older blog article about the Rose Art Museum.
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Chis Burden's "Metropolis II" depicts an urban landscape.  Burden created "Metropolis I" seven years before "Metropolis II".  The earlier work featured eighty Hot Wheels cars zooming around a model city.  This work is much larger and includes 1,100 custom designed cars, 18 highways, and a vast array of buildings and structures. The artwork runs on select days and times, so plan ahead!
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Jeff Koon's, "Balloon Monkey (Orange)", Mirror-Polished Stainless Steel with Transparent Color Coating, 2006-13. This is one of five unique versions.
Richard Serra's "Band" is a massive sculpture that fills a huge exhibition hall from top to bottom, from front to back.  The sculpture took two and a half years to develop.  Made from over 200 tons of steel, it measures 12 feet high and over 70 feet in length.  
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Below are two views of the same sculpture, titled "Phoenix" by Alexander Liberman, created in 1974-75.  I love how a different view of this sculpture creates an entirely new image, a new feeling, a new perspective.  
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"Levitated Mass" (Shown below) was conceived by artist, Michael Heizer, in 1969, but only realized in 2012.   "Levitated Mass" is a 456-foot-long concrete pathway, over which sits a 340-ton granite boulder. As you walk down the pathway, it descends to fifteen feet in depth, directly underneath the massive boulder before ascending back up.
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Below are two views of the same Alexander Calder sculpture created in 1964 titled, "Three Quintains (Hello Girls)."  It is made from sheet metal and paint with motor.  To me, it appeared to be moved by the wind, but apparently it has a motor that moves the mobile sculpture.  
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Visit to the New Museum in New York City

1/3/2017

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I ended the year 2016 with a visit to New York City and decided to explore a few museums.  This was my first visit to the New Museum, which is located at 235 Bowery (on the Lower East Side).  If you're in SoHo or Little Italy, it's a short walk to the Museum.  It's great to note that kids under 18 are always admitted free of charge.  I'll write about some other great art museum visits in the coming days!

The New Museum is New York City's only Contemporary Art Museum.  I learned that the New Museum building was designed by Tokyo-based architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA.  For more information about the building and the wonderful architetural design, visit: http://www.newmuseum.org/building
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The main exhibit during my visit was entitled "Pixel Forest," which is the first New York survey of the Swiss artist, Pipilotti Rist.  The exhibit opened in October 2016 and is only on view through January 15, 2017.  Pipilotti Rist is a pioneer of video art installations that blend visual displays with sound and immerse the viewer in a completely new environment from the moment the museum's elevator doors open!  The exhibit takes up almost the entire museum's exhibition space on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Floors of the museum and includes work from the artist’s entire career.  ​

​I really enjoyed walking though "Administrating Eternity" which featured video projections on numbers sheets of transparent fabric suspended from the ceiling.  Walking through the exhibit, you feel immersed and even part of the experience.  You see other people, their shadows, seeing parts of the video and missing segments of others, fabric moving with the breeze as you walk by, etc.  

One of her pieces included a chandelier made from undergarments.  
Another unique and very cool installation was "Pixelwald" and comprises 3,000 LED lights that are suspended from the ceiling and change colors over time.  I loved the whole experience walking through, hearing the sounds the artist chose, looking at the uniquely-designed shapes of the lights.  Every one was different and beautiful.  For all of Pipilotti Rist’s pieces, the sounds of heartbeats, forest sounds, and oceansounds almost put you in a trance.  If you visit the exhibit, take some time to sit, and experience some of the videos, which are quite fascinating and visually esoteric.  Some of the footage was even filmed underwater.  I've included some photos of the exhibit below.

​I should also mention Chris Burden's "Ghost Ship" that was part of his exhibit at the Museum in 2013.  The ship was conceived to sail autonomously and unmanned off the coast of Scotland.  In 2005, the "Ghost Ship" did, in fact, sail 400 miles!  It remains on the facade of the museum's exterior as a tribute to his legacy.  You can see a photo of the ship in the photo at the start of the blog article.   It's quite something to see and represents some of his work other than the permanent installation at Brandeis University in front of the Rose Art Museum and at LACMA.  


For more information about the New Museum, check out their website:  www.newmuseum.org.
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PS: If you liked this article, you might like these other articles on my artistic travels:
Kennebunkport, Maine
Los Angeles, California
New York City
New York City Street Art
Napa Valley, California
Park City, Utah
Barcelona, Spain
Caribbean Art
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Visiting Two Great Art Institutions in Greater Boston

6/16/2016

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This past week I had the pleasure of visiting two of my favorite Art Museums in the Boston area.  What I love about art museums is the special combination of new temporary exhibitions and spectacular permanent collections. 

The Rose Art Museum
The first museum I’ll write about is the Rose Art Museum, located in Waltham, Massachusetts.  On a personal note, the Rose Art Museum is special to me because it is part of Brandeis University, my alma mater.  As part of my art education at Brandeis university, I had the unique opportunity to tour the Rose’s amazing permanent collection—however, not exhibited on the walls of the museum, but rather in the museum’s storage vault.  In the mid-1990s, I saw incredible works from the collection from Roy Lichtenstein to Andy Warhol to Willem de Kooning to Jasper Johns.  With over 8,000 works of art, mostly from American Artists from the 1960s and 1970s, the Rose Art Museum is one of the leading art museums in the world.  Use the following link to see the digital collection:  http://rosecollection.brandeis.edu/
 
This week the Rose Art Museum was exhibiting a temporary retrospective exhibit on the artist Rosalyn Drexler. The exhibit, “Rosalyn Drexler:  Who does She Think She Is?” recently closed, but I believe it is traveling to other museums in the coming months.
It was very exciting to look at the career of an artist from the 1960s; Drexler’s work was really relevant at that time in history.  She was part of the pop art movement, knew Andy Warhol, and although her work is really relevant, for various reasons, she wasn’t a central figure in the art world at that time. Walking around the museum and looking at her artwork was really fascinating.  The themes of the show explored issues of love and violence and her interest in pop media, film posters, magazines, etc.  There were also depictions of violence towards women, which she picked out from the images in the mass media and used them as her subject matter.  She’s telling us that this is what is in our mass media and we should be thinking about it.  Some of her artwork feels very “Hollywood.” 
 
The one thing that was very exciting to see in her artwork is how you get to understand and experience her creative process.  For example, Andy Warhol literally took images from mass media, made a screen print of it and used it as his own on his canvas.  And pop artist Roy Lichtenstein often took an image, typically from a cartoon or comic book, and projected it on his canvas and then hand painted what it looked like. Rosalyn Drexler would do something in between, where she would find an image from the mass media and she would use a mimeograph machine (an early photocopier) to enlarge it and paste those enlargements directly on the canvas and painting right over it.  On a number of the paintings, if you looked closely, you could see this collage'd element.  She is using found material directly on the works.  The exhibit also featured from the original source material of the mass media materials she used for her artwork. ​​
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Also on permanent view just outside the museum is Chris Burden’s “Light of Reason” sculpture shown here, which was specifically commissioned for the Rose Art Museum and Brandeis University.  I had the pleasure of attending the dedication ceremony in 2014.  A similar work of his also featuring found Los Angeles street lamps can be seen at the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
http://www.brandeis.edu/rose/
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It was wonderful to see this retrospective exhibit.  Seeing all of an artist’s work together sheds new light on how significant her work was at the time.

​I also enjoyed a new permanent exhibit that was commissioned from the artist Mark Dion.  He turned a small space in the museum into an exhibit called “The Undisciplined Collector” and is staged as if it were a collector’s home office from 1961, the year of the Rose Art Museum’s founding.  The furniture is from that era and a record player was even playing in the background.  Works from the Rose’s permanent collection from 1961 were hanging on the wall.  In the drawers were prints and photographs from early exhibitions at the Rose.  It just opened this past fall and the room will remain on permanent view. 
The Museum of Fine Arts Boston
The following day I had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, which houses one of the world’s best and diverse collections of fine art including contemporary art, art of Asia, Oceana, Africa, Europe the Americas, art of the ancient world, and jewelry, musical instruments, prints, drawings, and photographs.  Although I didn’t get to see everything in the museum, I was able to see some of my favorite works of art again as well as see some new things and very cool new temporary exhibits.
 
And while I’m more of a contemporary and modern art kind of guy, I was particularly impressed with the story behind a 13-foot-tall statue of a classical sculpture of Juno.  The Roman marble lady is the largest Classical sculpture in any museum in the United States.  But perhaps even more fascinating was where the statue was found; It was found in the backyard of a Brookline, Massachusetts home (a suburb of Boston).  The statue that is dated to about the year 1633 was purchased at the end of the 19th Century in Rome and brought to Brookline, Massachusetts to be placed as part of a formal garden.
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I also encountered an amazing Vincent Van Gogh painting, called “Ravine,” painted in 1889, one year before his passing in 1890. The painting, pictured here along with a close up, is amazing!  From afar, the colors blend together to form a visual picture of a spectacular and breathtaking ravine in France, near the town of Saint Remy.  But as you draw closer to the painting, you see individual brushstrokes, globs of paint on top of paint, on top of even more paint.  The texture and thickness is very cool.  And yet, up close, you can’t even tell what the painting’s subject is at all.  Up close, it simply looks like brushstrokes of color in a random, haphazard fashion.  So what I love about this painting, is that the beauty of this painting is its uniqueness, partly because of this magical illusion; that when seeing the painting up close, we’re being tricked to think these brushstrokes don’t have meaning, when in fact they most certainly do.
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Two works that I loved seeing were Frank Stella’s 1966 painting, “Cinema de Pepsi” and Ellsworth Kelly’s 1968 huge, uniquely shaped painting, “Blue Green Yellow Orange Red”.  These two artists used color in fascinating ways, which I really love and admire. ​
Another American artist, named Spencer Finch, exhibited a spectacular work of art using florescent light fixtures and filters to create his 2014 work entitled, “Shield of Achilles (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02).  Finch’s work observes colors of a given landscape at a precise day and time; This work is arranged in the shape of a shield, inspired by Homer’s Illiad.  
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The Danish artist, Jeppe Hein’s work entitled “PLEASE…” is a neon light installation from 2008.  Hein is fascinated with the relationship between the viewer and his artwork and the art really isn’t complete without the viewer’s participation.  I really can relate with Jeppe Hein and his work because some of my artwork also has a similar element to it.  My paintings entitled “Close Your Eyes” and “You Have To Read This” come to mind when thinking about Hein’s work.  With “Close Your Eyes” I’m trying to convey to viewers a bit of edginess or something to make you think twice about what you are seeing.  I really enjoy the irony of creating art that is visual, and then the message of the painting instructs you not to look at it.  “Close Your Eyes” was selected in the prestigious Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts Annual Juried Art Exhibit a few years ago.  The six works of art are pictured here.  http://www.jeppehein.net/
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Throughout the museum (and around the Museum and even in Faneuil Hall in Boston) is the Megacities Asia exhibit, which runs until July 17, 2016.  Megacities are cities with populations of more than ten million. These megacities are increasing in numbers and changes the lives of so many people.  I was really impressed with the works of the artists Ai Weiwei and Choi Jeong Hwa.  Choi Jeong Hwa’s “Breathing Flower” located just outside the museum was very moving. http://aiweiwei.com/
  http://choijeonghwa.com/
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And lastly, the temporary exhibit called “#techstyle” was really quite amazing to see.  It’s on view through July 10, 2016, so be sure to get to the MFA soon!  The exhibit shows how emerging technologies are shaping fashion design now and in the future.  The exhibit highlighted 3d printed shoes (shown here), electronics, lights, lasers, etc.  Here is a photo of a dress made with a programmable LED display with changing patterns and colors.
 
For more information, go to www.mfa.org
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