LACMA "When Paradise Arrived" by Enrique Chagoya on
display at the "Made in California" exhibit at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art.
By Carolyn Brown
Daily Bruin Contributor
Any doubt about California’s status as the home of
America’s cultural heartbeat will be proven otherwise via a
look at its historical, artistic, literary, musical, political and
cultural movements from the past 100 years.
“Made in California, Art, Image, and Identity,
1900-2000,” an exhibit now on display at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, is a brilliantly put-together collection of
800 works of art from a wide range of media, including painting,
sculpture, photography, graphic art, decorative art, costume and
video.
Included in the exhibit are more than 400 cultural documents,
such as tourist brochures, rock music posters, labor pamphlets and
documentary photographs. There are also 16 specially commissioned
film and multimedia areas, two music listening stations, and three
mural reconstructions.
Together, these wide-ranging works create an image of what
California was like in the past and what it has contributed to
American culture.
“Made in California” is divided into five sections,
each displaying the state’s artistic and cultural
contributions from different 20-year periods, starting in 1900.
Each section begins with an easy-to-follow narrative which
describes the historical underpinnings and significant events of
each era.
 LACMA “Surfer” by Phil Dike is currently on
display at LACMA’s “Made in California” exhibit,
which looks at art from the Golden State. LACMA director Andrea
Rich indicated in her opening remarks at a press conference that
the exhibit attempts to answer two fundamental questions.
“Whose California are we talking about?” she
said. “And which California are we talking
about?”
Section one, covering the years between 1900 to 1920, focuses on
the mythology of California as a white middle-class paradise. It
begins with travel posters of sunny beaches and palm trees, which
promoted the utopian view of California and attempted to attract
potential residents.
Visual art of that period was mostly in the form of landscapes
done by Californians of local attractions from Halfdome in Yosemite
to the Southern California desert. These are breathtaking in their
scope and their rendering of the sunlight that drenches the
California geography. Anyone looking at these paintings in the year
1910 would have been instantly enthralled with the ideal that was
California.
Section two, which contains art works from 1920 to 1940, uses a
broader range of artistic forms that appear in stark contrast to
the emphasis on paintings and printed posters from section one.
In this portion, rooms are on display displaying the simple,
clean architecture and furniture designs that became known as the
California style in the first half of the 20th century.
Photography takes center stage during this period, from Dorothea
Lange’s black and white photos of migrant workers and Dust
Bowl refugees, to the sophisticated motion pictures that were first
and foremost a Californian art form.
Section two also utilizes photography and written material to
depict the socialist and labor movements that shaped California, as
well as to demonstrate the increasing visibility of
California’s Latino population.
Section three presents works that are illustrative of the
expansion of industry that accompanied World War II.
California’s citizens turned inward, as did the rest of the
country, to help contribute to the war effort.
This portion relies on news clips and photography to illustrate
the expansion of the oil industry and of manufacturing in
California, the rapid urbanization of the state, and the dark side
of the Japanese internment camps throughout California.Â
The visual art of this period shows the abstract art style that
was taking hold around the world, but the bold colors and the
subject matter make the works something that could only be made in
California.
Visual arts such as these are supplemented more and more heavily
with literature, music, collage and multimedia works as the exhibit
progresses into the more contemporary sections three and four.
Section three focuses on the years 1940 to 1960. It exhibits the
arts and influences of the Latino and Asian populations against the
backdrop of the white suburbanization of the 1950s. The museum
includes innovations in architecture and furniture design, along
with the influence and evolution of television as an art form.
This section of the exhibit contains an architectural rendering
of the Brady House, which manages to come off as the original home
before a closer examination proves it to simply be a drawing.
Section four, with art from 1960 to 1980, changes moods, taking
on the power of the counter-culture movement. Included is
“Summer of Love in San Francisco,” a multimedia show
combining slides, film and music. There is also a collage of
photographs, printed clippings, and bits of texts from the beat
movement that started in New York and eventually found its voice in
California.
A range of avant-garde sculptures and prints using unexpected
shapes and collages of random objects completes section four. One
outstanding item is an entire room filled with objects from the
1960s, illuminated only with a black light.
The random, the unexpected and, ultimately, the commercialized,
are what characterize the art contained in section five, the climax
and finale of “Made in California.”
Section five contains the works, as well as the attitudes, of
1980 to 2000. The commodification of art in the form of huge
color posters, advertising everything from beer to shoes, is offset
by an unexpected sculpture of a young girl hanging upside down from
the ceiling.
Advertising and commercialization, which are the focuses of this
section, have been at the heart of the culture of California for
the past 20 years. However, as one can discern from this show, such
industries and movements have always played a part in the image, or
the mythology, that was and continues to be California.
“Made in California, Art, Image and Identity
1900-2000″ proves that a much deeper and richer reality lies
beneath the glamorous and glitzy surface of the myth ““ a
diversity of people, culture and landscape.
The exhibit takes the myth that is California, displays it in
all its beautiful brilliance, and then delves deeper to tackle the
ultimately unanswerable question: whose and which California are we
talking about?
ART: “Made in California, Art, Image and Identity,
1900-2000″ is showing at LACMA now through Feb. 25, 2001. The
exhibit is open Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 12 p.m. to 8
p.m., Friday from 12 p.m. to 9p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 11
a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is $7 for adults and $5 for students. The
second Tuesday of every month is free to all. For more information
call (323) 857-6000.