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Pacific Standard Time expands--to include performance/public art festival and commercial gallery shows

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When the many-headed exhibition extravaganza “Pacific Standard Time” opens in October 2011, some 40 Southern California museums and nonprofit galleries will all be offering shows focusing in one manner or another on the origins of the art scene here, from 1945 to 1980.

Since the first press conference in 2008, it has been clear that “Pacific Standard Time” is easily the biggest collaboration that Southern California museums have ever undertaken. Now, that collaboration is getting even bigger, thanks to two new initiatives.

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The Getty Trust, which has been coordinating and funding the project through its different branches, has confirmed that there will be a performance and public art festival currently scheduled for nine days at the end of January 2012. Glenn Phillips, the Getty Research Institute curator who is overseeing the festival, says the planners are considering re-creating several historic performances that rocked the California art scene, from Judy Chicago’s “Atmospheres” (spectacles involving smoke and fireworks for which she put her pyrotechnic license to use) to Mark di Suvero’s 1966 Peace Tower (the centerpiece of a massive collaborative antiwar art installation).

But none of those proposals are firm, as the Getty Foundation has recently made a grant of $210,000 to a new partner, the nonprofit gallery LAX Art, to help realize the festival. LAX Art founder Lauri Firstenberg says that some funds will be used by LAX to help produce events or artworks for the festival but the “ majority of the money” will be redistributed to other nonprofit organizations that want to participate. Grant guidelines are online at www.laxart.org; proposals are due September 15.

On another front, several commercial galleries in the area report that the Getty has begun to reach out to them as well. Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute, confirmed that he has had early, exploratory conversations with a handful of galleries, including Rosamund Felsen and Gagosian, to see if they are interesting in organizing shows related to Pacific Standard Time during its run.

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--Jori Finkel

twitter.com/jorifinkel

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