Advertisement

The countdown to Pacific Standard Time has begun and so has a major PR push

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.


At a media event Thursday at the members-only Soho House on Sunset Boulevard, the organizers of Pacific Standard Time signaled their intention to start spreading the word about their colossal visual arts collaboration set to start in October 2011. In attendance were dozens of local museum directors and publicists.

In essence, Pacific Standard Time is a set of museum exhibitions that will each in its own way explore the birth of the L.A. art scene, to be staged by about 50 institutions next fall in Southern California. The Getty Trust has organized and largely funded the event, distributing about $7.3 million to its institutional partners since 2008.

Advertisement

Now that the exhibitions (currently 47) and accompanying publications (roughly 20) are under way, the publicity and marketing efforts are about to begin. At the Soho House, over cocktails, meatballs and tuna tartare, the Getty announced a new website for the project, www.pacificstandardtime.org. It also screened a new promotional video by TBWA/Chiat/Day for Pacific Standard Time that uses the slogan: “One era. A million moments of impact.”

The glossy four-minute video features cameos by some local museum directors who are participating in the initiative: Ann Philbin of the Hammer Museum, Charmaine Jefferson of the California African American Museum, Michael Govan of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Jeffrey Deitch of the Museum of Contemporary Art, along with Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, which is organizing four of the shows on tap for 2011. They each take a shot at summing up the difficult-to-summarize event.

Noriega calls it “a surveying, documenting and preserving of the archive, to tell the history of what happened in Los Angeles in the middle of the 20th century.” Philbin calls it an “exciting” idea — “turning Southern California into one big extended museum with the freeways functioning as the hallways between the galleries.”

Click here for the full storyabout the countdown to Pacific Standard Time.

--Jori Finkel

www.twitter.com/jorifinkel

RECENT AND RELATED:

Advertisement

Pacific Standard Time Expands to include performance/public art festival

Charges dismissed against ex-Getty curator Marion True by Italian judge

Getty’s prized purchase to stay in England -- at least for now


Advertisement