Elsa Longhauser's 10 years at the helm of SMMOA

 

This Sunday, Jan. 9, the Santa Monica Museum of Art officially celebrates the 10th anniversary of its director, Elsa Longhauser, at the helm. It may seem a long time for the art world, but she was at her last job as director of the Galleries at the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia for 17 years. 

Arriving here has proved "revelatory."  She has been struck by "the richness of the art history in Los Angeles and the region, the complexities and the layers,” she says.  “We’ve tried to uncover the important artists who have made a contribution to the history of art who work here, who live here, who teach here."  That's included artists such as Michael Asher, Wallace Berman, George Herms, Mary Kelly and Allen Ruppersberg.  The Herms show had a special poignancy since it was curated by Walter Hopps, one of the founders of the seminal Ferus Gallery, shortly before he passed away in 2005.

Longhauser has also been keen to bring in exhibitions from outside the region, and some have been international in scope.  In that effort she has frequently invited guests curators.  In 2001 Thelma Golden brought a group show of emerging African American artists, “Freestyle,” from the Studio Museum in Harlem, and in 2003 Lynne Cooke curated a show on the diagrammatic paintings of  Alfred Jensen.  In 2009 impresario Peter Sellars and curator Meskerem Assegued brought the work of  Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, his first survey show in the U. S.  (It dovetailed nicely with the production of Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” and “Symphony of Psalms” that Sellars staged for the L.A. Philharmonic –- conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s farewell program.  Sime's custom-built thrones served as part of the set.)  And this winter they featured the work of Italian abstract painter Alberto Burri.

The subject of an upcoming exhibition, “Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains” (Jan. 21-April 16), was discovered by Longhauser herself at a Chicago art fair.

“Ten years is not a long time when you are fulfilling an artistic vision,” she says.  Her job, she feels, “is always changing, always evolving.”

Sunday’s event,  “The Power of Ten: Take a Chance on Art” (from 4 to 7 p.m.) is a fundraiser in which works have been donated by 25 artists including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Kim McCarty and Betye Saar.  Admission is $300 for two persons, which includes one chance ticket; admission tickets and additional chance tickets are available online and at the museum.  For more information click here.

Read more on the Arts & Books section profile of Elsa Longhauser here.

-- Scarlet Cheng

Photo Credit: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times

 

'Borderlandia': The art of the brothers de la Torre

Stepping into the exhibition, “Borderlandia:  Cultural Topography by Einar and Jamex de la Torre” at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, is like stepping into a funhouse that mixes hand-worked glass, found objects and technology with a neo-Baroque sensibility.  “Our work deals a lot with hybridity on so many levels,” says Einar.  He has long frizzy hair and is the extroverted, talkative one.   Jamex, his older brother and longtime collaborator, stands to one side, wearing glasses and a thoughtful air.           

Around us are wildly colorful glass sculpture on pedestals and inside showcases, plus larger works such as their versions of the Last Judgment in altar form (“La Reconquista”), an Aztec-inspired calendar made of turning wheels with “hearts” dangling from the sides (“La Belle Epoch”), a pair of electronic totems loaded with found objects (“Tula Frontera Norte” and “Tula Frontera Sur”) and a surrealistic wall mural of bowls and platters piled with food from several cultures (“Pho’Zole”).
   
Mexican and American culture are handily tossed together in their artistic salad, and so is a bit of Asian culture.  In the glass sculpture “Double Happiness K.O.” a laughing golden Buddha  also looks like a sumo wrestler; in “Pho’Zole” the artists photo-collaged together bowls of the Vietnamese noodle soup and other food.  “Food sometimes is the first step of acculturation,” Jamex observes.  “It dawned on us when we were in San Jose in a restaurant eating pho – we realized everyone in the restaurant was Mexican, eating a soup that was somewhat familiar to us.”        

Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, the brothers moved with their family to Southern California in 1972.  Both studied at the Cal State Long Beach, and later ran a flame-worked glass business together.  Eventually they decided to concentrate on their artwork and began exhibiting at galleries, museums, and biennials.  Today they maintain homes and studios on two sides of the U.S.-Mexico border – in San Diego and near Ensenada.

For the full Arts & Books section article, click here.

-- Scarlet Cheng

Photo: The brothers with "La Reconquista," 2009, mixed media: backlit, Lenticular prints, framed plywood "altar" foam, resin castings and printed vinyl.

Credit: Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times

An arts celebrity who doesn't toot his own horn: Herb Alpert

It’s a rare celebrity in Los Angeles who’s not tooting his or her own horn -- let alone one who’s also a major philanthropist, a benefactor to the arts and arts education. But the word “humble” is often used to describe Herb Alpert, he of the chart-busting Tijuana Brass fame, by those who’ve gotten to know him. He’s given away more than $100 million through his foundation, which was set up in 1988.

Alpert has yet another hat, that of visual artist. Today he’s amid a forest of sinuous black totems spiraling into the lofty heights of Ace Gallery Beverly Hills. They're an art form he has practiced for the last two decades -- sculpture. “I do something every day, whether sculpting or painting,” he says. “It definitely feeds my spirit when I sculpt or paint or blow the horn, that’s an essential part of my being.”

About 40 years ago he took up painting. Then he picked up working with clay from his friend, sculptor Kristan Marvell. “Once I put my hand on the clay, I was hooked,” Alpert says. “It’s a very sensual feeling, you can work very quickly if the clay is cooperating.” He began forming small pieces a few inches tall, then they became several feet tall.

“I began doing this in the kitchen,” he says with a laugh, “which my wife wasn’t crazy about.” Especially when he used a blowtorch to soften up wax pieces. His wife is singer Lani Hall, with whom he released an album last year, “Anything Goes: Herb Alpert & Lani Hall Live.” Alpert also has an album coming out this fall, “I Feel You.”

Later they built a studio on their property in Malibu. The sculpture in “Black Totems,” the current show at Ace (through Aug. 28), are made of bronze coated with a soft black patina, and reach up to 18 feet high, fabricated at a local foundry.

They were inspired by totems of the Pacific Northwest Native Americans and by the tall, gnarly “scholar’s rocks” prized by Chinese literati. “There was a progression, I started making them larger and larger,” he says. “As they go up, there are parts I change from the original concept. I like to keep that spontaneity -- to me it’s like jazz. I’m not trying to analyze it, I’m just trying to feel it.”

To read my full Arts & Books profile, click here.

-- Scarlet Cheng

Photo credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

Conserving a masterpiece -- the Ghent Altarpiece

When Anne van Grevenstein-Kruse was a child, her family made a pilgrimage from Antwerp to Ghent to see “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” the celebrated 15th-century altarpiece by Hubert and Jan van Eyck. “It was still in its original chapel,” she recalls, “and I remember very well the old man who was paid to close the altarpiece and open it again.”

Made up of 18 painted panels, the work, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, is widely considered a treasure of early Northern Renaissance art and an object of veneration in Art History 101. It also boasts a legacy so checkered that it could be lifted from a Dan Brown novel. It has been, at various times, sold off in parts and carried off as war booty.

After half a millennium, the altarpiece is miraculously intact, with only one smaller panel, depicting the “just judges” and stolen in 1934, replaced by a replica in 1945. It is also, remarkably, still in the church for which it was made: Saint Bavo Cathedral, formerly Saint John.

Van Grevenstein-Kruse, an art conservator who teaches at the University of Amsterdam, along with Ronald Spronk, an art historian from Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, head a team of art experts and trainees conducting a detailed technical analysis of the work, a project funded by a $230,000 grant from the Panel Paintings Initiative of the Getty Foundation.

In a side chapel of the church, most of the panels sit inside a protective glass enclosure. Several have been taken down for study, and another, the one of the just judges depicting 10 resplendently cloaked men on horseback, has been sent to Brussels to fix its flaking paint.

Van Grevenstein-Kruse admits it’s ironic that this newest component of the work is falling apart the fastest.

Click here to read more about the Ghent Altarpiece conservation project.

-- Scarlet Cheng

Photo: Overview of the open altarpiece. Credit: J. Paul Getty Trust

A museum director's trajectory from Shanghai to San Francisco

It’s a banner year for Shanghai — the World Expo has just opened in the city, the first  on Chinese soil and the most expensive fair ever. Superlatives come naturally to Shanghai, a city that rapidly recovered its sense of mission after the downtrodden days of the  Cultural Revolution. Skyscrapers pierce the sky, fashionable Western-style shopping malls abound. Of course, all this came from a legacy — a legacy of international trade and cosmopolitan sophistication that reached a peak in the 1930s.

Some of the city’s past glory is glimpsed in “Shanghai,” an exhibition  at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, at a time when, appropriately enough, the museum is under the directorship of Jay Xu, a Shanghai native. “I think myself a lucky guy,” says Xu, sitting in his office with a panoramic view of the Civic Center Plaza. “I come to work for our institution and realize there’s a show about my hometown, in such a magnificent year as the World Expo.”

Two years ago Xu (pronounced “shu”) stepped in after the departure of Emily Sano, who had held the position for 13 years and shepherded the organization through its move from Golden Gate Park — where it had been a virtual appendage to the De Young Museum in a crumbling building — to a beautifully renovated Beaux Arts building. With a full-time staff of 140 and an annual budget of $17.3 million, the museum is one of the largest  in the West dedicated to Asian art.   However, programming has sometimes been perceived to be old-fashioned.

Xu is planning to change that, partly by connecting the dots of East and West in fresh ways and partly through collaboration with other institutions. Being Shanghai-born and bred, he’s from a culture that loves to be up-to-date, open to the novel, while keeping an eye on  the pragmatic.

To read my Arts& Books section profile of Xu and more about the museum's current show -- "Shanghai," naturally -- click here.

-- Scarlet Cheng

 
Photo Credit: Robert Durell/For The Times

Monster Mash: Lena Horne dies at 92; Manet self-portrait up for auction; 'Fatal Attraction' on stage

-- Sophisticated lady: Lena Horne, whose beauty, resilience and silky voice helped her overcome racial barriers to go from Cotton Club chorus girl to stage, screen, nightclub and recording star, has died at 92 in New York. (Los Angeles Times)

-- Hot market: Edouard Manet's "Self Portrait with a Palette" -- the latest in a series of high-value Impressionist and modern works to be offered for sale -- could bring as much as $44 million when it goes up for auction in June. (Bloomberg)

-- Bunnies, beware: A stage version of the 1987 Michael Douglas-Glenn Close romance-revenge film "Fatal Attraction" may be heading to the West End. (Guardian)

-- A real Raphael? An ornately framed portrait painting that had been kept in the storeroom of an Italian palace for years may be an original Raphael and not a copy as long thought. (Associated Press)

-- Road trip: Less than a month after it opened, the Broadway revival of  "La Cage aux Folles" -- which is up for 11 Tonys in June -- has announced plans to launch a national tour in the fall of 2011. (Wall Street Journal)

-- Music lover: Flora Laney Thornton, a longtime Los Angeles philanthropist and patron of the arts for whom USC's School of Music is named, has died at 96. (Los Angeles Times)

-- Back onstage: Emmy winner Edie Falco and Tony nominee Alison Pill are set to open this week in Chloe Moss' prize-winning life-after-prison play, "This Wide Night," off Broadway. (Playbill)

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne visits Medellin, Colombia, where investing in ambitious civic architecture has sparked a renaissance; Victoria Looseleaf reviews Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet at UCLA's Royce Hall; a new exhibition at the Autry Museum tells how women helped shape the American West; music critic Mark Swed looks back at Southwest Chamber Music's role in the first large-scale cultural exchange between the United States and Vietnam.

-- Karen Wada

Photo: Lena Horne in 1981, when she won a Tony for her one-woman show, "The Lady and Her Music." Credit: Christian Steiner / Thirteen / WNET

Monster Mash: Museum to go back to nature; son to get Ansel Adams photos; special Tonys announced

-- The great outdoors: The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will announce today it will be adding a 3.5-acre $30-million park with 11 themed areas that are designed to put the natural back in natural history. (Los Angeles Times)

-- Not for sale: The bankrupt Fresno Metropolitan Museum will return six Ansel Adams photographs donated by Adams' son and his wife instead of selling them at auction -- a move that will help settle a lawsuit the couple had filed against the now-closed museum. (Associated Press)

-- Special prizes: Actress Marian Seldes and playwright Alan Ayckbourn will receive lifetime achievement honors at the 2010 Tony Awards ceremony on June 13 in New York. Actor David Hyde Pierce will receive the Isabelle Stevenson Award for humanitarian work.  (Los Angeles Times)

-- Dark cloud: The effects of volcanic ash on air travel have taken a toll on Britain's orchestras, stranding some overseas, keeping others stuck at home and leaving a few facing financial disaster. (Daily Telegraph)

-- Flying fingers: Ever the showman, Chinese pianist Lang Lang played Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" using the Magic Piano app on his new iPad during an encore for a concert in San Francisco. (Wall Street Journal)

-- Long run:  Hal Holbrook, who has appeared in "Mark Twain Tonight!" for 56 years, gave a special performance of his one-man show Wednesday -- the centenary of the author's death -- in Elmira, N.Y., where Twain wrote many of his best-known works. Holbrook is scheduled to bring "Twain" to the Thousand Oaks Civic Arts Plaza on May 5. (Associated Press)

-- Rising star: Susanna Phillips, a 28-year-old soprano from Alabama, has won the Metropolitan Opera's Beverly Sills Artist Award for young singers. (New York Times)

Also in the Los Angeles Times: Rick Schultz reviews pianist Emanuel Ax at Walt Disney Concert Hall; David Choe, who went from petty criminal to international artist, has a new show in Beverly Hills; the Broad Stage in Santa Monica announces its biggest season yet.

-- Karen Wada

Photo: David Hyde Pierce. Credit: Paul Morse / Los Angeles Times

What's cooking at SFMOMA? O'Keeffe-inspired recipes

In her sensuous and nearly abstract landscapes and flower paintings, Georgia O’Keeffe pioneered American modernism. In her diet, she practiced a pared-down and exacting approach as well. In fact, her eating habits — emphasizing the simple and the organic as well as having Southwest inflections — seem positively contemporary.

“Miss O’Keeffe exhibited discriminating taste in all elements of her surroundings, so it is not surprising that she was very particular about the food she ate and the environment in which it was prepared,” Margaret Wood, O’Keeffe’s former companion and cook, wrote in her book “A Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes From the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keeffe.”

Now these recipes have inspired the daily specials at the Caffé Museo at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is holding the show “Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities” through Sept. 7. The exhibition presents about 100 works from the painter

Peter Shelton's whimsy, all in a row, for the L.A. police HQ

 

Inside an expansive East L.A. studio, a collection of creatures is undergoing a transformation. One is a giant unbaked loaf of white plaster, sanded into smooth curves; another has taken on a yellowish-brown coating, a sealant; a third is covered by thick sheets of red wax. All are headless and rotund yet seem — with their crouched, perched, lolling torsos — to be quite playful. Soon, they will be trucked to a foundry to be cast in bronze.

This summer, Peter Shelton’s sculptural installation called “animaline” will be filing down Spring Street in downtown L.A., on pedestals placed along a sitting area adjoining the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Six ballooning forms will be held up by two elongated, vaguely quadrupedal creatures on either end. “As is common in my work,” says Shelton, an affable man with frizzy gray hair and round glasses, “I want to develop a contrast in the physicality of the forms from the corporeal and ponderous to the attenuated and light.”