This morning we launched a new website dedicated to Los Angeles art from 1945 to 1980. Here you can get acquainted with Pacific Standard Time, the region-wide collaborative project that will tell the story of the L.A. art scene and its impact, and snap up reservations for fall events. The website also features details on the four related exhibitions soon to open at the Getty Center.
The heart of the site is an in-depth browsable archive of the artwork, people, and places central to the stories told by these exhibitions. Meet 63 personalities, explore over 100 artworks—including paintings, assemblages, happenings, and more—and see archival photos of the postwar L.A. art scene as it unfolded. You can also visit historic art-world locations via a Google Map.
The website features oral-history video clips, too—there are already 12 videos with key players in the historic L.A. art scene, including this one with artist Betye Saar, who speaks about the art of transformation and her girlhood discovery of “the freedom to make something out of nothing.”
We’ll be adding 30 more videos, 12 more people profiles, and over 100 more archival photos in late September.
At the Getty Center itself, the countdown to Pacific Standard Time is happening quickly. Already installed in the Museum Entrance Hall is Robert Irwin’s 40,000-pound granite sculpture Black on White; and on September 13, the Getty Conservation Institute opens From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine’s Gray Column, featuring a meticulously polished, twelve-foot-tall massive polymer slab.
Also throwing open its doors on September 13 is the Pacific Standard Time Information Room in the West Pavilion, where you can explore a timeline and an interactive map on our multi-touch table—or unplug and read.
Coming over the next month is a free iPhone/Android app featuring an image-and-audio tour of our exhibitions. We’ll update you here and via the initiative-wide Twitter feed, @PSTinLA.
Great website! can’t wait to check it out!!
Yes, we had Bird living here for awhile, and many other worldclass musicians. Those born here included Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Hampton Hawes, Billy Higgins, Bobby Hutcherson, Etta James and dozens more of the greatest artists this country every produced,in our only true creative art form, jazz.
Oh, your talking visual arts? Gotta go north to teh Bay area in teh post war era for that, not much doins here. Just a buncha entittle dhwite kids goofin around pretending to be artists, when really just soft of mind, body and soul kids whinin. oh, thats who you are talking about?
Nevermind.
Sandra — Hope you enjoy the site! Let us know what discoveries you’ve made and how you liked it.
Hugh — You might be surprised by the doins in L.A.’s postwar art scene! Many of the exhibitions will present work not seen before in museums, not recognized, and in some cases even thought to be lost. Since you’re talking about jazz, I’ll mention two Pacific Standard Time exhibitions that explore the work of African American artists: the Hammer’s “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980,” which connects visual art to ideas and events in the wider world of creativity and politics here in L.A.; and the California African American Museum’s “Places of Validation, Art, and Progression,” which tells the story of people and places that fostered L.A.’s African-American visual artists. There will be a lot to discover.
What does black visual arts in LA have to do with jazz? Very seldom do the two meet, and African American art, outside of a few like Romare Bearden, from Harlem, are anywhere near this level, and yes his was music based art, as all true creative art is either poetic or musical, not the prosaic and psychobabble of decadent times, as we have just went through.
No, this is a lily white affair. Where is the Watts Towers? Even though build single handedly by a 4’11” Italian immigrant, it is ignored, because of its location below the Wilshire line. The “cultural’ institutions of LA ignore its people. The “doins’ between Wilshire and Ventura have been pretty insignificant outside of the movies, This is an entertainment town, not art. The are yin and yang, bot necessary but separate.
Watts Towers is participating in the Pacific Standard Time Performance Festival in January 2012. “Civic Virtue: Watts Here and Now” will be a daylong event featuring spoken word, jazz, and public art sculptures in the spirit of important historical works by artists Noah Purifoy, R. Judson Powell, and John Outterbridge. Should be a really interesting exploration of the connections between the musical, visual, and literary arts.