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January 27, 2010
The Getty Foundation will award $3.1 million in grants
to 26 arts institutions for their roles in "Pacific
Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980," a bonanza
of exhibitions coming to Southern California in fall 2011.
The grants nearly double the foundation's financial commitment
to the exhibitions. Most of the grants, to be announced
today at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, will
support art shows and catalogs initiated by an earlier,
$3.6-million round of Getty research and planning grants.
"It's exciting to be moving this project into the
public phase, when we will see the fruits of many years
of behind-the-scenes work," said Deborah Marrow,
director of the foundation, the philanthropic arm of the
J. Paul Getty Trust. The collaborative venture will construct
an enormous patchwork quilt of Southern California's post-World
War II art history in museums and galleries from San Diego
to Santa Barbara. Composed of exhibitions such as "California
Art in the Age of Pluralism, 1974-1980" at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, "Doin' It in Public: Feminism
and Art at the Woman's Building" at Otis College
of Art and Design and "Now Dig This! Art and Black
Los Angeles 1960-1980" at the Hammer Museum, "Pacific
Standard Time" is designed to illuminate a vibrant
art community long overshadowed by its East Coast counterpart.
For Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary
Art San Diego, it boils down to this: "An opportunity
for a critical mass of institutions, all focusing on our
art history from 1945 to 1980, to finally bring a little
bit more balance between the East and West Coast in accounts
of what happened during this period.
"It's great that the Getty has the vision and perspicacity
to do this," he said. "And I love the fact that
we are not waiting for someone else to do it. We are doing
it ourselves. And who better to tell our story?"
At his museum, a year of exhibitions about California's
Light and Space movement will begin with "Phenomenal,"
including works by Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Douglas
Wheeler, Mary Corse and Ron Cooper. A $225,000 research
grant helped the museum to hire curator Robin Clark and
launch the project. A new Getty grant for the same amount
combined with funds from the National Endowment for the
Arts and the Luce Foundation will implement plans for
a scholarly catalog and a series of installations.
"This is far and away the most extensively researched
group of exhibitions we have ever been able to undertake,
and we are not going to squander the opportunity,"
Davies said. "When the history of Light and Space
is rewritten, I think the significance and groundbreaking
nature of what these artists were doing with phenomenology
and perception and their influence on a younger generation
will be understood."
At the Hammer, a $200,000 research grant kick-started
a major project on African American art in Los Angeles,
enabling the museum to consult with artists, curators
and scholars, conduct oral interviews and hire a research
assistant along with guest curator Kellie Jones, a specialist
in the subject who teaches at Columbia University.
"This is a show that fits us perfectly, shining
a light on overlooked and under-acknowledged artists,"
Hammer Director Ann Philbin said of "Now Dig This!"
"But we wouldn't have been able to do it right without
the grants."
Jones has traveled widely to find works by artists such
as Noah Purifoy, John Outterbridge, David Hammons, Senga
Nengudi and Maren Hassinger. A new grant of $250,000 will
help fund the exhibition and document it in a publication.
"Pacific Standard Time" is rooted in a 2002
joint initiative of the Getty Research Institute and the
foundation, Marrow said. The goal of "On the Record,"
as it was called, was to save Los Angeles' art history
by locating and preserving archives squirreled away in
closets and storerooms or headed for trash bins.
"It was only after we had been giving grants for
the archives for several years that everyone involved
began talking about discovering amazing stories that would
make great exhibitions," she said. "At that
point we began working with partners to do something bigger.
That led to the research and planning grants, which --
once it became clear that there were exhibitions we wanted
to support -- led to the current round of grants."
The research grants, given in 2008 and 2009, ranged from
$60,000 to $239,000. The awards to be announced today
run from $50,000 to $275,000, with the largest going to
institutions that will publish catalogs and, in some cases,
present two or three shows. All the recipients must provide
part of the funding for their projects.
Twenty-three of the 26 grantees received research grants.
The new arrivals -- the Museum of Latin American Art in
Long Beach, the University Art Museum at Cal State Long
Beach and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and
Botanical Gardens in San Marino -- will use their money
to plan and realize exhibitions.
The Getty Museum, though not a grant recipient, will
present one of the most sweeping shows, a survey of L.A.
painting and sculpture from 1945 to 1970. Among the grantees,
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will offer a major
study of California modern design and a retrospective
of ASCO, a Chicano performance and conceptual art group.
The Long Beach Museum of Art will focus on video art;
the Palm Springs Art Museum on Southern California photographers'
images of swimming pools.
Art made of clay will be the subject of shows at the
Santa Monica Museum of Art, the American Museum of Ceramic
Art in Pomona and Scripps College in Claremont. The University
Art Museum at UC Santa Barbara will explore Cliff May's
architecture.
The 26 grantees are planning to present 29 exhibitions,
but that's not all. Eight "programming partners,"
including the Skirball Cultural Center, the Los Angeles
Philharmonic and the Norton Simon Museum, are developing
self-funded events.
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