Calder’s “Hello Girls”: History of a Commission

On March 31, 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) opened its doors in a new complex with several large outdoor sculptures, among which was Calder’s monumental Three Quintains (Hello Girls). In 1962 LACMA’s Art Museum Council (AMC) had organized a “fountain committee” to acquire for the museum a significant sculpture for the new Hancock Park location. The AMC (founded in 1952) was LACMA’s first volunteer-support group dedicated to the full range of museum endeavors, including acquisitions. The fountain-committee members researched countless artists before offering Calder the commission (the museum also conferred with sculptor Isamu Noguchi). Calder agreed in June 1964, writing to AMC president Laurelle Burton, “I am, indeed, very much interested in designing you a fountain.” Burton announced the approved commission in a letter to the council: “To have a man of Alexander Calder’s prominence be the first to design a sculpture specifically for the new museum would set the standards for future efforts, on the part of the artists and donors.”

Alexander Calder, Three Quintains (Hello Girls), 1964, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art Museum, Council Fund, © 2013 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © Museum Associates / LACMA

Calder visited the site and consulted with the architects, designers, and museum officials through fall of 1964. The mobiles then were made in Connecticut at the Waterbury Iron Works, one of three iron fabricators he regularly used. They sent mobiles to Los Angeles after Thanksgiving, and Calder revisited the site in mid-December to indicate the mobiles’ placements and oversee their installation. Additionally, at the AMC’s request, Calder designed a poster commemorating the museum’s opening.

Alexander Calder and ironworker Chippy Ieronimo overseeing the installation of Three Quintains (Hello Girls), 1964, © 2013 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photo © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA, photographic archives

This poster, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 1, 1965, was created by Alexander Calder on the occasion of the 1965 opening of the museum. Available at the LACMA Store.

As the photographs of the completed work demonstrate, Three Quintains (Hello Girls) is an exuberant fountain, with simple geometric mobile forms floating in the air with four water jets impelling them. The work heralded a new era for Los Angeles as the city grew in population, geography, and cultural sophistication, and marked only the second large public Calder sculpture to be installed in California—and the first on the West Coast to be specially commissioned for its site. The sculpture would become one of very few fountain sculptures that Calder realized during his long career. Three Quintains (Hello Girls) is permanently on view in LACMA’s Director’s Roundtable Garden, on the east side of campus. Its commissioner, the AMC, has provided invaluable support for Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic.

Ilene Susan Fort, Senior Curator and the Gail and John Liebes Curator of American Art

Tips for Visiting James Turrell: A Retrospective (Part Three)

This fall we shared thoughts from college students who spent the summer conversing with visitors to James Turrell: A Retrospective. (Read part one here, and part two here.) Here is the final part of their conversation:

What tips do you have to offer people who haven’t yet visited James Turrell: A Retrospective at LACMA?

Jackeline Acosta (recent graduate, UCLA): It is a very popular show, and it may be slightly overwhelming. But I urge anyone who hasn’t visited yet to do so, because the works are striking and beautiful.

James Turrell, Breathing Light, 2013, LED light into space, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Kayne Griffin Corcoran and the Kayne Foundation, M.2013.1, © James Turrell, Photo © Florian Holzherr

Kristen Laciste (senior, UCLA): I would advise visitors to take their time and not rush through the exhibition, to ask any questions about the works they are viewing, and to stay in line and wait to see the remarkable Ganzfeld (an installation designed to eliminate the viewer’s depth perception), Breathing Light.

Jackeline: Patience is key. From the various conversations I was lucky enough to have with exhibition visitors, I found that they all appreciated how the artworks allowed them to slow down and take, for example, those eight to 10 minutes inside the Ganzfeld to really make an experience of it. After all, James Turrell wants viewers to genuinely draw observations from the art and take time to contemplate light and all its possibilities. If you do, the experience you will have at this exhibition will truly be fantastic.

James Turrell, Afrum (White), 1966, Cross Corner Projection, LACMA, partial gift of Marc and Andrea Glimcher in honor of the appointment of Michael Govan as CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director and purchased with funds provided by David Bohnett and Tom Gregory through the 2008 Collectors Committee, © James Turrell, photo © 2013 Museum Associates LACMA

Marissa Clifford (senior, UCLA): Yes, I would encourage those who haven’t visited the retrospective to hurry to LACMA to catch it, and I would encourage those who have already done so to visit again. Multiple viewings simply reveal new aspects of the work as readily as Light Reignfall (Turrell’s Perceptual Cell installation at the Resnick Pavilion) changes color.

Aida Lugo (recent graduate, Otis College of Art and Design): To those who have yet to see the exhibit I would recommend doing some research, spending some time in nature, and meditating. The exhibition requires a clear mind, a fresh perspective, and a release of expectations. Turrell does a magnificent job illuminating the overlooked and everyday miracles of light, perception and space, leaving us virtually alone to explore the magic of sight, thought, and reflection. We live on a planet with a complicated observation system in us to analyze the sky, nature, ourselves, and each other. Turrell: A Retrospective is like the Olympics of perception.

Jackeline: The benefits of visiting this exhibit when you really have the time to sit down and look at each piece and contemplate, for example, the tiniest color shifts in lights that occur throughout the exhibit, are wonderful.

Elizabeth Gerber, Education and Public Programs

This Weekend at LACMA: Extended Holiday Hours, Tours of the Collection, and More!

Say goodbye to 2013 this final weekend of the year at LACMA. On Friday and Saturday take advantage of extended holiday hours as the west side of campus (Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the Resnick Pavilion) stays open late until 10 pm. That means more time to see favorites like James Turrell: A Retrospective and Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic (both require special tickets) and others you may have not gotten around to yet, like Agnès Varda in Californialand and David Hockney: Seven Yorkshire Landscapes Videos, 2011. Keep in mind, on Fridays L.A. County residents receive free general admission after 3 pm.

Andrew Young, Plane at Aberdour. In Old Avenue, c. 1850, printed c. 1850, the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, gift of The Annenberg Foundation, acquired from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin

Throughout the weekend guests are invited to free, docent-lead tours of our permanent collection and select exhibitions. Friday at 1 pm, take a stroll in the sculpture garden to learn about French sculptor Auguste Rodin and his works and, later at 3 pm, tour the American art galleries, one of LACMA’s strongest collections. On Saturday at noon take a 50-minute tour of the exhibition See the Light—Photography, Perception, Cognition: The Marjorie and Leonard Vernon Collection, featuring photos from the inception of the medium and highlighting hundreds of works from hundreds of artists. Lastly, Sunday offers even more tours, with focused 20 minute tours of urban landscapes at 1:30 pm and an overview of the lush Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Here’s to a great new year.

Roberto Ayala

Design Inspiration

Think about it: where do you find your inspiration?

If you’ve ever participated in an art class at LACMA, you know that spending time in the galleries before retreating to the studio is par for the course. Students of all ages at LACMA spend quality time looking at works from the permanent collection or temporary exhibitions to inspire their own studio projects, develop ideas, and spark creativity. They examine the thousands of ways that artists before them have used color and materials, solved problems, and conveyed a message, just as artists and designers have always looked to examples from the past.

Earlier this month, we highlighted Closet to Collection, the first of three videos we created with middle-school students from Santa Monica Alternative School House (SMASH) and curators from LACMA’s department of costume and textiles. We hope the videos, made possible by a generous grant from the John B. and Nelly Llanos Kilroy Foundation, will help reveal LACMA’s extensive costume and textiles collection to a wider audience.

The second video in this three-part series explores the idea of inspiration. The same students who participated in our Closet to Collection experiment visited the galleries to investigate costumes by Rodarte and textile designs by Elza Sunderland, as we set out to understand what inspires artists working in the world of textiles.

Students discuss the Rodarte gowns, making connections to the adjacent Italian Renaissance paintings.

The video’s footage was shot last year, when the students visited an installation of gowns designed by Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the two sisters that make up Rodarte. On a recent trip to Italy, the sisters had encountered art that they had only seen before in books, and were struck by the vibrant but chalky colors in the frescoes that Fra Angelico, a monk who was also an artist, painted on the walls of San Marco, a complex of monasteries in Florence. This experience prompted the sisters to design the Fra Angelico collection, a set of gowns that capture the color palette of the Renaissance period and the drape and flow of the fabric depicted in the paintings.

The dresses were appropriately hung in the Italian Renaissance galleries, on the third floor of the Ahmanson Building, alongside artwork from the period that had inspired them. When the SMASH students met with costume and textiles department curator Sharon Takeda, they were able to compare the paintings and gowns for themselves, and see the Rodarte sisters’ direct source of inspiration. This self-constructed discovery was akin to a playful match-up game supporting hands-on learning.

Takeda also revealed the inspiration for the way the gowns were installed in the gallery: the composition of an Italian painting, Christ on the Cross with Saints Vincent Ferrer, John the Baptist, Mark and Antoninus. In the painting, a group clusters around a central figure, just as in the gallery, a group of dresses surrounded a single dress—a painter from 500 years ago inspiring fashion houses and museum installations today!

Master of the Fiesole Epiphany, Christ on the Cross with Saints Vincent Ferrer, John the Baptist, Mark and Antoninus, c. 1491–95, gift of the Ahmanson Foundation

The SMASH students also looked to textile designer Elza Sunderland to discover her muse. Curator Kaye Spilker explained that Sunderland was inspired by the climate in California and her childhood in New York, where as a young girl she would visit museums with her mother. Those museum visits stuck with her: the colors and geometry as seen in her textile design “Pampas—Inca” indicates that she most likely had an impressionable visit to New York’s American Museum of Natural History! Other patterns show her interest in cubism, animals, flowers, and even Sunset Boulevard. Sunderland turned nearly everything she saw or experienced into a whimsical pattern, as evidenced by her prolific career, in which she churned out thousands of textile designs.

Elza Sunderland, Pampas—Inca, 1948, © Henry Sunderland

Man’s Tunic (Uncu) with Tocapu and Stylized Jaguar Pelt Design (double-sided), Bolivia, Lake Titicaca, mid- to late 16th century, American Museum of Natural History, Division of Anthropology, New York, © American Museum of Natural History Library, New York

Elza Sunderland, Textile Design, ‘Sunset Boulevard’ from ‘Hollywood’ Series, 1946, Elza Sunderland Textile Design Collections, © Henry Sunderland

Design Inspiration documents this encounter between students and these inspiring—and inspired—artists, and encourages kids, teachers, and families to reflect on their muses.

Stay tuned for our post about the third video in this series, in which the SMASH and other students focus on the idea of collaborative art making.

Karen Satzman, Director, Youth and Family Programs

Winter Wool and Moths: Repairing a Museum-Grade Textile

Have you ever pulled your favorite wool coat out of the closet, only to find that some hungry moths had been busily at work during the summer? Given that today is Christmas, and surely the weather is chilly (in other parts of the country, at least), you may have encountered this problem as you’re searching for warm sweaters. And believe it or not, many of the woolen textile objects in LACMA’s collection have suffered the same fate at some point in their history. In fact, there is one such object currently residing in the textile conservation lab: a bright-red military uniform coat from England.

England, Man’s Military Uniform Coat, 1799–1800, purchased with funds provided by Michael and Ellen Michelson

This handsome coat has suffered insect damage in the form of scattered holes and grazing.

Above: Moth larvae damage woolen objects via two main modes of action: 1) by “grazing” across the fluffy top layer of fibers (which often results in a color shift when the underlying fabric is exposed), 2), by concentrating in a single location, which results in a hole as they chew down through the entire depth of the fabric. As the larvae eat, they extrude a casing, which often can be found stuck to the textile near damaged areas.

As a textile conservator, it is my job to stabilize these areas of damage structurally, while also visually compensating for the losses. Recently, the fiber-arts technique of needle felting has been adapted into the conservator’s repertoire, as a way to achieve both of these objectives simultaneously.

Above: The working set up: to the left are coils of wool roving, which are unspun wool fibers that have been dyed red. By blending the two shades of red, an exact match to the coat can be found. On the right are samples of red wool fabric. This is the substrate onto which the wool plug is felted: the fabric is attached on the inside of the coat and holds the fill in place while simultaneously providing support by spanning the damaged areas. In front is a block of gray foam: this is the working surface onto which the felting is performed using barbed needles, below (two can be seen stuck into the foam block).

Close-up view of the barbed needles—along the tips you can see a series of small upward- facing notches: these grab the fibers and facilitate felting as the needles are moved up and down.

Using sharp, barbed needles and wool roving (unspun wool fibers) in the same red as the jacket, I was able to create small felted woolen plugs, each one tailored to fit the exact shape of every hole.

The video above shows felting in action. By repeatedly piercing the fibers with a barbed needle, they enmesh and become entangled, eventually forming a dense felt. The felting is performed onto a fabric substrate, which supports the plug and provides structural support when attached to the inside of the garment. By trimming along the top surface of each plug with a pair of small scissors, any loose fibers are leveled off, allowing the texture of the plug to more closely mimic the dense texture of the fulled wool.

This technique offers many advantages. For one, the fills are reversible and can be easily removed (this is an important tenet of conservation, and allows one to distinguish between the original materials and the work of the conservator). For another, it allows structural support and visual compensation to be achieved at the same time. Needle felting is both satisfying and successful: by imitating the color, texture, and depth of the surrounding fabric, the hole becomes essentially invisible to the naked eye.

Above, top to bottom: 1) an area of loss; 2) visual compensation using a similarly colored fabric underlay—note the depth of the hole is still visible; 3) the same area of loss filled with a felted plug—note that the plug is able to match the color, depth, and texture of the loss to blend almost invisibly into the surrounding fabric.

You will be able to see the finished product in person when this jacket goes on display for an exciting exhibition about men’s fashion!

Above: Here I am, maneuvering the fiber fill into position. One hole down, just a few more to go!

Anne Getts, Mellon Fellow, Textiles Conservation Center