This Weekend at LACMA

End your summer on a high note with free tours, live music, art workshops, and fun talks and courses at LACMA! On Friday, Jazz at LACMA brings us the spiritual jazz sounds of the Phil Ranelin Jazz Ensemble at 6 pm on the outdoor stage in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light. In the galleries, museum members have early access to Variations: Conversations in and around Abstract Painting, featuring abstract paintings by 29 artists. Member Previews continue into Saturday, with access to Variations and our newest display of African art inspired by celestial wonders, African Cosmos: Stellar Arts. Both exhibitions open to the public on Sunday.

Mary Weatherford, love forever (cave) for MW, 2012, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, promised gift of Ann Colgin and Joe Wender

In Torrance the Art+Film Lab presents the LACMA9 Animation Program at 8 pm on Friday, a series of animated films with classics and new stories. At the Mini-Docs Workshop on Saturday at noon, learn about expressing your unique perspective through character, mood, and detail. The Torrance Art+Film Lab will be in Torrance through September 6.

Back at LACMA, Saturday stays busy with docent-led tours and free talks and music. Tours on this day include a walk-through of Treasures from Korea and The Painted City: Art of Teotihuacan and looks at Urban Landscapes and European Art.  At 1 pm, join the conversation with artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathan Keats and Reciprocal Biomimicry in the Brown Auditorium. Remember not to miss the second-to-last performance of this season’s Latin Sounds with the Afro-Peruvian Jazz Project at 5 pm. And Family Dynamic, our newest family workshop series, launches this weekend to a sold-out crowd but spots for the next session in September are still available.

Gavin Jantjes, Untitled, 1989–90, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, purchased with funds provided by the Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, 96-23-1, photograph by Franko Khoury

On Sunday, create tech-inspired art with the family at LACMA’s weekly Andell Family Sundays workshops beginning at 12:30 pm. At 2 pm a curator-led tour of African Cosmos sheds new light on the creation of art and its connections to celestial phenomena and cultural astronomies in ancient and modern times. At 3 pm, stop by Art Catalogues and listen in as the artist George Herms talks about his recently published book, George Herms: The River Book. Be sure to see Night in Day, displaying a wide range of photographic nocturnes, before its closing on Sunday. Lastly, end the weekend with this week’s Sundays Live performance of Los Angeles Symphonic Winds, directed by Stephen Piazza, at 6 pm.

Lily Tiao

 

The Marc Treib Poster Collection

This June LACMA received a wonderful gift of over 500 posters from Marc Treib, professor emeritus of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to his notable career as a historian of architecture and landscape, Treib is an accomplished graphic designer whose work has been the subject of several exhibitions and international publications. A founding gift of LACMA’s new interdepartmental initiative to collect graphic design, this donation provides significant holdings of international posters from the 1960s to the 1980s. Staci Steinberger, assistant curator of Decorative Arts and Design, interviewed Treib about how he built this impressive collection, as well as his own design work.

Kiyoshi Awazu, exhibition poster for Poster Nippon, 1972, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection

Staci Steinberger: What inspired you to start a collection?

Marc Treib: I never really intended to create a collection as such. But as my interests broadened from architecture, which I had first studied in the university, to other forms of design, of course graphic design was of interest. Some posters were typical student acquisitions to brighten the walls; others just interested me for their illustration, typography, or color.

Actually it was a bit of a shock to find that I have acquired so many posters over the years, some of which I used for teaching, others for exhibitions, and others to inform my own design work.

Jerzy Flisak, poster for Dywerskanci film, 1968, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection

SS: Many of your posters were collected while you were living and teaching abroad. Did the graphic design culture in any of these places strike you as particularly distinct?

MT: First of all, I was interested that poster culture was still thriving in these countries. I visited Poland in the late 1960s and found that their vibrant designs responded to a very active theater and film culture, but also were shaped by the limited means available to designers. The paper stock was poor and type fonts were limited. The designers I met there were amazing illustrators who could draw the fonts to which they had no access, as well as the primary illustration.

In Japan, that characteristic sensibility of spare richness also informed their graphic design. And with the millions of people using the trains each day the poster was a viable form of advertising. I often found a residual surrealism in many of the posters that relied on photography, and perhaps also in their use of illustration. On my first visit to Japan, I got to know Tadanori Yokoo, Kiyoshi Awazu, and several other designers who kindly gave me a number of their works.

April Greiman, Jon Coy, Michael Manwaring, Linda Hindrichs, Michael Vanderbyl, Michael Patrick Cronan, and Eric Martin, poster for AIGA California Design 2, 1985, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection

SS: One of the many reasons we were so excited about having this collection come to LACMA was that your collection really captures some of the exciting things that happened in California in the 1960s through the 1980s—from psychedelic rock and protest posters to New Wave. Do you have any thoughts on California design in that period?

MT: “California” was not one thing of course, and I constructed my own version by approaching designers whose work interested me. (I was born in New York, came out to Berkeley for one year in graduate school, and have been here ever since.) So over the years I wrote for Print magazine about orange crate labels, the painted billboards on the Sunset Strip, the pig murals on the Farmer John’s factory in Vernon, martini glasses as bar signs, and other things that caught my eye. In Print and the Japanese magazine Idea, I also wrote profiles on people like April Greiman and Bruce Montgomery, the former splashing out of Basel into collage, the latter representing an intelligent approach to art museum catalogue design.

Marc Treib, exhibition poster for Marc Treib Posters 1972–1976, 1977, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection

SS: Your gift to the museum includes a selection of the posters you designed for lectures and productions at UC Berkeley. Can you describe your process for designing these?

MT: When I took on the role of lecture series chair for the Department of Architecture, there was neither money for the lectures nor their announcement. I began publicity for the series by making 8.5″ x 11” posters using “spirit duplication,” more commonly known as “Ditto.” It was the common means for producing school handouts and exams, paper with a wonderful smell (but not quite enough to get you high).

Since we produced only about 25 copies of each lecture poster for distribution within Wurster Hall (home of the College of Environmental Design), diazo was a cost-effective method for producing a large format piece at low cost (total budget for many of the posters at that time was about $30 for 25 copies). On some posters I colored the images or collaged materials onto the diazo print, or folded them into three dimensions. All hand work, naturally, but there were relatively few copies made and often students would help.

Almost all of the posters for the lecture series were designed and produced in one night, and reproduced the following day. Sometimes I was doing two or more a week during the academic year. In all, I think there were about 300 of them, some of which I would never like to see again.

Frances Butler, poster for Joe Average & the Home-made Versailles lecture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Treib Collection

SS: What made you decide to donate the posters to LACMA? What are your hopes for the collection’s future?

MT: For one, I have been in a mood to reduce my possessions—all but the books, of course. I first approached Wendy Kaplan [curator and department head, Decorative Arts and Design] a couple of years ago about LACMA’s possible interest in the posters. My sole requirement was that I wanted the museum to take a substantial part of what had become a collection now almost 50 years old, and that they would stay together as a group. It took a while to make it happen, but I am very pleased that LACMA accepted over 500 of the posters.

Staci Steinberger, Assistant Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Families in Residence

For better or worse, every family has a unique dynamic. It’s a vibe that can be difficult to describe and only sometimes is intentionally cultivated. But despite its predominately subliminal nature, a family’s dynamic exerts a strong force. As kids, we began to realize what differentiated our home only by comparing ours to others. As adults, we point to these variances to explain how we turned out.

Imagine if you were raised by artists.

Glenn Kaino, Fishing with Morice, #9 Sake Snake, 2001, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Peter Norton

How would it compare to the environment of other households? What could we learn from artists in terms of fostering an atmosphere of creativity within a family unit or home?

LACMA’s latest series, Family Dynamic: Workshops Led by Artists and Their Kids, explores these questions by going straight to the source. These interactive classes are co-led by acclaimed contemporary artists from LACMA’s collection—including Glenn Kaino, Ingrid Calame, Lara Schnitger, Matthew Monahan, and Sterling Ruby—plus their children. Through discussion and art-making activities, participants discover firsthand the ways artists nurture imagination at home, and in turn, they can uncover new ideas for how to engage in artistic endeavors together as a family.

A common denominator that seems to unite the dynamic of artists with kids is an overall culture of making, which is accomplished simply through default. The children of artists often observe their parents working with their hands, playing with materials, and making things sometimes purely for the sake of experimentation. Below the surface of this general culture of creation are idiosyncrasies that make each family of artists unique.

The Calame-Roberts family

Lara Schnitger and Matthew Monahan share a studio with their eight-year-old daughter, where she has full access to fabrics, sewing machines, wax, foams, and carving tools. Tingri is not taught “art” as a separate discipline—it’s a creative force. She plays with all of the resources that artists have at their disposal on a large scale and with a narrative sense of purpose. Tingri and her friends have an elaborate art project in development consisting of architectural models and a cast of characters made exclusively from using colored tape in inventive ways.

For Glenn Kaino and fashion designer Corey Lynn Calter, it’s primarily about a shift in mindset. They instill in their two daughters the idea of contributing to culture, not just passively consuming it via the books they read, video games they play, or clothing they wear. They’re taught to not just recognize the artists and designers behind these inventions and appreciate it, but to make art as well.

Sterling Ruby, SCALE (4586), 2013, image courtesy the artist

Another aspect that frequently characterizes the relationship between artists and their kids is the mutual exchange of creativity. It’s not just that artists influence their kids; their children inspire them artistically too. That two-way conversation is evident in the home of Sterling Ruby and photographer Melanie Schiff. Inspired by his daughters, who regularly make mobiles for their rooms and to hang above their brother’s crib, Ruby began building large hanging sculptures. The family mobiles often incorporate images influenced by Schiff’s poetic photography. In Ruby and Schiff’s workshop, participants will make mobiles incorporating found objects, textiles, materials, and photographs.

Floor of the studio shared by Lara, Matthew, and Tingri

For Ingrid Calame and photographer Shelby Roberts, their seven-year-old daughter is the resident expert in creativity. Willa’s freedom in playing with clay and laissez-faire attitude for the “rules” of working with the material is a source of inspiration to her parents and the basis for their LACMA class.

Raising a family is the ultimate creative act. Who better to look to than artists for a new perspective? Enroll for these classes today by calling 323 857-6010 or visiting www.lacma.org/familydynamic.

Sarah Jesse, Associate Vice President of Education

This Weekend at LACMA

In the last few weeks of summer take advantage of free art tours, live music, film screenings, and creative workshops at the museum! This Friday evening, Jazz at LACMA presents the high-energy sounds of jazz, hip-hop, pop, and world music by Katisse and his band at 6 pm. In neighboring Torrance, enjoy the LACMA9 Shorts Program, featuring a great variety of short films from international classics to beloved animated films put, as part of the Art+Film Lab beginning at 8 pm.

Karma Mirror and Stand, 19th century, National Museum of Korea, Seoul, photo © National Museum of Korea

 

On Saturday at the Art+Film Lab, get hands on film experience with shot design and camera movement at the Composition Workshop from noon to 3 pm. Back on the Miracle Mile, explore the amazing collection of Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist paintings from an essential generation of European painters in Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky (and take the docent-led tour at 10:30 am for even more insight). Enjoy a tour about the inspiring masterpieces from Korea in Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910 at noon or stroll through the Japanese Art collection at 2 pm and immerse yourself in prints, ceramics, and more. Additional tours include Modern Sculpture: Brancusi to Chamberlain, Tiles in Islamic Art, and Highlights of the Museum: Art of the Americas. Be sure to catch one of the final performances of this season’s Latin Sounds with the unique blend of Latin and soul music by the Scott Martin Latin-Soul Band on Saturday at 5 pm.

 

Marsden Hartley, The Iron Cross, 1915, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis; university purchase, Bixby Fund, 1952

On Sunday, LACMA invites everyone from Compton and the surrounding area for a Free Day, the final component of the Compton Art+Film Lab. Nicole Miller: Believing is Seeing shines light on the personal stories of the city’s residents in the Bing Theater starting at 12:30 pm. At the tech-inspired Andell Family Sunday at 12:30 pm see how artists and scientists innovate. While you’re here check out two of our most recent exhibitions, Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913–1915 and the accompanying Sam Durant: Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C. Finally, end the weekend on a relaxing note with the classical sounds of Violinist Guillame Sutre, Harpist Kyung-Hee Kim-Sutre, and Pianist Steven Vanhauwaert at 6 pm at this week’s Sunday Live.

Lily Tiao

 

A World Made Visible

Few artists come along who blur the lines of the aesthetic paradigms of “fine art” or “folk art” and transcend both with a truthfulness and verve that allows us to see within the mythology. Sam Doyle is such an artist. He gives us more than mere images of vivid clarity, he opens an intimate world of America’s history, a diasporic history that is still so close it haunts the present. Like Henri Rousseau, a great parallel, whose crafted images, which are just as mysterious, spoke in an oblique way to the interior of the French psyche’s colonial ambitions, Doyle’s impassioned artwork speaks to both our hearts and our minds.

Were Doyle properly considered a neo-expressionist, he would be framed by a zeitgeist blessed by kindred artists who also engaged their deepest feelings. The movement, characterized by an array of styles that ranged from quasi-religious undertow to existential symbols of contemporary angst over historical events, was filled with a violence of cynicism and bleeding, sensuous wonder. Internationally renowned artists of such contrast as Francesco Clemente, Georg Baselitz, and Jean-Michel Basquiat (a passionate fan of Doyle who collected his works) are just a few of the artists who created in a wild profusion of “self” expressionism.

Sam Doyle, Dr. Crow, 1970–83, Gordon W. Bailey Collection

Doyle’s very nature embodies Matisse’s “dream of the unconscious,” reaching for subject, color, image, and abiding meaning that defines where paint and line will dwell. A self-taught creator, Doyle’s intuitive skills at organizing the image within the classic renaissance rectangle on corrugated tin, or detritus wood, added depth to his vision. One senses his awareness, his ease at placement, his daring scale, and his bold textual pronouncements, which he often added to shape his visual narrative. “I paint from, I would say, the mind’s eye,” he told NPR in 1983, “I know what it’s all about you see.”

Sam Doyle, Adlade, 1982–85, Gordon W. Bailey Collection

Both a devout Baptist and culture bearer, Doyle recorded powerful images of Christian mythology and African folklore in bold depictions, melding cross-cultural entities into a single reverent oeuvre, and displayed them all in the front yard of his two-story wood home, which he built on a few acres of ancestral farm land on coastal South Carolina’s St. Helena Island. Over the years, his museum-like display evolved into the St. Helena Out Door Art Gallery. Visitors witnessed portraits of the great root doctor, Dr. Crow; his nemesis, Devil Spirit; Penn Drummer, an homage to Penn School, which was established on the island in 1862 to assist freed slaves; Jake, Our Best (“Jackie” Robinson); Rey (Ray Charles); and First Black Midwife, a sociopolitical commemoration of contributions by African Americans to child rearing, honoring his maternal grandmother, who he posed holding a golden child.

Sam Doyle, Rey, 1970–83, Gordon W. Bailey Collection

Doyle painted his subjects in full glory with purposeful garb, attitude, tools, and emotions—all bathed in thought-provoking gorgeous colors. Perhaps they are more than portraits, perhaps they are records of memory illuminations where status, image, and emotional hues coalesce into vivid, personal, graphic icons, that danced in his “mind’s eye.” For Doyle, it was as much about memory as about dreams. In the words of John Ruskin: “The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”

Sam Doyle, Gulf 7¢, 1982–85, Gordon W. Bailey Collection

The artist discovered on his home ground the profound nature of how art lives and has always lived, deep down, inside the well of our unconscious, where dreams stain of memories and their relentless present form the echo chamber of our social consciousness. Yes, he took note of the wider world. But, with bold, sure-handed strokes and vibrant colors, he stayed true to his mission. There was no air of transcendence, just the ethereal dance with the dense, celebratory air of mythology immemorial.

Sam Doyle, First Black Midwife, 1978–83, Gordon W. Bailey Collection

In scholar and collector Gordon W. Bailey’s thoughtful essay considering Doyle, “Haints and Saints,” a black-and-white photograph shows the proud artist, his dark skin glistening, settled into a metal lawn chair in front of a modest wood-frame structure adjacent to his house, where he painted when the weather was bad. It is an image that countervails the commoditized art universe with the ease of a shooting star. In the background, guarded by a nearly abstract wire fence, a few of his artworks (marked “Sold” to discourage collectors) can be seen. There are no fictional conceits or exotic matter—he simply is—as if lifted from the earth itself.

Doyle painted our presence, our enslaved history, our American history. His Gullah lore, with its African shadow, guides us outward, giving lines of reference, making a world visible, tangible, naming the dreams, tagging the darkness. Doyle is our witness, our voice, our griot. He created art that does more than arouse—it reveals. Its very essence lives nature deep within our culture in those blank spaces where time has separated us from our dreams, our nightmares, from our dark history.

Hylan Booker