Descriptions of the projects funded by the Getty Foundation

six art exhibition catalogues standing up or laying down on a white background

Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980 publications supported by the Getty Foundation

Photo: J. Paul Getty Trust

American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA)
Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945–1975

A survey of Southern California studio ceramic artists, Common Ground investigated the interconnections within the post–World War II clay community of the greater Los Angeles area, including how the social, political, and economic climate of the time affected ceramic design, styles, instruction, and trends. Central to AMOCA's presentation was artist Millard Sheets, whose leadership in art making, education, design, and industry had an unsurpassed influence on artists and craftsmen in the area.

Exhibition research support: $141,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $50,000 (2009)

Armory Center for the Arts
Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken

Speaking in Tongues: The Art of Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken brought two seminal Los Angeles artists into close conversation with one another for the first time. The exhibition examined how these two artists bridged modernist and emerging post–modernist trends by ushering in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant–garde art. Focusing on language and the creation of new visual codes, Berman's and Heinecken's works were explored within the unique cultural context of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches.

Exhibition research support: $110,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $75,000 (2009)

California African American Museum (CAAM)
Places of Validation, Art, and Progression

Through documents, artifacts, and art, Places of Validation told the story of the under–recognized places and people that presented, collected, and traded the visual art of African Americans in Los Angeles from 1940–1980. This exhibition explored how a network of community support and Black commerce laid the foundation for a structure, still in place today, that encouraged and enabled Black artists to create and proliferate in the face of economic, social, and political challenges. This foundation nurtured and thus validated their artistry and importance in Los Angeles.

Exhibition research support: $225,000 (2008); exhibition and planning support: $80,000 (2009)

California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)

The Experimental Impulse: Los Angeles Art from 1945 to 1980

The Experimental Impulse explored the pivotal role of experimentation in Los Angeles art making during a time when the city emerged as an important artistic center. Conceived from the perspective of artists who currently live and work in Los Angeles, this exhibition bridged the distance between earlier developments and current practice, offering new insights into the understanding of developments in the art world between 1945 and 1980. The exhibition was presented at the school's REDCAT gallery, housed in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex.

Institutional archives support: $7,500 (2003), $86,900 (2005) and $120,000 (2006); exhibition research support: $145,000 (2009); exhibition support: $60,000 (2009)

University Art Museum
California State University, Long Beach (CSULB)

Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change

Cal State University Long Beach (CSULB) mounted a survey of the press's work and its connections to artist collectives of the time. Peace Press Graphics 1967–1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change featured 50–75 posters from the press's archive alongside works on paper by artist groups who worked with the press, including the Feminist Studio Workshop and Women's Graphic Center, the Méchicano Art Center, and Self–Help Graphics and Art, Inc. A graphic timeline, music listening stations, poetry and spoken word performances, film clips interspersed in the galleries, and a separate film screening series accompanied the artworks and gave audiences a unique opportunity to understand the art of political protest within its larger cultural milieu.

Institutional archive support: $20,000 (2004); exhibition support: $57,000 (2010); publication support: $18,000 (2010)

California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside (UCR)
Seismic Shift: Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and California Landscape Photography

When the nexus of landscape-centered photography moved from Northern to Southern California in the postwar decades, this geographic shift was matched by changes in style and attitude. Once dominated by romantic sensibilities, the landscape became a subject of gritty objectivity in the hands of the Southern–California New Topographics in the 1970s. Seismic Shift revisited this turning point, focusing on artists Lewis Baltz and Joe Deal, who turned their cameras towards the region's rapidly changing suburban landscape, documenting the replacement of farmland by tract homes and industrial parks.

Exhibition support: $52,000 (2010); publication support: $20,000 (2010)

Chinese American Museum
Breaking Ground: Chinese American Architects in Los Angeles (1945–1980)

Breaking Ground documented and showcased the architectural achievements and contributions of pioneering Chinese American architects in the development of Los Angeles's urban and visual landscape between 1945 and 1980. In particular, the exhibition focused on four architects whose designs had a significant impact on modern architecture in the city: Eugene K. Choy, Gilbert Leong, Helen Liu Fong and Gin Wong. Studies of the selected architects remain largely absent from the critical literature on architectural history; this exhibition aimed to increase public awareness of and knowledge about their work by highlighting their specific contributions to architecture in L.A.

Exhibition research support: $50,000 (2010)

City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA)
Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (MAG) and the Watts Towers Art Center (WTAC)

Civic Virtue: The Impact of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and Watts Towers Arts Center

These two exhibitions examined how the City of Los Angeles and its two pre–eminent arts venues—the Municipal Art Gallery (MAG) and the Watts Towers Arts Center (WTAC)—helped shape the development of post–war art in Los Angeles. At a time when L.A. public and private museums and galleries were in their infancy, MAG and WTAC showed numerous artists both from this community and beyond. Both exhibitions included selections from artists whose work is housed in the City's archives along with historical photographs and film, documents, and archival exhibition catalogues.

Exhibition research support: $66,000 (2009); exhibition support: $90,000 (2010); publication support: $15,000 (2010)

18th Street Arts Complex
Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artist Space Movement

Far more than mere alternatives to the established gallery system, Los Angeles's artist–run spaces of the 1970s were sites of community organizing and political engagement on issues ranging from gay liberation to feminism. Collaboration Labs focused on five case studies of such spaces: artists Rachel Rosenthal, Barbara T. Smith, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz Starus, Kit Galloway and Sherri Rabnowitz of Electronic Café, and Michael Masucci and John Dorr of EZTV. These five seminal and often overlooked artists and artists groups were fundamental to charting the course for the artist space movement and its vision of egalitarian artistic production and reception.

Exhibition research support: $132,000 (2009); exhibition and publication support: $65,000 (2009)

Grammy Museum
Good Vibrations: Connecting the Music and Pop Art of Southern California, 1960–1980

The Grammy Museum's exhibition focused critical attention on the rise of musical forms that developed out of the specific cultural context of Southern California and quickly influenced one of the most diverse periods of American culture in the post World War II era including cool jazz, surf, the Laurel Canyon folk rock scene, the Sunset Strip rock scene, ‘60s psychedelic rock, punk, Chicano rock, and glam metal. The show included documentary photographs by noted photographers Henry Diltz, Moshe Brakha, Julian Wasser, Bill Claxton, Jim Britt, Joel Brodsky, and Elliot Landy whose iconic images have helped define the varied strains of Southern California's music scene during the decades under review.

Exhibition research support: $120,000 (2010)

Hammer Museum
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980

Now Dig This! was a comprehensive survey of the vital but often overlooked legacy of the city's African American visual artists. Charting the work of key figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, and Betye Saar, the exhibition examined a prevailing artistic shift from didactic artistic modes toward more performance–based practices in these artists' work, presenting it alongside parallel developments in other ethnic communities throughout L.A. This exhibition brought to light the significant network of friendships and collaborations across racial lines and established African American influence on the era's larger movements and trends.

Exhibition research support: $200,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $250,000 (2009)

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
The House that Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945–1975

The Huntington's exhibition focused on master woodworker Sam Maloof, who became a nationally recognized leader of the American Studio movement—a movement that favored the aesthetics of craft and the handmade over the machine and mass–production. The House that Sam Built showcased classic examples of his work, spanning more that twenty–five years of his career, alongside circa 80 works by his friends and colleagues. The exhibition shed new light on the rich network of influences and exchanges that developed among artists and artisans living in the Pomona Valley in this dynamic period of American art.

Exhibition support: $150,000 (2009); publication support: $25,000 (2010)

Japanese American National Museum (JANM)
Drawing the Line: Japanese American Art, Design and Activism in Post–War Los Angeles

Drawing the Line was an ambitious survey that provided an unprecedented perspective on the dynamic diversity and depth of Japanese American contributions to the visual landscape of L.A. in the post–war period. The exhibition examined works of art and historical documents, including video clips, texts, and images from extensive oral histories to illustrate the delicate line that exists between form and function. The diversity and effectiveness of the artistic works represented in the exhibition revealed a narrative about ethnicity and race in Southern California.

Exhibition research support: $60,000 (2009); exhibition support: $50,000 (2009)

LA><ART
Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival

The history of postwar art in Los Angeles is punctuated by dramatic examples of ephemeral artworks and public installations that coincided with the rise of performance art across the country. From Mark di Suvero and the Los Angeles Artists Protest Committee's 1966 Artist's Tower of Protest, erected in response to the Vietnam War, to Judy Chicago's Atmospheres, a series of environmental interventions in public spaces, artists utilized non–traditional exhibition spaces and materials to collapse the divide between art and daily life and create unexpected experiences. LA><ART coordinated a week–long Performance and Public Art Festival that consisted of four key components: ambient public art projects; large–scale single–event spectacles; theatrical performance art; and media interventions.

Performance and public art festival support: $210,000 (2010), $235,000 (2010), $160,000 (2011)

Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA)
Exchange and Evolution: World Wide Video Long Beach 1974–1999

Exchange and Evolution explored the connections forged between the Long Beach Museum of Art and the international video community during the museum's most fertile and dynamic period between 1974 and 1999. The project analyzed the important role that video played in the history of Southern California contemporary art, focusing especially on the international video artists working and exhibiting in the LBMA video production and exhibition program, who influenced video in Southern California and beyond.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $75,000 (2009)

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE)
Los Angeles Goes Live: Exploring the Origins of Performance Art in Southern California

Los Angeles Goes Live explored histories and legacies of performance art in Southern California in the 1970s, emphasizing the evolution of the genre within the context of artistic experimentation that cut across many spheres of cultural production. The show focused on synthesizing the disparate practices of early performance art in the region, and included re–stagings of historic performances.

Exhibition research support: $132,000 (2009); exhibition and publication support: $70,000 (2009)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
California Design, 1930–1965: "Living in a Modern Way" and Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1971–1987

California Design, 1930–1965 was the first major study of California mid–century modern design. With over 300 objects—furniture, ceramics, metalwork, fashion and textiles, and industrial and graphic design—the exhibition examined the state's role in shaping the material culture of the entire country. Organized into four thematic areas, the exhibition's goal was to elucidate the 1951 quote from émigré Greta Magnusson Grossman that is incorporated into the exhibition's title: California design "is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions.... It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way."

Concurrently, LACMA presented Asco: Elite of the Obscure, the first retrospective to examine the wide–ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco(1971–1987). The group began as a tight–knit group of artists from East Los Angeles composed of Harry Gamboa Jr., Willie Herrón, and Patssi Valdez. Taking their name from the forceful word for disgust and nausea in Spanish, Asco used public performance art and multimedia to respond to turbulent socio–political periods in Los Angeles.

Institutional archive support: $122,000 (2004) and $300,000 (2007); exhibition research support: $230,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $275,000 (2009)

Los Angeles Filmforum
Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in L.A. 1945–1980

Alternative Projections focused on the community of filmmakers, artists, curators, and programmers who contributed to the creation and presentation of experimental cinema in Southern California from 1945–1980. The project expanded understanding of how experimental filmmaking evolved by contextualizing its practice in postwar art and film history. In addition to screenings in numerous venues throughout Los Angeles, Alternative Projections coordinated screenings and special events in collaboration with other Pacific Standard Time partners, such as MOCA, REDCAT, Otis College of Art and Design, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Research on experimental film and video art: $118,000 (2008); film series and online publication support: $65,000 (2009).

MAK Center for Art and Architecture
Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design

This exhibition was the first to focus on the formidable range of architectural historian Esther McCoy's practice and affirm her unassailable role as a key figure in American modernism. Author and co-curator Susan Morgan and MAK Center director Kimberli Meyer collaborated in researching McCoy's archives and selecting relevant visual documentation from major institutions nationwide.

Publication support: $20,000 (2011)

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
Under the Big Black Sun: 1974–1981

Under the Big Black Sun examined the exceptional fertility and diversity of art practice in California. The exhibition argued that pluralism reached its apex in California during the mid–to late 1970s, and featured approximately 225 works by 120 artists, ranging from decorative art to representational painting, conceptual performance, spectacular public demonstration, and documentary video to staged photography. Bracketed chronologically by the departure of President Richard Nixon (1974) and the auspicious arrival of President Ronald Reagan (1980), both from California, the exhibition addressed a period of nationwide disillusionment, moral collapse, and de–centeredness.

Institutional archive support: $280,000 (2005); exhibition research support: $238,900 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $250,000 (2009); programming support: $50,000 (2011)

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)
At the Museum's La Jolla and Downtown San Diego locations

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface

Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface focused on perceptual investigations that began in Southern California in the 1960s, fomenting many of the most vanguard practices still engaging younger artists today. Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, Mary Corse, Robert Irwin, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, and Douglas Wheeler were among a cadre of artists whose work focused on visual perception and facilitated an awareness of one's physical body moving through space. The accompanying publication, the first critical reader on this topic, was co–published by MCASD and the University of California Press.

Exhibition research support: $225,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $225,000 (2009)

Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA)
MEX/LA: The Legacy of Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles 1930–1985

As early as 1930, strong links between the art scenes of Los Angeles and Mexico had emerged. Artists such as David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco completed influential murals in greater Los Angeles, and, together with other Mexican modernists such as Alfredo Ramos Martinez and the nationalized French/Mexican painter Jean Charlot, this group stimulated an entire generation of American artists and paved the way for the Mexican American and Chicano artists of later decades. Yet despite Los Angeles's geographical and cultural proximity to Mexico, few exhibitions or publications have examined this legacy in the postwar era. Featuring approximately 100 objects, this exhibition was organized chronologically and addressed works of art in wide-ranging media from murals to performance art.

Exhibition research and support: $100,000 (2010); publication support: $25,000 (2010)

Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1945–1963

Artistic Evolution: Southern California Artists at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, 1945–1963 was inspired by works shown at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (formerly Los Angeles County Museum) through the Annual Exhibition of Los Angeles and Vicinity series and related contemporary exhibitions. The exhibition highlighted the central role of the Museum as a standard-bearer for contemporary art in Southern California in the 1940s-early 1960s and included paintings, drawings, and prints, with loans of works by John Baldessari, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Tony Berlant, Frederick Hammersley, Lorser Feitelson, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, John McLaughlin, Lee Mullican, Mel Ramos, Ed Ruscha, and Betye Saar. Guest curated by art historian Charlotte Eyerman, the exhibition offered a kaleidoscopic view of the Museum's past exhibitions, when art was shown at the Museum until the move of its collections to the then new Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire in the mid-1960s. The establishment of a new museum dedicated to the visual arts, and the subsequent move of NHM's art collections, signaled the beginning of a new era for the continually evolving art scene of Los Angeles, whose institutional roots remain in Exposition Park.

Exhibition support: $75,000 (2011)

Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA)
State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970

State of Mind investigated the development of California's seminal conceptualism and related avant–garde activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s when artists adopted new attitudes and experimented with new forms of art that coincided with the sweeping political and cultural shifts taking place during the same period. State of Mind presented significant developments in the new genres of video, performance, sound art, artist books, and installations made by artists across the state. It featured works by approximately 40 artists, ranging from those who became major international figures to other lesser known artists who nonetheless made important contributions. The exhibition was presented first at OCMA and then traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum.

Exhibition research support: $175,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $225,000 (2009)

Otis College of Art and Design, Ben Maltz Gallery
Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building

From the 1970s through the early 1990s, Los Angeles was home to one of the most internationally renowned sites of feminist activity, the Woman's Building. This center was a space for artistic, social, pedagogical, and political experimentation and provided a multi–faceted community in which innovation was supported. The exhibition contextualized the artists, exhibitions, activities, and the Woman's Building's importance to the development of the Los Angeles art scene.

Exhibition research support: $130,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $95,000 (2009)

Palm Springs Art Museum
Backyard Oasis: The Swimming Pool in Southern California Photography, 1945–1980

Backyard Oasis examined the Southern California swimming pool as depicted in photographs. The backyard pool, as a private setting, became a space to participate in various sub–cultural rituals and to enact clandestine desires. As a medium, photography became the primary vehicle for the circulation of post–World War II imagery. This exhibition traced, for the first time, the integrated history of photography and the iconography of the swimming pool, bringing new light to many aspects of this rich interaction.

Exhibition research support: $146,000 (2009); exhibition and publication support: $100,000 (2009)

Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA)
L.A. Raw: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945–1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy

L.A. Raw mapped the relatively unexplored development of figurative art in Los Angeles in the postwar period. From popular artists of the 1940s and 50s like Rico Lebrun and Howard Warshaw to the resurgence of the body in the 1990s with artists such as Mike Kelley, Catherine Opie, and Paul McCarthy, the show examined the region's figurative tradition and presented an alternative history to the more fashionable lineages of formal abstraction or Duchampian conceptualism.

Publication support: $25,000 (2010)

Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA)
It Happened at Pomona: Art at Pomona College 1969–1973

From 1969 to 1973, the Pomona College Museum of Art presented highly experimental exhibitions of contemporary art curated by Hal Glicksman and Helene Winer. The display of groundbreaking works by artists who bridged the gap between Post–Minimalism and Conceptual Art, such as Michael Asher, Tom Eatherton, and Allen Ruppersberg, formed the educational backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years in Los Angeles, like Pomona alumni Chris Burden, James Turrell, and Mowry Baden. Art at Pomona College 1969–1973 took the form of a series of exhibitions (anchored by a timeline), events, and a publication chronicling the activities of artists, scholars, students, and faculty associated with the college during this period.

Exhibition research support: $190,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $220,000 (2009)

Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Pasadena to Santa Barbara: A Selected History of Art in Southern California 1951–1969

This exhibition focused on the legacy of two of Southern California's leading venues for contemporary art: the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Pasadena Art Museum, which later became the Norton Simon Museum. Taking into consideration both perceived and direct connections between the two cities and institutions, this exhibition featured approximately sixty works by over twenty artists, concentrating on a selection of works from major historic exhibitions at each venue. Artists represented included John Altoon, Richard Diebenkorn, Marcel Duchamp, Llyn Foulkes, Sam Francis, Philip Guston, Ed Kienholz, John McLaughlin, Robert Motherwell, Helen Lundeberg, Larry Rivers, Lee Mullican, Mark Tobey, Emerson Woelffer, Beatrice Wood, and others.

Exhibition and publication support: $100,000 (2010)

Santa Monica Museum of Art
Beatrice Wood: Career Woman—Drawings, Paintings, Vessels, and Objects

Beatrice Wood was a figure worth reexamining as a reflection of the developments and changes in the artistic and cultural milieu of Southern California throughout the 1900s. Career Woman, a comprehensive survey of this seminal California artist, offered a scholarly, commemorative evaluation of Wood, whose extraordinary life and work traversed the entire 20th century. Featuring over sixty artworks, the exhibition traced the arc of Wood's career from her early immersion in the Dada movement through her mature work as a ceramic artist, and surveyed all media of her production, with a particular emphasis on clay.

Exhibition research support: $145,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $75,000 (2009); publication support: $80,000 (2011)

Scripps College
Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price and Peter Voulkos, 1956–1968

During the postwar period, Scripps College was a vital part of the burgeoning ceramics art scene in Los Angeles. Clay's Tectonic Shift examined the role that John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos played in redefining ceramics at mid–century. This exhibition explored the ways in which each artist created a new and distinctive language for clay sculptures, one that claimed for the medium the same freedom of expression that is traditionally accorded to painting and sculpture.

Institutional archive support: $90,000 (2004); exhibition research support: $175,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $90,000 (2009)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center
L.A. XICANO
For related exhibitions at three locations: Autry National Center, LACMA, UCLA Fowler Museum

This series of exhibitions explored the important distinctions and continuities between Mexican American and Chicano art, and among individual painters and artists identified with social movements. The exhibition Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican American Generation at the Autry National Center presented works of art and historic documents. Mapping Another L.A.: The Chicano Art Movement at the UCLA Fowler Museum was an archive–focused exhibition, but also included artworks related to each of the Latino arts organizations featured in the exhibition. The Fowler also presented Icons of the Invisible: Oscar Castillo. The exhibition at LACMA, Mural Remix: Sandra de la Loza, consisted of a research–based commissioned piece by local artist Sandra de la Loza that acted as the aesthetic and historical bridge between the other two exhibitions.

Latino Arts Survey and Cataloguing Project support: $124,000 (2004); $146,800 (2006) and $48,000 (2009); exhibition research support: $225,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $175,000 (2009)

UCLA Film & Television Archive, Billy Wilder Theater
L.A. Rebellion Film Series

The L.A. Rebellion was a strategic chapter in the history of black representation on film. This arts movement of black communities creating film art from the late 1960s to the early 1980s is distinguished by its sustained intellectual rigor, its introduction of watershed films, and the intensity with which it confronted the dilemmas and contradictions inherent in its own aims. The film series featured the major works of at least twelve different filmmakers, who have been identified as members of the L.A. Rebellion, as well as selected examples of films by a second generation of African American UCLA filmmakers who directly reference the L.A Rebellion in their work.

Research for film series and publication: $65,000 (2009); film series support: $50,000 (2009)

University Art Museum
University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)

Carefree California: Cliff May and the Romance of the Ranch

This exhibition examined Los Angeles–based Cliff May's design and business savvy, through which he boldly shaped lifestyle expectations by subtly adapting the rancho sensibility to modern, system-built homes. In the process, May became associated less with specific architectural advancements than he did with the development and dispersal of a relaxed lifestyle model.

Architecture and Design collection archival support: $250,000 (2007); exhibition research support: $140,000 (2008); exhibition and publication support: $100,000 (2009)

University of Southern California
Fisher Museum of Art

Sight Specific: LACPS and the Politics of Community

In 1974, the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS) was formed to encourage the growth and appreciation of photography and to provide an infrastructure for study and exhibition. The organization became a hub for the photographic community, generating opportunities to explore ideas, expand knowledge, and experience new work. Active members included Robert Flick, Eileen Cowin, Jack Butler, Grant Mudford, and Donald Blumberg. The exhibition at the Fisher examined the personalities, programs, and impact of the LACPS and made clear its role in facilitating a critical dialogue crucial to photography's development and acceptance as an art form.

Exhibition research support: $50,000 (2010)

Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM)
'Round the Clock: Chinese American Artists Working in Los Angeles

The Vincent Price Art Museum (VPAM) at East Los Angeles College presented an exhibition of Chinese American artists working in Los Angeles in the postwar decades. Figures such as George Chann, John Kwok, Jake Lee, Milton Quon, and Tyrus Wong came to be known for their work in local creative industries including film, commercial design, and advertising, yet they have received little recognition for their personal artistic endeavors. VPAM aimed to correct this oversight by presenting a survey of these artists' work that included paintings, watercolors, drawings, and animation cells.

Exhibition support: $65,000 (2010)

Additional non–exhibition–related grants were given to:

Art Center College of Design To catalogue the institutional archive. $200,000 (2003)

Autry National Center of the American West For public programming related to the exhibition Art Along the Hyphen: The Mexican American Generation. $25,000 (2010)

California International Arts Foundation For surveys of Los Angeles avant–garde archives. $150,000 (2002); $100,000 (2003); $48,000 (2007)

California State University Northridge Foundation To catalogue Los Angeles–related materials in the Institute for Arts and Media's photographic collection. $80,000 (2010)

Louisiana Museum (Denmark) For the production of an illustrated scholarly catalogue to accompany the American and European tour of artist Ed Kienholz's Five Car Stud (1969-1972). $60,000

Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County For an educational outreach program for schools in downtown Los Angeles to participate in Pacific Standard Time. $37,000

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art To catalogue the Southern California materials in the institutional archive. $222,000 (2006)

Smithsonian Institution To catalogue Southern California archives in the Archives of American Art. $240,000 (2006)

Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections University of California, Los Angeles To catalogue archives related to Southern California avant–garde art and architecture. $190,000 (2005)

University of California Press Foundation Publication support for exhibition catalogues, Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface (MCASD) and State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 (OCMA). $50,000 (2010)

Getty Exhibitions

Though not grant recipients, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute also offered exhibitions as part of Pacific Standard Time:

The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1945–1970

Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1945–1970 offered a fundamental reappraisal and reinterpretation of postwar Los Angeles art, leading viewers on a dynamic tour from the beginnings of an important indigenous modernism in and around Los Angeles to the great diversity of artistic practices that characterized the end of the postwar era. Featuring no more than 50 artists, the exhibition included multiple works from each artist, allowing visitors to get a sense of the distinctiveness of individual practices as well as the place of Southern California artists within broader historical movements.

The Getty Conservation Institute at the Getty Center From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine's Gray Wall

This special display focused on the technical aspects of one of De Wain Valentine's monumental sculptures, Gray Wall. His quest for a material that would allow him to create large-scale single castings while retaining the surface qualities and refractive properties he desired led Valentine to develop an entirely new polyester resin formula. This imposing piece allowed for an in depth study of the materials and manufacturing process—from start to finish—highlighting some of the key aspects of modern materials used in contemporary sculpture. The display also explored the practical and ethical issues surrounding the conservation of these fragile and surface-specific pieces.

The Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center Greetings from L.A.: Artists and Publics 1945–1980

In the postwar years, artists in Southern California developed free–spirited alternatives to the traditional art market. Wallace Berman, George Herms, and their friends circulated handmade works between one another. Others, like Allen Ruppersberg and Ed Ruscha, appropriated mass media and commercial forms to bypass galleries. Meanwhile, art schools provided forums for innovators such as Judy Chicago, John Baldessari, and Maria Nordman, and the peace and feminist movements mobilized artists to reach out to society at large. Through photographs, ephemera, correspondence, and artwork—many on view for the first time—this exhibition surveyed a vibrant artistic community, one built from diverse and varied publics.

The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center In Focus: Los Angeles, 1945–1980

The exhibition presented photographs from the Getty Museum's permanent collection made in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1980 by artists who were influenced by the city.

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