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“L.A. Raw: Abject Expressionism” in Pasadena
If you think of Los Angeles art as the cool school, get ready to turn up the heat. The Pasadena Museum of California Art has opened one of the more game-changing “Pacific Standard Time” shows, “L.A....
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Cameron: Art, Rockets, and the Pleasure Dome
I’ll bet there can’t be a PST-featured artist with a more colorful backstory than Cameron. Iowa-born Marjorie Cameroun (1922-1995) made art the old-fashioned American way, through compulsive drawing...
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Edgar Payne at PMCA
Those who can’t stand “California impressionism” might take a look at Edgar Payne—the best Left Coast postimpressionist? Through mid October, Payne is the subject of a retrospective at the Pasadena...
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Greta Magnusson Grossman at PMCA
Greta Magnusson Grossman (1906-1999) is having a brilliant posthumous career. She was a star of LACMA’s “California Design, 1930-1965: ‘Living in a Modern Way’”—her words supplying the quoted...
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Is L.A. Ugly? Is Ugly Good?
“I live here because L.A. is ugly,” John Baldessari once said. Civic ungainliness spurs the art-creating instinct, he implied. That could be the subtext for a couple of current museum shows. The Getty...
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PMCA to Show Sam Francis
On August 11 the Pasadena Museum of California Art will open one of its highest-profile exhibitions ever, a five-decade retrospective of Sam Francis. The show was organized with the Crocker Art...
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Alfredo Ramos Martinez at PMCA
One of the most successful Los Angeles (and “Latino”?) artists of the 1930s was Alfredo Ramos Martinez, an authentic Mexican Modernist who settled in California. A Hollywood crowd—Alfred Hitchcock,...
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June Wayne’s Kafka Paintings
June Wayne is so often identified as the founder of Tamarind Lithography that her own art has gotten short shrift. The Pasadena Museum of California Art’s “June Wayne: Paintings, Prints, and...
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Jess & Co. Coming to PMCA
It isn’t often that a show organized by Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum gets rave reviews in New York. “An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle” did, and this fall it touches...
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Bohemia on the Bay
Long ago, when the 20th century was middle-aged and San Francisco real estate was a whole lot cheaper, an artist (Jess [Collins]) and his poet partner (Robert Duncan) lived in bohemian splendor,...
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Corita Kent Gets a Retrospective
In the mid 1960s, the most famous L.A. artist just might have been Corita Kent. Pegged by the media as the Pop Art-making nun, “Sister Mary Corita” [Kent] is due for reappraisal. Her method was to...
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