FACES
Los Angeles-based artist Ruth Weisberg exuberantly leaps in front of her colorful, dream-like painting. Performance artist Kaylynn Sullivan peers out from her Harlem rooftop. Painter Joan Semmel mimics the expression in her huge self-portrait. Jean Edelstein is at work, painting a fluid model with a large brush.
These women artists are captured in the photographs of Los Angeles photographer Kenna Love. They're part of a book Love put together with art critic Betty Ann Brown and art historian Arlene Raven called "Exposures: Women and Their Art." And the photographs compose an exhibit of the same name that runs through Aug. 12 at the Los Angeles Photography Center.
Love has photographed 50 women artists interacting with their art, and, in the process, she has created art herself. She said she didn't just shoot away; the process of getting the photos just right was painstaking. "I met with the artists, looked at their work, and tried to envision what they're trying to say with their art, and convey that into a photo," said Love, who works out of a downtown loft.
Because she was dealing with creative women, she tried to make the project collaborative. "I asked the women artists to contribute, to come up with their own ideas of how they wanted the pictures to be taken," said the 43-year-old Love.
The result is a collection of photos Love said is as diverse and unique as the artists represented. Love took pictures of young women and older women--painters, sculptors and performance artists--from throughout the United States.
"The hardest thing was making all the photographs different," said Love, but it was a task she accomplished. Some of the women seem quiet and pensive next to their work, others are in frenzied motion. Some are pictured in studios, homes or outdoors, and one is in front of her work along with her perky young son, who appears in her painting.
Love's favorite is the photo of Weisberg, as she dances past her huge painting of men and women with arms linked. "That one is just special to me," she said.
To Love, a predominantly commercial photographer who sees the exhibit as her breakthrough to the art world, the message of the exhibit rings loud and clear: that women artists are not second-class citizens in the art world. "I want to promote greater awareness, that women are out there doing substantial art also."
So far, Love said, it's been empowering for women to see the photographs. "Women really get involved. It's a powerful connection they're making between the artists and their work, as well as what this says about women artists."
THE SCENE
Artists including Jenny Holzer, Robert Nedboy and Robert Yarber have joined MTV: Music Television's latest advertising campaign by creating a series of print ads that premiered in Thursday's issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Each of the artists has created an original work to visually interpret the cable TV channel's signature line, "Just when you think you know what it is, it's MTV." MTV hopes the artists' involvement in the ads will help bring back maturing viewers who "grew up with MTV but are now kind of falling out of it." The first artist to be featured in the campaign is painter and illustrator Janet Woolley, who has exhibited in several galleries throughout Europe and is a lecturer at London's Central St. Matin's School of Arts.
The L.A. Municipal Art Gallery will be turned over for architectural shows this month, with two exhibitions opening Tuesday and running through Aug. 19. "Recycling L.A." presents six theoretical projects critiquing L.A. architecture, and "Pride in Civic Architecture II" presents the works of 10 firms that have received the L.A. Cultural Affairs Commission Awards for Architectural Design 1990.
Jack Rutberg Gallery is making some changes, but it is \o7 not\f7 joining the rush to Santa Monica. The gallery has decided to remodel its current La Brea Avenue home and will be closed until approximately the end of September. The gallery plans a re-opening celebration in October.
Advance tickets for the L.A. County Museum of Art's major exhibition "Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection" go on sale Monday at all Ticketmaster outlets including May Company and Music Plus stores. The show runs from Aug. 1 to Nov. 11 and features 54 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, watercolors and drawings.
OVERHEARD
American art "lacks the age-old connection between heaven and Earth," according to a gray-haired artist from Leningrad, when asked how he liked art in the United States, at a reception at the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery. A Southern California critic responded, "Well, God is dead now anyway."
