In the eyes of the art world, Los Angeles is a city of the future. Forever re-creating its art scene with new galleries, updated museums, unconventional outposts and the latest crop of graduates from Southern California schools, L.A. seems to be a place where the only way to look at the arts is forward.
But change is in the wind. More and more writers, curators, filmmakers and historians are digging into the origins and evolution of the cultural landscape. Whether focusing on small slices of Southern California or looking at L.A. in a statewide context, they are turning local art history into a hot topic. "There's an explosion of interest," says Susan Ehrlich, an art historian, independent curator and former West Coast regional collector for the Archives of American Art. "The art schools and artists here are getting a lot of attention, and that leads eyes back to history."
The phenomenon will become abundantly clear in October 2011, when -- in a coordinated effort -- four major institutions will open ambitious exhibitions on chapters of the region's artistic past.
Andrew Perchuk, head of contemporary programs and research at the Getty Research Institute, is planning a survey of Southern California painting and sculpture from the late 1940s to the early '70s, to be presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Building a case for an alternative to the New York-centric view of contemporary art history, he will focus on Southern California's distinctive approach to Modernism, Minimalism, Conceptualism and feminist art.
"I'm a pretty good example of how views of Los Angeles' art history have changed," Perchuk says. "I grew up and spent my first 30 years in New York at the height of New York's parochialism, when it really was believed that if it didn't happen there, you didn't have to know about it. I came to Los Angeles in the late '80s and was just amazed by how remarkable the work being done was."
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'Material culture'
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, decorative arts curator Wendy Kaplan is organizing "California Design, 1930-65: 'Living in a Modern Way,' " a 300-piece traveling show of furniture, fashion, functional objects and graphic arts. Downtown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, chief curator Paul Schimmel is working on "California Culture," an eclectic compendium of inventive visual arts that flourished in the 1970s. And the Hammer Museum has engaged Kellie Jones, an art historian at Columbia University, to assemble a show about African American artists who worked in L. A. in the 1960s and '70s.
