L.A.'s artistic roots

"Everyone should be remembered," says Lyn Kienholz, director of the California/International Art Foundation, who has taken on the herculean task of compiling "Los Angeles Art and Artists 1940-1980," an encyclopedia of more than 600 artists, galleries, art schools, exhibitions and related events. Staff members at museums and art schools are also busy, delving into their institutions' past. At LACMA, curator Lynn Zelevansky has detailed the museum's rocky relationship with contemporary art in a book about the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Across town, Otis College of Art and Design is celebrating its 90-year history in a two-volume publication, "Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art."

It's about time that all this history is being dredged up and recorded, the curators and authors say. The accomplishments of Los Angeles' artists have been obscured by the entertainment industry and largely ignored by the New York-based publishing industry. But the contemporary art scene has developed on its own terms. And globalization has helped to put L.A.'s leading artists on the world's map. Before the 1990s, when young artists found that they didn't have to live in New York to have big careers, only a few isolated figures -- such as Edward Kienholz, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy -- made the leap.

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Global acclaim

Zelevansky, who came to LACMA from the Museum of Modern Art in New York 13 years ago and travels widely in contemporary art circles, is among those who have noticed a big change. "People outside of Los Angeles suddenly realized what's been going on here," she says. "We are very chic and trendy in Europe and South America. Everybody thinks we are the place in the United States."

At the Getty, Thomas Crow, who led the research institute from 2000 to 2007, is credited with creating a larger presence for contemporary art. The library expanded its postwar holdings enormously, including a trove of video work amassed by the Long Beach Museum of Art, and Perchuk took charge of contemporary programs and research during Crow's tenure.

The Getty Foundation has always supported local institutions, but its involvement with Southern California art history has escalated in recent years.

Joan Weinstein, the foundation's associate director, says that 2002 was a turning point, sparked by a conversation with Lyn Kienholz and Henry Hopkins, a UCLA professor emeritus who has directed the Hammer Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.