Pacific Standard Time

The last of an absorbing trio of small Pacific Standard Time shows charting an especially rambunctious moment at Pomona College between 1969 and 1973 looks at the work of nine artists who were either students or on the school's faculty. Ranging from accomplished to unresolved, the paintings, photographs, sculptures and installations often ricochet off one another in form and content, underscoring an era of ferment. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, senior curator Rebecca McGrew and Getty Research Institute specialist Glenn Phillips have chosen 53 works for Part 3 of "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles, 1969-1973.

This week, a forgotten work of political art is being reconstructed on Sunset Boulevard. But it is unlikely that the new Tower of Protest, going up as part of the months-long, Southern California-wide Pacific Standard Time art initiative, will spark the kind of reaction it did during its first appearance in 1966. The skirmishes back then began before the tower even existed. One day in January 1966, a group of artists announced their intention on a billboard-sized sign on Sunset near La Cienega Boulevard.

We've heard a great deal in recent months from members of the Pacific Standard Time generation: artists whose work between 1945 and 1980 heralded "the birth of the Los Angeles art scene," in the words of the Getty's PR campaign. Less visible have been the heirs to all this innovation — the artists who've swelled the ranks in the last two decades, standing on the shoulders of PST's giants to capture the attention of curators everywhere. Which gets one to wondering: What have they seen?

ART The Getty's 11-day Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival includes the unveiling of "Kalpa," a site-specific sculptural and performative installation by Hirokazu Kosaka. The piece, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for "eon," incorporates Butoh dancers, live and recorded music, hundreds of spools of colorful thread, and a wall designed by architect Michael Rotondi. Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. 7 p.m. Fri. Free, reservations required.

It's hard to imagine now. But one fact about the early years of the post-World War II art scene in Los Angeles that has been brought into focus by the Pacific Standard Time initiative is that there was no real art museum in what was becoming the nation's second largest city. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art did not exist as a separate entity until it opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 1965. The Museum of Contemporary Art's Grand Avenue location was years away. Much of the energy, then, in the city's art scene in the 1945 to 1980 stretch came from private collectors, artists' collectives, print shops, art schools and especially from commercial galleries.

Esther McCoy is having a moment. The architecture critic and historian, who died in 1989 at age 85, is the subject of a smart Pacific Standard Time exhibition at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, building on McCoy's deep connections with Rudolph Schindler himself. The show is accompanied by a Getty-funded catalog, and early next year East of Borneo Press will publish "Piecing Together Los Angeles," an anthology of McCoy's essays on architecture. What this turn in the spotlight will make clear to the public is what every architecture critic who has spent significant time in this city already knows: It was McCoy who first gave shape to the story of modern architecture in Los Angeles.

The Getty Foundation announced three years ago that its research project to archive material related to Los Angeles art made between the end of World War II and 1980, before it was lost to indifference or time's vagaries, would be expanded to support a series of exhibitions. It seemed a worthy goal. The story of L.A. art's meteoric rise and temporary stumble, before it helped lead the global art explosion of the 1980s, had only been sketchily told. Grants totaling $2.8 million would be made to 15 Southern California institutions to help underwrite shows, targeted to open in 2011.

The shift in ceramics from craft to art form was a quiet revolution in postwar Southern California. "Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945-1975" at the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona explores that big topic through the influence of one man, Millard Sheets, a painter who taught and was an administrator at Chouinard Art Institute, Otis Art Institute and Scripps College. It was Sheets who brought the legendary avant-gardist Peter Voulkos to California to run the ceramics department at Otis.

In the Getty's shiny large catalog for the Pacific Standard Time festival, Igor Stravinsky's name is a mere footnote. He is added to a list of émigré artists, and even there he comes after novelist Thomas Mann and philosopher-critic Theodor Adorno. He meant more. When Stravinsky arrived in Los Angeles from Europe in 1940 — having just married his longtime mistress, Vera Sudeikin — he was 58 and the world's most famous composer. He became an American citizen in 1945 and remained here until 1969, when he moved to New York (where he died in 1972)

One sign of success for a museum exhibition is the willingness of other museums to host the show, bringing it to new audiences nationally or internationally. By that measure, many of the shows that make up Pacific Standard Time, however strong their reviews, are underachievers. Of 60-plus exhibitions from San Diego to Santa Barbara that are part of this initiative, only a handful are confirmed to be traveling beyond California, and none is currently going to New York. A few shows have secured one additional venue.