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When an art museum reinstalls its permanent collection of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, perspectives can be freshened, recent scholarship given a platform and surprises unwrapped.
Last week, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened a permanent collection installation for Modern art some 250 works by nearly 200 artists. There’s a lot to see. Here are three unanticipated examples.
First: Does the name Cecil de Blaquière Howard ring a bell? If not, you’re not alone. Until last week, the artist was unknown to me.
But in the new installation on the third floor of the BCAM building, a small painted sculpture dated 1915 to 1917 stands on a pedestal between famous, powerhouse paintings by Henri Matisse (“Tea,” 1919) and Fernand Léger (“The Disks,” 1918-1919). Like them, that little sculpture, acquired by the museum two years ago, is marvelous.
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The year was 1969. It was a time of social protest over civil rights and representation issues. Those protests echoed at UCLA, where Mexican American students were demanding improved access to higher education, as well as greater resources devoted to the study of the Mexican experience in the U.S.
Enter the university’s Mexican American Cultural Center, which was established to support research in what was then the new field of Chicano studies. In the 52 years since, that center now known as the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) has grown from a small student- and faculty-led initiative to a full-blown academic center, supporting original research and publications, the maintenance of archival collections and a library.
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Every now and then over the past half-century, wallpaper has stepped forward to play an unexpected leading role in art.
Yes, wallpaper.
In the 1960s there was Andy Warhol’s frilly pink cows, which queered Picasso’s self-identification as art’s macho bull. In the ‘70s, Tina Girouard went around the bend of Conceptual art, replacing rigorously mathematical wall drawings with geometric bits of grandma’s parlor décor. Later, Jim Isermann affixed abstract vinyl decals to museum walls, transforming a high art institution into a domestic home for acute DIY craft.
Now, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wallpaper is a linchpin in a marvelously multidimensional installation by Cauleen Smith.
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