Artist and educator Roland Reiss dies at age 91
Roland Reiss, Human Nature, 2012, Oil, acrylic, and vinyl on canvas.
LOS ANGELES, CA
.- We are saddened to announce the death of Roland Reiss, artist and educator, loving husband, father, and grandfather, who passed away on Sunday, December 13, of natural causes in Los Angeles, at his home and studio at The Brewery Artist Lofts. He was 91.
Reiss is widely known for his miniatures but is foremost a painter. An influential and beloved voice in the Los Angeles and Southern California art scene, Reiss exhibited widely throughout his sixty-year career. He was included in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, documenta 7 (1982), and received fourteen solo museum exhibitions, including The Dancing Lessons: 12 Sculptures (1977) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A retrospective at the Begovich Gallery at Cal State Fullerton (2014) highlighted his career of continual self-reinvention, which led to a groundbreaking body of work.
Part of a year-end series revisiting subjects of some of our most popular arts articles of the year.
For the art world, 2020 was the year that the Black Lives Matter movement spurred a deeper conversation about inclusion and equity, ultimately leading some museums to sell off works by certain artists usually white, often male ostensibly to diversify their permanent collections.
While deaccessioning pieces from collections is not unheard of, museums have historically followed ethical guidelines and invoked the process only when art is damaged or decided to be fake, or when it no longer fits their mission. But then COVID-19 came along.
The Aluminare House as it appeared in the 1930s
After three years of travelling across the continent and sitting in a container, the iconic Aluminaire House designed by Albert Frey and A. Lawrence Kocher has found a future home on the grounds of the Palm Springs Art Museum in California. The boxy 1,100 sq. ft house was gifted to the museum by the Aluminaire House Foundation, founded by the architects and academics Michael Schwarting and Frances Campani.
“We think this is the perfect location and relationship to how the house will continue,” says Schwarting, who helped save the structure from demolition in the late 1980s. Palm Springs already boasts a number of Frey’s other landmark buildings, including the City Hall and the Tramway Gas Station.
For the record:
11:33 AM, Dec. 11, 2020An earlier version of this post said the Palm Springs Art Museum is in Florida. It is in California.
The deaccessioning of artworks from a museum’s permanent collection is widely and deeply frowned upon. Times critic Christopher Knight called MoLAA’s mass unloading of work by artists from Central and South America, Cuba, Mexico and the United States “a virtual fire sale of art” that was an “unprecedented bulk-removal of works from the museum’s collection.”
MoLAA’s collection consisted of 1,333 objects, so the auction at which 44 of the 59 key works actually sold amounted to a reduction of about 3.3%.