Art and Art History: Los Angeles and Southern California

Art of Engagement takes the first comprehensive look at the key role of California's art and artists in politics and culture since 1945.

In this vivacious collection of color portraits of 82 L.A. artists with their work, accompanied solely, and highly effectively, by the artists' verbal statements. The artists' own voices, reflecting with eloquence, passion, humor and poetry on concepts, communication, process, necessity and the stimulus of L.A. itself, add a compelling perspective to the nature of this subtly complex relationship.

L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980 is the first comprehensive pictorial showcase of the diverse universe of artists working in the Los Angeles area during the formative period of Los Angeles' art history. Over 800 color and 100 black and white images of work by almost 500 artists illustrate the edited texts quoted from critical reviews of exhibitions and writings of the period.

The modernist pioneers of Los Angeles art and architecture made statements in their work and legacies, but they were every bit as much a community as they were individual satellites of expression. This book is about a secret Los Angeles, a Los Angeles filled with optimism about a different kind of "city of the future."

LA Artland is a survey of one of the most vibrant and influential art scenes of recent decades. The focus of this publication is on extensive visual documentation of contemporary artists working in Los Angeles now.

Live Art in LA: Performance Art in Southern California, 1970-1983 documents and critically examines one of the most fecund periods in the history of live art.

In the 1960s, a group of Los Angeles artists fashioned a body of work that has come to be known as the "LA Look" or West Coast Minimalism. The author uses the methods of technical art history to inform her investigation of conservation issues associated with their work, thereby illuminating challenges facing the conservation of contemporary art in general.

In this original and engaging book, Cécile Whiting examines what Pop looked like when it left the highbrow cloisters of Manhattan's art galleries and ventured westward to the sprawling suburbs of Los Angeles.

Von Blum deftly organizes his material around the triatic theme of "Resistance, Dignity, and Pride" to problematize the thematic of this body of artists who nevertheless share overlapping concerns about identity, culture, activism, and all the tragic variables traceable to the trauma of the African diaspora.

This book, full of rare illustrations, surveys and documents the work of West Coast artists from 1945 to the 1970s, with glances back to the art schools and movements of the first half of the century.

Since the 1960s, Los Angeles has been a hub for groundbreaking art. This slim volume features work by Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Douglas Huebler, Larry Johnson, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Maria Nordman, Raymond Pettibon, Stephen Prina, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Williams.

Working between the 1960s and early 1990s, the artists profiled in this compendium represent a broad cross section of L.A.'s art scene. With nearly 400 illustrations and ten essays, this volume presents histories of artistic experimentation and reveals networks of collaboration and exchange that resulted in some of the most intriguing art of late 20th-century America.

Based upon a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2006, Catalog L.A. illuminates a radical period that forever altered the landscape of contemporary art.

Taking its name from Frank Lloyd Wright's quip, "Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles," this book argues that L.A.'s famous cultural "looseness" permitted exciting developments in art and architecture, with the two disciplines mingling freely and borrowing from one another.

L.A. Xicano accompanies four interrelated exhibitions that explore the diverse artistic contributions of Mexican American and Chicano artists to American art and to Los Angeles's artistic development since 1945.

This volume explores the art of Light and Space and related "finish fetish" pieces with highly polished surfaces. Light, Space, Surface draws on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's deep holdings of this material, revealing the vibrancy and diversity of this slice of American art history.

This opulent and expansive volume, published in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's monumental exhibition Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, charts the dynamic relationship between the arts and popular conceptions of California.

Bringing together the work of 60 artists from in and around Los Angeles--many of them emerging or under-recognized--this collection of paintings, sculpture, installations, and stills from video and performance art offers a snapshot of the current trends and practices coming out of one of the world's most active and energetic art communities.

Celebrating the Hammer Museum's biennial, this volume brings together the work of thirty-five emerging and under-recognized artists from Los Angeles.

This book presents work featured in the 2018 edition of Made in L.A., the Hammer Museum's biennial exhibition.Spanning sculpture, painting, installation, film and video, music, and performance, the exhibition is dedicated to giving emerging artists a platform alongside influential artists of an earlier generation.

Made in L.A. 2020: a version brings together an intergenerational and interdisciplinary mix of artists, each of whom is contributing to L.A.'s vibrant art scene. Drawing inspiration from historical artist magazines, this book is not documentation of the artists' work, but rather serves as an additional venue for the exhibition.

From the Olvera Street mural by Siqueiros, to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and the Disney silver-screen productions, to the revitalization of the street mural, up to the performance art of Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "MEX/LA" explores the bi-national and hybrid forms of artistic practices, popular culture and mass-media arts that have so uniquely shaped Los Angeles' cultural panorama.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.

The Chicano Civil Rights Movement (El Movimiento) of the 1960s and 1970s protested the social, political, and educational inequalities in Mexican American communities across the country, primarily in the Southwest. Chicana/Chicano muralists also took to the streets with their art creating works that expressed cultural pride, embodied political activism, and challenged the status quo.

The pioneering work of a group of black artists is documented in this companion volume to a groundbreaking exhibition. This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost.

Published to accompany an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum from 1 October 2011 through 5 February 2012, and at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin from 15 March through 10 June 2012.

Decades before today s major Los Angeles museums realized the potential of contemporary art, the pioneering institutions Pasadena Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art under curator directors Thomas Leavitt and Walter Hopps championed talented local and internationally recognized painters.

By tracing the local printmaking communities, the academic establishment, as well as the significant influence of workshops like Gemini G E L and Cirrus Editions, the catalogue addresses the spectacular spread of printmaking from its modern beginnings in Southern California within the larger narrative of post-war American art.

R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona celebrates the 50th Project Series at Pomona College with a milestone exhibition connecting the extraordinary artists who have participated in the Project Series to a new generation of artists working in Southern California.

A remarkable catalog of a remarkable exhibition in 1999, recreating a fertile and exciting period in the artistic past of Southern California. During the `60s and early `70s, the old Pasadena Art Museum - now the Norton Simon Museum - aggressively collected the finest art of the moment, and brought together cutting edge Los Angeles artists like Llyn Foulkes and Ed Kienholz, along with world renowned artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Frank Stella.

This publication presents an essential assessment of the vital and influential art scene in Southern California since 1990. Contemplating the sociopolitical context, the available cultural tools and the importance of certain Californian artists both on an aesthetic level and as teachers, the book offers perspectives on the singular Southern California art scene.

This catalog was published accompanying an exhibition organized by Maudette W. Ball for the Laguna Beach Museum of Art which took place July 24- Septmeber 13, 1981. It offers a complete list of plates of the exhibition in full color along with an introduction of the main themes held within the works.

Sunshine & Noir takes a look at the art and the artists that define art in L.A., featuring full-color examples from the work of over fifty Los Angeles artists, an in-depth chronology, interviews, biographies and essays by major critics such as Mike Davis. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Sunshine & Noir. Art in L.A. 1960-1997 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, May 16-September 7, 1997.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Fisher Gallery, University of California.

This third volume of the "Place & Time" series highlights the interplay of utopia and dystopia--sunshine and noir--that characterized Los Angeles in the postwar era, and which has since vitally impacted contemporary art. Works by Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Ed Kienholz, Sam Francis and James Turrell, among others, form the core of the volume, and the diversity of artistic practices explored here reveal similar influences, but a variety of media and methodologies.

Examining art-making in California during a tumultuous transitional period, this catalogue accompanying a remarkable exhibition features approximately 125 California artists working in a wide array of media: from installation art to representational painting, from conceptual art to performance art, and from video to photography.

Featuring the work of 14 Los Angeles artists, the exhibition Wasteland and its accompanying catalogue are inspired by the unlikely meeting, in the city of Paris, of the LA-as-cultural-wasteland myth with T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Waste Land.”

Challenging historical accounts that situate the city's origins as an art center in the 1960s, Art and the City argues that debates over modernism among artists and civic leaders alike made art a charged political site as early as the 1910s.

The Beat and the Buzz is one-third a history of the Los Angeles art world since 1970, one-third about the psycho-dynamics of how people make it, or don't, and one-third art world gossip and stories.

Black Arts West documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Also available as an e-book: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1134fs5

Conceived as a challenge to long-standing conventional wisdom, Creating the Future is a work of social history/cultural criticism that examines the premise that the progress of art in Los Angeles ceased during the 1970s and didn't resume until sometime around 1984.

A social and cultural history of Los Angeles and its emerging art scene in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Here, at last, is the book that tells the saga of how the scene came into being, why a prevailing Los Angeles permissiveness, 1960s-style, spawned countless innovations.

In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Also available as an e-book: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hpmsq

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs.

Collaboration Labs: Southern California Artists and the Artists Space Movement investigates five artists and artists' groups that have been central to the alternative artists' space movement in Southern California since the early 1970s.

Cruising the Archive: Queer Art and Culture in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 explores the rich history of queer art, activism and culture in Los Angeles through artworks, documents, and archival items culled entirely from the collections at ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, the largest LGBTQ archive in the United States.

From its space in Boyle Heights, ART2102 hosted a vibrant program known for its open cultural discourse and flexibility of ideas, and for engaging both local and international artists at various stages in their careers. Dispatches and Directions, the final publication and project of ART2102, does not simply document this history, but also emulates the organization’s role as a platform and a network by spotlighting a number of the artists-run collaborations that are currently active in Los Angeles, and that will continue to thrive as ART2102 recedes.

Doin' It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building comprises an exhibition, two scholarly publications and a series of public events that document, contextualize and pay tribute to the groundbreaking work of feminist artists and art cooperatives that were centered in and around the Los Angeles Woman's Building (downtown L.A.) in the 1970s and 1980s.

In March 1957, Ed Kienholz, in collaboration with curator Walter Hopps, co-founded one of California's greatest historical galleries, Ferus. A Place to Begin is an illustrated oral history of this heroic enterprise. With 62 new interviews with Ferus artists and more than 300 photographs (most previously unpublished), it retrieves a lost chapter of twentieth-century American art.

Since 1999, the Hammer Museum's Hammer Projects series has furnished international and local artists with a laboratory-like environment to create new work or to present existing work in a new context.

From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art, in Claremont, California. Providing unprecedented and revelatory insight into the art history of postwar Los Angeles, It Happened at Pomona chronicles the activities of artists, scholars, students and faculty associated with the College during this period.

Since 1978, LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, has been an integral artist-run organization committed to presenting the work of Southern California artists. This book presents an abundance of material from LACE's archive.

Self Help Graphics has been a national model for community-based art making and art-based community making since its founding in the early 1970s. Known for its groundbreaking printmaking and art education programs, Self Help Graphics has empowered local artists and taught the world about the vibrancy of Chicano/Latino art.

Wallace Berman's (1926-1976) larger community is the subject of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle ,a catalogue to the exhibition organized by the Santa Monica Muesum of Art including previously unexhibited works by 52 artists. Showcasing the individuals who came to define a still potent strand of post-war beat counterculture, Semina Culture subtly outlines the energies, values, and foibles of this fascinating circle.

In the communities of Los Angeles, artists, cultural institutions and activities exist in ways that are often concealed from sight, obscured by the powerful presence of Hollywood and its machinations. In this significant collection of original essays, The Sons and Daughters of Los reconstructs the city of Los Angeles with new cultural connections. Each essay examines a particular piece of, or place in, Los Angeles cultural life: from the Beyond Baroque Poetry Foundation, the Woman's Building, to Highways, and LACE, as well as the achievements of these grassroots initiatives.