Lucas Museum Adds Vincent Valdez Series
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| Vincent Valdez, Excerpts for John, 2012. Lucas Museum of Narrative Art |
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has acquired Vincent Valdez's Excerpts for John, a series of six grisaille paintings of a military funeral. The deceased, John R. Holt, Jr., was the artist's childhood best friend, a combat medic in Iraq whose battle with PTSD ended in suicide. All six paintings are oil on canvas and measure 24 by 36 inches. They are currently on view at MASS MoCA in "Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream…," co-organized with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Excerpts for John was shown at LACMA in 2017, and Valdez wrote a post on it for the museum's Unframed blog.
Valdez's work has been popular with Los Angeles-area institutions. The MASS MoCA show also includes loans from LACMA and the Cheech Marin Center. My guess is that the serial ("narrative") format of Excerpts for John factored in the Lucas acquisition. It's an odd way to collect, but the Valdez paintings add to the Lucas' small holding of mainstream contemporary art. The Lucas collection has works by Robert Colescott, David Hockney, Roxy Paine, Yinka Shonibare, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Kara Walker.
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| Excerpts for John as installed at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2025. Photo: Ruben C. Cordova |
Comments
There is no "great chain of being." One is always forcing some grand metanarrative on a bunch of "homeless" or "strange" objects.
There's a tipping point (I think) for any great collection when the objects themselves begin to tell a story about the collector's own preoccupations. When the minor becomes the major, not by intention, but by chance...
I don't think the Lucas Collection is near that tipping point. And, it certainly won't get there if it keeps chasing its own tail --- a meta-narrative about narrative.
--- J. Garcin
Meanwhile, Forbes has posted an article about the Geffen Galleries. I have a sense that the opinion of its author, Tom Teicholz, will end up mirroring mines. The one sentence that stood out the most to me is the one that worries me the most---beyond reduced square footage or less suitable exhibit space:
Forbes: "Inside the building is all one large columnless space with grey concrete floors and walls, with several rooms, most of which struck me as too small for separate exhibitions and somewhat claustrophobic."
The writer also ended his piece with a head scratcher. LACMA 60 years ago (or its predecessor in Expo Park) wasn't built for merely modern-contemporary art. So is the putdown of "a de facto museum of contemporary art, but frankly...not a very good one" somehow being mistaken for what the museum actually wasn't supposed to be?
> "When LACMA opened in
> 1965, it was LA’s first
> contemporary and modern
> art museum."
The Geffen has made me wonder why William Pereira designed the Ahmanson Gallery to have four levels instead of, at most, three. Its northern side in 1965 could have been extended where its namesake foundation funded an add-on in the 1980s. The top level of that building was always like the attic, whereas its lowest level always made me think of a basement. Beyond its shorter ceiling height, Its dark tile floor always looked or felt uncomfortable.
The regrettable (or likely) shortcomings of Zumthor 2026 are forcing me to look more closely at Pereira 1965. However, I don't think a tourist from, for example, Minnesota will be as dismissive of LACMA 2026 as they were of Pereira's/Hardy-Holzman-Pfeiffer's LACMA 1986. So something had to be done. But I'll always suspect Govan's lack of total transparency for over 10 years as not helping make the rebuilt museum turn out much better.
People are so inured to all the crappy/flashy design in LA that they don't know better. And that includes in my mind Walt Disney Hall. It reminds me of a homeless encampment. It's tent-like form squats, quite literally on top of a parking garage. On two sides, you can see the structure of the parking garage. But hey, if you make the "tent" out of stainless steel you can fool almost everyone into thinking it looks more like a flower or ship.
LA did not need another building like that. It also did not need a museum building that fits all the current cliches of what a museum building is: skylit galleries, sheetrock walls, windowless exteriors, blocky massing, and some slick gimmick for a facade.
What Zumthor is aiming for here is something more elemental and eternal. One of the precursors here is Cezanne, specifically his rock paintings. Cezanne's rock paintings were not images of fleeting sensations (i..e., Impressionism), but were images of something wore weighty and hard-edged. They have been described as having a "primal, beginning of the world quality." Of course, if you don't know much about art history or did not have the opportunity to read the recent NYT article on Cezanne, everything looks to you like a "defacto museum of contemporary art."
--- J. Garcin