At MOCA Geffen, "Judith F. Baca: World Wall" (Sep. 10, 2022–Feb. 19, 2023) extends the string of local Baca exhibitions with a presentation of her mural-without-walls, World Wall: A Vision of the Future Without Fear.
 |
| Lee In-sung, From a Mountain Valley in Gyeongju, 1934 |
LACMA's "The Space Between: The Modern in Korean Art" (Sep. 11, 2022–Feb. 19, 2023) assembles about 130 ink and oil paintings, sculptures, and photographs tracing the influence of the Western avant garde on Korean tradition and innovation. Above is a painting by Lee In-sung, known as the Gauguin of Korea. Huh? "The Space Between" ought to be a revelation.
 |
| Mary Lee Bendolph, Image of Formal Presidents, 2000. |
The Huntington's "Gee's Bend: Shared Legacy" (Sep. 17, 2022–Sep. 4, 2023) will showcase recent purchases of two Gee's Bend quilts and a set of color soft ground etchings by Gee's Bend artists. It's a year-long display in two rotations in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.
The California African American Museum has tapped Lauren Halsey for a large-scale installation in its atrium-lobby (Sep. 21, 2022–May 7, 2023).
 |
| My Barbarian |
October
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, offers the West Coast debut of "My Barbarian" (Oct. 1, 2022– TBA), the political-absurdist theater trio's performance and installation that was seen at the Whitney last fall. Also on view is "Rebecca Morris," a retrospective of the inventive abstractionist.
 |
| William Mortensen, Self-portrait as a Magician. Laguna Art Museum |
The Laguna Art Museum's "Photography & Seduction: William Mortensen's Laguna Beach" (Oct. 1, 2022–Jan. 15, 2023) celebrates a photographer from the wrong side of good taste's tracks. Want cheesy, zexy, creepy, scratched-into-the-negative fakeloo? Better call Bill! As precursor to camp and Hollywood f/x, Mortenson was anathema to Group f/64. Ansel Adams called him the anti-Christ. The Laguna show will offer a fitting rebuttal: a pro-Mortensen film narrated by Vincent Price.
 |
| Fred Eversley, Untitled, 1976. OCMA. Photo: ofstudio |
The Orange County Museum of Art opens its new Thom Mayne/Morphosis building at Segerstrom Center, Costa Mesa, on Oct. 8 (at 5 PM on a Saturday). Inaugural exhibitions are the "California Biennale 2022" (through Jan. 2, 2023), "Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World)" (also through Jan. 2), and "13 Women" (through Oct. 1, 2023). The latter is a collection display of works by women artists (Joan Brown, Vija Celmins, Mary Heilmann…) in honor of the 13 women founders of the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, precursor to OCMA. The Eversley show, a 50-year retrospective, follows the OC museum's 1978 Eversley exhibition.
 |
| Brigitte Lacombe, Joan Didion, New York, 1996. |
The Hammer's "Joan Didion: What She Means" (Oct. 9, 2022–Jan. 8. 2023) is the season's wild card. Critic/essayist Hilton Als curates (he organized small, perfect shows on Celia Paul and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye for the Yale Center for British Art and Huntington). "Joan Didion" is to be a vastly bigger group exhibition organized around Didion, an artist of prose, film, and thought. Film clips and documents will be shown alongside some 250 works by 50 of Didion's bicoastal contemporaries: Maren Hassinger, John Koch, Helen Lundeberg, Liz Larner, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, and Pat Steir.
 |
| Bob Thompson, Blue Madonna, 1961. Detroit Institute of Arts |
"Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine" (Hammer, Oct. 9, 2022–Jan. 8. 2023) is the final venue of a traveling retrospective of the beat/60s Black painter. Thompson leveraged European art history to invent a mystic, engaged, and often literary art.
 |
| Pablo Picasso, untitled. Musée National Picasso, Paris |
Another Hammer show, "Picasso Cut Papers" (Oct. 9, 2022–Dec. 31, 2022), spotlights one of the least-known phases of the alpha modernist's work. Some objects are clever cubist origami, but even more intriguing are those that look nothing like Picasso's other productions. The cut papers demand comparison to Matisse's prismatic post-war cut-outs. Unlike Matisse, Picasso created cut paper pieces throughout his long career and rarely sold them. He documented and preserved them, like Emily Dickinson, as a gift to a posterity that might be… us.
 |
| Kaj Franck, Goblet, model KF 486, designed 1968 |
LACMA's "Scandinavian Design and the United States, 1890-1980" (Oct. 9, 2022–Feb. 5, 2023) explores a more familar thread of global modernism. It chronicles the migration of Nordic designers to the U.S. and the marketing of Scandinavian modernism to American consumers, from Dansk to Ikea to hygge.
 |
| Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis of a Small Emperor Moth on a Damson Plum, 1679. J. Paul Getty Museum |
 |
| Winged Isis Pectoral, 538-519 BCE. Boston Museum of Fine Arts |
At the Getty Villa, "Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston" (Oct. 12–Apr. 3, 2023) will draw from the East Coast collection of works in gold and ivory, from ancient Egypt's rival kingdom.
 |
Códice Maya de México, about 1100 CE
|
"Códice Maya de México" (Getty Center, Oct. 18, 2022–Jan. 15, 2023) is the first U.S. loan in 50 years of the oldest book made in the Americas. One of just four surviving pre-contact Mayan manuscripts, it was created as a sacred almanac devoted to the movements of the planet that NASA calls Venus. Discovered only in the 1960s, the fragmentary Códice Maya was displayed at New York's Grolier Club and then restituted to Mexico. It's a cultural marvel contemporary with the Getty's oldest European manuscripts.
 |
| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856. National Gallery, London |
Speaking of Picasso, the ubiquitous Spaniard resurfaces in Pasadena. "Picasso Ingres: Face to Face" (Norton Simon Museum, Oct. 21, 2022–Jan. 30, 2023) will unite the Norton Simon
Woman with a Book with the Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres portrait that inspired it,
Madame Moitessier. Both are fantastic, and there's nothing like
Madame in an L.A. collection.
November
On Nov. 3 the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opens new rotations of its core exhibitions. They include focused displays on The Godfather and Agnès Varda.
"Henry Taylor: B Side" (MOCA Grand Avenue, Nov. 6, 2022–Apr. 30, 2023) is the long-anticipated retrospective of the L.A. painter, the first in Los Angeles. MOCA will bring together informal portraits, mural-scale allegories, installations of found objects, and mini-paintings on cereal boxes and cigarette packs.
 |
William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time, 2012. The Broad
|
The Broad's "William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows" (Nov. 12, 2022–Apr. 9. 2023) is a career survey with 130 works, among them all the Broad's holdings, in an exhibition design by Sabine Theunissen. The show coincides with the American premiere of Kentridge's staging of Ferdinand Oyono's 1956 novel Houseboy at REDCAT.
 |
| Jingdezhen Porcelain, Chairman Mao ready to swim with the people, 20th century |
At the Wende Museum is "(De)Constructing Ideology: The Cultural Revolution and Beyond" (Nov. 13, 2022–Mar. 12, 2023). It explores the porcelain propaganda of Jingdezhen during Mao's Cultural Revolution. These are Chinese appropriations of Western kitsch that was itself an appropriation of a Chinese invention.
 |
| Uta Barth, …and of time (AOT 4), 2000. Getty Museum |
"Uta Barth: Peripheral Vision" (Getty Center, Nov. 15, 2022–Feb. 19, 2023) spans the artist's career as a photographer of sublime nothingness. It debuts a Getty-commissioned work.
The Fowler Museum's "Visualizing Devotion: Jain Embroidered Shrine Hangings" (Nov. 20, 2022–Mar. 26, 2023) presents a promised gift of devotional textiles from the Ronald and Maxine Linde collection.
 |
| Jain chhoda from the Linde collection |
 |
| Brian McEntee, Cogsworth, concept art for Beauty and the Beast, about 1990. Walt Disney Animation Research Library. (c) Disney |
December
The Metropolitan Museum-organized "Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts" lands at the Huntington Dec. 10, 2022, through Mar. 27, 2023. It is what it is. Disney adults will want to reserve tickets early.
LACMA's "Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945" (Dec. 18–Apr. 16, 2023) considers mid-century New Mexico's take on abstraction, which somehow seems more relevant than ever.
 |
| Agnes Pelton, Winter, 1993. Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. |
Comments
Beyond that, it's not too sarcastic to hope things like the Wende's upcoming exhibit on Mao Tse-tung will always be seen as a cautionary tale instead of an honorable mention.