Ben Sakoguchi "Unauthorized Baseball" Paintings to Irvine

Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2008. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art

The UC Irvine Langson Institute and Museum of California Art has acquired three paintings from Ben Sakoguchi's "The Unauthorized History of Baseball" series. Janet Mohle-Boetani, MD, supplied funds for the purchase. 

The baseball pictures are themselves a subset of Sakoguchi's paintings inspired by the graphic design of mid-20th century California orange crate labels. For Sakoguchi the orange crate labels are emblems of consumerism, modernism, colonialism, race, and the American (California) dream. The baseball pictures add a fan's obsessive knowledge of the American pastime that captivated Sakoguchi's father, a grocer who sold oranges and spent the war in an Arizona interment camp.

Sakoguchi has produced 200-plus baseball paintings. Over a hundred were shown at the Skirball Cultural Center in 2016.

Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2005. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art

Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2008. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art

Comments

Anonymous said…
"University of California Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art" just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
Anonymous said…
The skills (if not talent) of a person who does figurative art can be more easily gauged compared with a person who favors abstract or non-representational. Other artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat are in their own category. Over 20 years ago Basquiat was trashed by the art critic of Time magazine, but Basquiat has a look or style that can be rather easily identified, other artists not so much.

Sakoguchi would certainly fit the format of the upcoming Lucas Museum, which may or may not affect today's art scene---of figurative, representational, conceptual and abstract.
Re "The skills (if not talent) of a person who does figurative art can be more easily gauged compared with a person who favors abstract or non-representational.": That’s your decision. I'm interested in your reasons.
Anonymous said…
^ Works that favor a format of random splotches of color or free-form shapes and lines, or 3-D set pieces that reflect pure concept more than tangible reality are technically easier to create. I won't describe the well-known reaction of, "hey, even my kid can do that!" as being necessarily accurate, but I'll also say such works make judging skill and talent tougher to clarify.
The result is the only thing that matters...How the art is perceived by the viewer.
I've seen so much figurative nonsense, I give it no credit as a superior conveyor of artistic meaning.
We've had 50,000 years of figuration in art, and less than 200 years of abstraction. I applaud abstraction for how it makes me feel: fear; love; anger; pain.
You say it's easier to create. I disagree.