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Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2008. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art
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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.
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| Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2005. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art |
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| Ben Sakoguchi, from "The Unauthorized History of Baseball," 2008. UC Irvine Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art |
Comments
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.
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.