LACMA Commissions a Lauren Halsey Sphinx
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| Lauren Halsey, the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I), 2022, as installed on Metropolitan Museum's Roof Garden. Photo: Hyla Skopitz. |
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| Todd Gray, Maquette for Octavia's Gaze |
The latter, a photo-collage mural, was funded by the 2024 Collectors Committee. It will feature a portrait of Octavia Butler, the Pasadena sci-fi novelist and godmother of Afrofuturism. Spanning 27 feet, Gray's mural consists of 14 inkjet prints in the artist's frames. A photo of the maquette shows it will include a replica of Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson's neoclassical portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley, Senegal-born Haitian and French statesman.
None of the installation themes sound frivolous or dumbed-down. Some are art-historical categories that you might expect in a conventional installation ("Ancestral Ceramics from Panama and Columbia"; "Spanish America at the Center of the World"). The Stowe Vase, a Roman antiquity etched by Piranesi, will anchor a focus installation including Piranesi prints and Paul Storr's silver interpretation of the vase. (This reprises a 2016 show.) Another Hearst antiquity, the Hope Athena, will be shown with vases, coins, and other representations of the Roman goddess.
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| Shiro Kuramata, Glass Chair, 1976. A 2023 acquisition of the Decorative Arts and Design Committee |
The quirkiest installation mentioned is "In This Light." Situated between windows and concrete, it will assemble contemporary sculptures by Ruth Asawa, Larry Bell, Roni Horn, and Shiro Kuramata that cast interesting shadows or refract light, changing appearance with the sun's angle and weather. It's not exactly a show of Light & Space art, but it explores some of that perceptual territory. Decorative arts and design curator Bobbye Tigerman calls it "a response to the building itself."
The Geffen installation will include 20th-century pieces that are now in BCAM (Rivera, Asawa) plus a modern masterpiece that's been off view for years (Matisse's ceramic mural La Gerbe). This suggests that the modern installation in BCAM is being supplanted by the Geffen. If so, that's logical—it would be odd to keep 20th century art separate from earlier and some later parts of the collection. On the other hand, loss of the BCAM space (about 17,000 sf) would further reduce the dedicated permanent collection space, which is about 10,000 sf smaller in the Geffen Galleries than in the buildings it replaced.
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| Round-Topped Stela, Egyptian, about 1391-1353 BCE |
Mixing contemporary and ancient art often doesn't do justice to either. The Halsey sphinx might be an exception. Compared to other large American museums, LACMA does not have much of an Egyptian collection. Its few significant works, such as the 18th Dynasty Round-Topped Stela, are modestly scaled. Halsey is an artist of international reputation who has claimed ancient Egypt as an emblem of South Los Angeles. That connection may well encourage visitors to spend more time with the museum's Egyptian holdings.
The Gray mural will test the Geffen building's light management. Octavia will be gazing west, to the setting sun's rays. I know that today's pigment prints stand up to light better than traditional color photographs. Still, a photo work exposed to direct sunlight has to make conservators uneasy.
Maybe that's where the chromium-clad curtains come in. Costume and textiles curator Sharon Takeda explains that Japanese textile artist Reiko Sudo tried a transparent stainless steel fabric, but it proved flammable. This led her to fire-resistant chromium. Takeda talks up the moire effects of layered curtains and the shadows they cast on Zumthor's roughhewn concrete.
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| Henri Matisse's La Gerbe in its original setting, the Bel-Air home of collectors Sidney and Francis Brody |
Comments
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I'm lethal in math, but I count roughly 23 rooms, of varying sizes. The walls' exterior sides count as rooms in their own rights, so we're looking at roughly 46 rooms. That is not a small amount of spaces, assuming they are cleverly furnished with art. Add innumerable vitrines, that could easily break up the wider pathways for pedestrians, and you're cooking with gas, I venture.
> installation in BCAM is being
> supplanted by the Geffen. If so,
> that's logical—it would be odd
> to keep 20th century art
> separate from earlier and some
> later parts of the collection.
If that's the case, then turnaround is fair play. So the Broad building should now host artworks from the 1700s, 1500s, ancient Egypt, etc. But nothing will annoy me more than LACMA sticking the works of contemporary artists into areas not based on time or style, but based on race-ethnicity-nationality. Doing that actually comes off as casually patronizing, condescending.
When it comes to great collections in parts of the East Coast, Europe, Egypt, Asia, etc, LACMA will always be seen as flimsy or an also-ran. But Govan is going out of his way to run that point home. Or making the museum riff on all the Any City museums and commercial galleries of contemporary art found throughout the nation and world.
However, in this age of social media and short-attention spans, I predict the Geffen Galleries will do well. The new building will also insert LACMA more into the conversation compared with what existed prior to 2020 and the tired, aimless or makeshift 1965/1986 campus.
Just one thing alone can change an outsider's impression (at least mines) of the cultural scene in a place. Without the GEM, the city of Cairo, with just the old, smaller Egyptian Museum of the early 1900s, seemed threadbare and broken down.