“40 for LA celebrates the forty-year history of MOCA. Offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into MOCA’s past, this multimedia exhibition features archival materials from the museum’s vault, including rare photographs and lithographs, limited-edition objects, a detailed exhibition and programming timeline, excerpts from the museum’s YouTube video project MOCAtv, and a special homage to all of the artists to whom the museum is indebted. Visitors get an in-depth look at some of the key elements that define the institution: the Grand Avenue location designed by famed Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, a celebrated permanent collection, a groundbreaking history of temporary exhibitions, and the museum’s dedicated board members and patrons. Together, these elements tell the story of MOCA’s beginnings, explore the museum’s vital role in shaping the Southern California art community, and take stock of MOCA’s achievements as a pioneering contemporary art institution in Los Angeles. 

40 for LA is organized by Bryan Barcena, Assistant Curator and Manager of Publications, and Amanda Hunt, Director of Education and Curator of Programs, with Karlyn Olvido, Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

Lead underwriting for MOCA’s 40th anniversary exhibitions and programs is provided by Sean and Alexandra Parker. 

Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with lead annual support provided by Sydney Holland, founder of the Sydney D. Holland Foundation. Generous funding is also provided by Dr. Alexander and Judith Angerman, Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation, Nathalie Marciano and Julie Miyoshi, Steven and Jerri Nagelberg, and Jonathan M. Segal through the Rhonda S. Zinner Foundation.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

BAD MANTRAS
Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen
June 7 – July 20, 2019
Opening reception: Friday, June 7, 6 PM – 9 PM

“BAD MANTRAS by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, Mellors’ second exhibition at The Box, is a dark satire of contemporary western politics and cultural assumption. We enter a space/time k-hole/black-hole where autocracy and corruption has led to a world of dysfunction and absurd inversion…

…Where humans are subjugated to puppets and a giant talking egg is GOD.

…Where nationalism manifests in cosmic/comic acts and the world is remade as just one country … FINLAND.

…Where liberal-democracy has become a terrified technocratic autocracy and to make matters worse the God-like creators of Planet Finland will be back any moment now to check-in on the culture they think they’ve created…

This may not go so well.

At the core of Mellors and Nissinen’s exhibition is The Aalto Natives, a project originally conceived for the Finland Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. This is a comedy which fuses creation mythology and religion with contemporary themes through the archetypal narrative of Atum and Geb, the father and son creators of “New Finland”. Atum and Geb – a talking egg and talking cardboard box – exist in the gallery as animatronic sculptures, interacting with the video projections, through which we experience their mock-epic narrative. The Box will show The Aaltos Natives (Floored version), which was exhibited in Mellor’s solo exhibition, Progressive Rocks, at the New Museum in 2018. This work is a sculptural amalgamation of Atum and Geb: multiple projections shoot from their heads and limbs, floating images of the film around the room and encouraging the viewer to move about the space and objectify the sculptural bodies.   

The current political and cultural situation in the U.S.A. intertwines crooked corporate dealings, infantile political activity and the hermetic mediation of reality through social media and the news cycle – we experience the apparently permanent extension of the dominant power structure and its inverse – the new underclass – a growth beneath the belly of ownership. In The Aalto Natives, all the characters living outside of the technocratic political super-structure are subject to misery and mutation. They sing songs about it, and some have resorted to performance art. This work mirrors the scenes and situations we see increasingly manifesting in the world.

In narrative dialogue with The Aalto Natives storyline, the exhibition presents two new works: Presidential Crucifixion (2019) and Bad Mantras (2019). Presidential Crucifixion features The President of Finland puppet, with a spherical head and long tentacle-like arms, and mounts him to the wall as a totemic sacrifice. The projected film upon him both glorifies and degrades him at the same time. Bad Mantras isa felt sculpture of the mangled Transcendental Accident character from The Aalto Natives. The Transcendental Accident has no centralized body but multiple-heads and long limbs reaching out and improvising with various musical instruments. It’s performing, it’s singing … it’s a sculpture trying to transcend its own objectification.

The humor and playful visual tone of Mellors and Nissinen’s work highlights the moral complexity of our intense political and environmental issues. The Box is excited to bring these works to their first showing on the west coast at a time of broad social and political vulnerability and to invite the viewer to enjoy the work’s humor and use it as a vehicle to encourage reflection.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Almost mythic in status, the Bauhaus is seen as one of the most influential schools of art and design of the 20th century. Established in 1919, the Bauhaus sought to erode distinctions among crafts, the fine arts, and architecture through a program of study centered on practical experience and diverse theories. Until the school’s forced closure by the Nazi regime in 1933, students and masters worked with a variety of traditional and experimental media and continually reconceived the role of art and design in contemporary society. Despite its relatively brief, itinerant existence, the Bauhaus occupies an outsize position in the cultural imaginary. 

Marking the 100th anniversary of the school’s opening, Bauhaus Beginnings reexamines the founding principles of this landmark institution. The exhibition considers the school’s early dedication to spiritual expression and its development of a curriculum based on elements deemed fundamental to all forms of artistic practice.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Venice, CA — L.A. Louver is pleased to announce an exhibition of painting and sculpture by venerable artist Mark di Suvero. Known the world over for his monumental public works, the exhibition features a selection of the artist’s smaller-scaled sculptures, made between 1990-2019, presented alongside a new series of colorful, abstract paintings. Movement, both physical and implied, pervade the works on view in the first floor gallery. Comprised of steel, stainless steel and cor-ten steel, di Suvero conceives the sculptures to spin and sway with a slight touch of the hand. Curious and
engaging, the sculptures convey a sense of grace and weightlessness that defies the rigid and dense materials of their making. In “Untitled” (2019), the largest and most recent work in the exhibition, a base structure made from angular cut-out pieces of raw steel rests on the floor. From its raised point, a large stainless steel pinion-like form is perfectly balanced, and when gently pushed, the silver shape pirouettes with a transcendent elegance. “After 60 years, I’m still doing it with my hands,” says the 86-year-old artist. “I cut the steel. I weld it. I put it together.” Only one sculpture,
“Blue Flame” (1998-2011), is stationary. While its elements are fixed, the work breathes with fluidity and movement – its gnarled centerpiece, a striking blue “flame,” is ablaze against the raw steel frame in which it sits.
A selection of brilliant abstract paintings by the artist accompanies the sculptures. Like the sculptures, his paintings are never still. Created with dazzling colors in dense layers of linear and freeform gestures, they project a swirling sensation akin to the twirling movement in his three-dimensional works. Accented with phosphorescent paints, the works luminesce and reverberate even in the absence of light (and are especially dazzling when activated by black lights installed throughout the gallery space). “The heart of art is the search for form that is electrifying, that gives life to
our vision,” explains di Suvero. “This is the language of emotion. Anesthetic is to kill feeling. Aesthetic is the opposite, aesthetic is feeling. The thing that is most important is the dream, the vision for what doesn’t exist that could exist.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

“Various Small Fires is pleased to present its second solo exhibition by The Harrisons.

Newton Harrison worked from 1969 to 2012 with his wife Helen Mayer Harrison (1927-2018), and has continued to work alone since her passing. After reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the late 1960s, The Harrisons decided to only create artworks that benefit “the great web of life”, leading over many years of research and production to the genesis of the Ecological Art movement. Decades later, despite the prescience of The Harrisons and others, the planet finds itself on a short path to the sixth extinction.

In 2007, The Harrisons began to design and realize interdisciplinary works, employing a range of mediums, including landscape-scale living installations, that would not only protect the life web, but actually counter human destruction by stimulating the life web to assist in its own amelioration. The artworks collected in this exhibition, dating from 1970 to the present, demonstrate this singular approach proposed by The Harrisons to mediate the extinction of our natural world, and provide a rough and ready blueprint for countering the extinction now upon us.

Newton Harrison and his team at the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at University of California, Santa Cruz, continue to develop and implement projects at large-scale across the globe, “aware of the short time remaining for humans to counter the devastating effect of their own greed”. Now 86 years old, Newton is profoundly encouraged by the rising movement of young environmental activists around the globe, led by Greta Thunberg, who he considers to be answering his (and Helen’s) words from their works The Lagoon Cycle (1979) and Serpentine Lattice(1993).

The Harrisons Studio consists of Newton Harrison (b. 1932) and Helen Mayer Harrison (1927—2018). Often simply referred to as “The Harrisons”, the husband and wife team are leading pioneers of the Ecological Art movement. During their prolific career, the Harrisons have been the subject of over 100 solo exhibitions, and have been included in over 250 group exhibitions. For nearly fifty years, the Harrisons have produced work across a vast range of disciplines, working in collaboration with biologists, ecologists, historians, activists, architects, urban planners and fellow artists to initiate dialogues and create works exploring biodiversity and community development. They have shown work at the 2019, 1980, and 1976 Venice Biennales; Taipei Biennial (2018); documenta 8 (1987); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Tate, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, CA; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Kunstmuseum Bonn, DE; and Kunstverein Hamburg, DE. Works by the Harrisons are included in many major permanent collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL. Newton Harrison is a Professor Emeriti at University of California, Santa Cruz, and University of California, San Diego.” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel

JUN 9-SEP 1, 2019

“The first American survey of one of the UK’s most influential artists.

Over the past 30 years, Sarah Lucas (b. 1962, London, UK) has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. Bringing together more than 130 works in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation, Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel reveals the breadth and ingenuity of the artist’s practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power–with a particular attentiveness to the legacy of surrealism—from her clever modifications to  everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the mundanely familiar and the disorientingly strange.

Alongside new sculptural works created for the exhibition, Au Naturel features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for human body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period that reflect objectified representations of the female body. In addition to the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never been shown together in the United States.

Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel is organized by the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, and Margot Norton, Curator. The Hammer’s presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with Nika Chilewich, curatorial assistant.’

• per website
• – for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

curated by BEN LEE RITCHIE HANDLER
with multiversal interiors by JORGE LUIS CRUZATA

“According to multiverse theory, every decision a person makes causes a split in the universe, wherein an alternate version of one’s self continues to exist in an alternate universe, living with the consequences of an alternate decision. There are an infinite number of variations of ourselves existing throughout time and space, having made an infinite number of differing decisions.

TRANS WORLD is an exploration of identity through work by artists who are able to manifest multiple universes at the same time.

TRANS WORLD exists in Bucharest and Los Angeles concurrently, with unique works by the same slate of artists suited for each respective environment.

TRANS WORLD contemporaneously occupies the universes of art and design with design objects evocative of each respective location, transforming the gallery space into a domestic refuge for the

universally ambiguous.

TRANS WORLD is radical, metaphysical empathy. How can we not identify with one another on some level, knowing there’s a version of ourselves out there existing in every conceivable state of being?” – per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson

The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China

“Since the 1980s, Chinese contemporary artists have cultivated intimate relationships with their materials, establishing a framework of interpretation revolving around materiality. Their media range from the commonplace to the unconventional, the natural to the synthetic, the elemental to the composite: from plastic, water, and wood, to hair, tobacco, and Coca-Cola. Artists continue to explore and develop this creative mode, with some devoting decades of their practice to experiments with a single material. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China brings together works from the past four decades in which conscious material choice has become a symbol of the artists’ expression, representing this unique trend throughout recent history. Some of the most influential Chinese contemporary artists today are featured in this exhibition, including Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Lin Tianmiao, and Ai Weiwei. The Allure of Matter premieres at LACMA before traveling to the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum, and finally the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

This exhibition is accompanied by the first scholarly volume to examine Chinese art through the lens of materiality. It is co-authored by the exhibition’s curators, Wu Hung, Smart Museum Adjunct Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago, with Orianna Cacchione, Smart Museum Curator of Global Contemporary Art.”

• per website

– for more information on additional images from this event please contact EMS at [email protected] or Instagram at @ericminhswenson