Las Vegas Diaspora: Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland

March 9, 2008 - June 1, 2008

Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland (March 9 – June 1, 2008) travels to Laguna Art Museum from its recent premiere at the Las Vegas Museum of Art. Organized by the well-respected art critic and curator Dave Hickey, this exhibition celebrates the work of twenty-six artists who received their degrees from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada (UNLV). All of the featured artists studied with Hickey between 1990 and 2001, when Hickey taught art theory and criticism in the Department of Art at UNLV.

“When I joined the Department of Art at UNLV in 1990, I knew that students who chose Las Vegas to study art would have to be a special breed,” says Hickey, “and they were. At that time, the city of Las Vegas could hardly have been considered the art destination that it is today. But it was then, as it is now, an extremely self-selecting venue. It attracts a certain kind of person, so I wasn’t surprised that the kids who came here were adventuresome, cosmopolitan, self-sufficient, and indifferent to parental oversight. As a result of their industry and courage, some things that happen in Vegas don’t stay in Vegas. They go out and change the world.”

Since their graduation from the University, the featured artists have gone on to establish successful careers, most having been launched by Los Angeles galleries such as the Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Western Project, Suzanne Vielmetter, L.A. Louver, Mark Moore Gallery, and the Richard Heller Gallery.

Bolton Colburn, Director of Laguna Art Museum comments “Hickey, who frequently curates shows and writes essays for museums and galleries in southern California, has had a significant effect on the arts here and, as shown in Las Vegas Diaspora, he has been instrumental in building a new outpost for contemporary art on the eastern parameter of the West Coast in the unlikeliest of all places, Las Vegas.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog published by The Las Vegas Art Museum and BrightCity Books. The catalog features an essay by Dave Hickey with color reproductions of some of the choice work in the exhibition.

Major support for this exhibition has been provided by the Murray and Ruth Gribin Trust, June Lee’s Contemporary Art, The Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica and the Mark and Hilarie Moore Family Trust, and Sheridan Brown.

Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of painting

October 28, 2007 - January 27, 2008

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Twyla & Chuck Martin, Pam & Jim Muzzy, and Sandy & Harold Price.Wayne Thiebaud: 70 Years of Painting is a survey of this major American painter’s work. The show traces the development of Thiebaud’s signature style, but also includes some of his lesser known figural and beach paintings.

Wayne Thiebaud’s recent series of beach paintings are a reflection of the painter’s youth, dating back to the 1920s and 1930s in Long Beach, California. As a teenager Thiebaud (born November 15, 1920) served as a city lifeguard, which provided him a unique perspective of coastline activities. It was here that the first impression of beach culture made its mark on his memory.

By the early 1960s, he began to focus on objects of mass culture such as pies, cakes, and pinball machines creating the essential Thiebaud aesthetic: simplified geometric forms executed in rich, dense colors. Laguna Art Museum Director Bolton Colburn states, “Although Thiebaud was included in the first museum exhibition of the Pop Art movement, organized by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, and was featured in Lucy Lippard’s seminal book on Pop Art in 1966, the artist has never really had an allegiance to any particular style or subject matter. In fact, he began creating images of common objects as early as 1953, long before the emergence of Pop Art.”

Thiebaud experienced acclaimed success with his series of “found” objects and landscape paintings. As a result, he sought inspiration elsewhere in hopes of breaking away from the predictability that accompanied such iconic imagery. By the 1980s he began to extend his brief trips to Laguna Beach, a beachside community that brought back vivid memories of his upbringing in Long Beach. It was these childhood remembrances that first inspired the beach
bathers theme explored in his 1959 painting Beach Boys. Now, almost fifty years later, Thiebaud continues to find inspiration in Southern California beach culture. Incorporating a freshly minted style, the works include a broader exploration of emotion and content that vivify his waning formal conventions.

Guest curator Gene Cooper says, “He is a painter at the age of 87 whose unfinished oeuvre portrays a discerning self-portrait in progress. It has long been his practice to mine his near-photographic memory for salient images that signify his past. Whether it’s a display of nostalgic candy apples or recollections of Southern California’s beach culture, they are primary forms that mark his life’s journey as well as illustrating his warm humanist values.
In the world of art, Thiebaud remains as America’s vox populi”.

This exhibition includes a full color catalog and is available at the Museum Store and online. 

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by Twyla & Chuck Martin, Pam & Jim Muzzy, and Sandy & Harold Price.

Shag: The Flesh Is Willing

October 28, 2007 – January 27, 2008

The Flesh Is Willing combines two ofthe artist’s pictorial interests, nudes and purgatory, in an investigation of50s cocktail culture and the notion of sin.

This exhibition was inspired by a recent trip to the Prado in Madrid, where SHAG viewed the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in person forthe first time. Bosch's work The Garden of Earthly Delights, center panel of his famous triptych depicting Paradise, Earth and Hell, was of particular interest to the artist. SHAG was struck by Bosch’s grand depiction of the earthly delights and began to analyze the effect of this iconography on modern culture.

The centerpiece of The Flesh Is Willing is a large triptych with the artist’s interpretation of Paradise, Earth and Hell as seen through consumerism and consumption à la America in the 1950s. SHAG also addresses the implementation of punishment and fear, used as adeterrent against indulgences, with three interactive pieces created from vintage arcade games where users can play and determine in advance what theirfate will be.

Josh Agle (better known as SHAG, an acronym of the last two letters of hisfirst name and the first two letters of his last) is a painter, illustrator, anddesigner working in southern California. This is Agle’s first major museumexhibition. 

June 24 to September 30, 3007 - Main Level

Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence, the artist’s first major retrospective and solo museum exhibition, opened on June 24, 2007. A cult figure that set the iconographic terrain for the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, in his art Griffin expressed idealism and hope along with a darker side that perfectly embodied the contradictions of the era with its mixture of hedonism, politics, and avant-garde expression.

The exhibition, which included some 140 paintings, drawings, posters, album covers, and artifacts, surveyed thirty years of Griffin’s work from the 1960s until his death in 1991. The accompanying 156-page catalogue, published in association with Gingko Press, is the first publication to address Griffin’s impact on the surf, psychedelic rock, and born-again Christian movements.

Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence was organized for Laguna Art Museum by Susan M. Anderson, and co-curated by guest curators Greg Escalante and Doug Harvey with curatorial consultant Gordon McClelland.

Laguna Art Museum would like to thank all of the sponsors of the exhibition Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin’s Transcendence for their generosity in making this important contribution to the scholarship of this under-recognized artist possible.

The exhibition and book were made possible through the generous support of presenting sponsor Hurley.

Additional support was provided by the Segerstrom Foundation; the Gillespie Foundation; Juxtapoz Art and Culture Magazine; Mark Parker; Jeff Smith; Bernie Chase; Flat Bread Company, Paia, Maui and the Classic Surf Gallery; and Cindy and Joe Knörnschild.

Major media sponsorship provided by Surfer Magazine.
 
Visit Griffin's MySpace page!

East Coast/West Coast and Beyond: Colin Campbell Cooper, American Impressionist

February 25 - June 3, 2007

Colin Campbell Cooper’s (1858-1937) career is defined by two periods: his education and maturity as an East Coast artist, and his relocation, in later years to the West Coast. Whether painting in the East or West, Cooper was lauded and heralded as a significant Impressionist artist who captured the spirit of his surroundings. Cooper visited Southern California in 1916, spending a month in San Diego. He relocated to California 1921 (and remained until his death), becoming dean of painting at the Santa Barbara Community School of Arts. Not surprisingly, West Coast architecture fascinated him—particularly the dominant Spanish and Mexican influence—but he was also inspired by the variety of Western flora; especially the lush gardens overflowing with unique species of plants. While Cooper assumed a leading role in Santa Barbara’s art community, he never lost his ties to the East, concurrently maintaining a studio in New York City for many years.

The Cooper exhibition was co-curated by Dr. William H. Gerdts and Dr. Deborah Epstein Solon. Dr. Gerdts concentrated on the artist’s work on the East Coast, and Dr. Solon explored his career in California. The exhibition included approximately fifty works and was accompanied by a major catalogue by Dr. Gerdts and Dr. Solon, published by Hudson Hills Press, New York. 

The exhibition traveled to The Hecksher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York from November 11, 2006 to January 28, 2007.

Jeremy Kidd: Fictional Realities

February 25, 2007 to May 27, 2007

Los Angeles-based artist presented a new body of work that involves large-scale cityscape photographs composed from a patchwork of hundreds of digital images. Kidd attempts to create a more visceral experience of the landscape through his process. The work also explores both the beauty and the artificiality of our urban environments. This was Jeremy Kidd’s first museum exhibition. Co-organized by Scott Richards Contemporary Art (San Francisco) and Laguna Art Museum.

OsCene 2006: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC

October 29 to January 21, 2007

Southern California is arguably the hottest art spot in the country now and Orange County, with three million people, was able to display the depths of its talent in Laguna Art Museum’s biennial survey, The OsCene 2006: Contemporary Art and Culture in OC. By spotlighting the often underestimated art of the county, The OsCene serves as a counterpoint to the Orange County Museum of Art's broader themed 2006 California Biennial that runs concurrently with The OsCene 2006.

When the first OsCene (a combination of the phrases “OC” and “scene,” and pronounced o-seen) was organized in 2004, it had been over twenty years since a survey exhibition of contemporary art in Orange County had been organized by a museum. 2006's survey included painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, multi-media installations, video/film, fashion, and kustom kulture.

Millard Sheets in Mexico, 1932-1942

October 29, 2006 - January 21, 2007

Millard Sheets in Mexico, 1932-1942 explored the artist’s works from the early part of his career, during the period when he was developing the art department at Scripps College in Claremont, California. During the decade of the 1930s through the early 1940s, Sheets often made trips to Mexico, the closest locale to Southern California that afforded an opportunity for him to experience another culture. It was this intense interest in the people of other cultures that inspired much of Sheets’ work throughout his career.