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October 30, 2011 – January 22, 2012

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UC Irvine was a hotbed of creativity and experimentation in the 1960s and early ’70s, a hub of innovation where exceptional teachers such as Tony DeLap, Robert Irwin, and Vija Celmins taught talented students like Alexis Smith, Chris Burden, and Nancy Buchanan. All but forgotten in the intervening years, this exceptional time and place was recovered at Laguna Art Museum in Best Kept Secret.
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Often overlooked in art history, University of California, Irvine (UCI) played a pivotal role to the development of contemporary art. Best Kept Secret took a look at UCI’s formative years beginning with its inaugural year in 1964. This was also the year that John Coplans was appointed director of the University Art Gallery. Coplans was a writer and editor for Artforum magazine who moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Los Angeles at this time. One of the first art professors Coplans recruited was Tony DeLap, and the faculty grew to include Larry Bell, Ed Bereal, Vija Celmins, Ron Davis, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Philip Leider (editor-in-chief of Artforum, 1962–1971), John Mason, Ed Moses, Barbara Rose, and Alan Solomon. Under the tutelage of this faculty, students included Marsha Red Adams, Michael Asher, Nancy Buchanan, Chris Burden, Ned Evans, Marcia Hafif, Charles Christopher Hill, Jay McCafferty, Richard Newton, Alexis Smith, Barbara T. Smith, Bruce Richards, James Turrell, and Robert Walker. This is only a short list of individuals, as the exhibition showed the works of about forty artists of faculty and students during this time.
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The year 1971 marked a significant end year of exploration for this exhibition. The Duchamp Festival—organized by Moira Roth and Barbara Rose—took place at UCI that year. The festival included an exhibition, symposium, and a set of performances and talks organized by faculty, students, and other artists. As artists at UCI laid the groundwork for formative art practices, utilizing the vacuous ranch land as a site of many experiments, the art community converged, new galleries opened, and new models of artist-run, alternative spaces were created—all before the City of Irvine’s incorporation into Orange County.
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Through first-hand interviews with the artists, collected ephemeral materials, early works from the artists of this time-period, the production of a short documentary, and the publication of a book, the overlooked activities that took place were recognized as an important moment in the emergence of contemporary art in Southern California. Before the ISMs of art movements became solidified in the ways we view them today, UCI nurtured the roots of various movements of art practice—Finish Fetish, Light and Space, performance, video, conceptualism, feminism, and installation. Because of or in spite of the underdeveloped landscape surrounding UCI and the greater Orange County area at the time, the wealth of artists and activities had been overlooked and under-recognized in the discourse of Southern California art history.
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Tony DeLap, a pioneer artist of Minimalism and Op Art on the West Coast,  served as the project consultant and Grace Kook-Anderson was the curator.
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Artists Included:
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This exhibition was accompanied by a publication of the same name, now available in the museum store and online.
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This exhibition was generously supported by:
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Bente and Gerald E. Buck, Jane and Richard Gribin, LBM deLux, Lyn and Rick Balzer, Ruth Martin, John Van Maanen, Kenneth Frank, and Fran Siegel.
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Additional support for this exhibition was provided by:
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This exhibition was part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980. Pacific Standard Time was a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions across Southern California, which came together for six months beginning October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world. Each institution made its own contribution to this grand-scale story of artistic innovation and social change, told through a multitude of simultaneous exhibitions and programs. Exploring and celebrating the significance of the crucial post-World War II years and beyond, Pacific Standard Time encompassed developments from modernist architecture and design to multi-media installations; from L.A. Pop to post-minimalism; from the films of the African-American L.A. Rebellion to the feminist happenings of the Woman’s Building; from ceramics to Chicano performance art, and from Japanese-American design to the pioneering work of artists’ collectives.
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Initiated through $10 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time involved cultural institutions of every size and character across Southern California, from Greater Los Angeles to San Diego and Santa Barbara to Palm Springs.

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June 12-October 2, 2011

Isamu Noguchi (b. Los Angeles, 1904; d. New York, 1988) is an internationally celebrated Japanese-American artist and designer. Noguchi: California Legacy was comprised of three parts that examined the impact Noguchi had in California: 1) California Scenario: The Courage of the Imagination based on Noguchi’s South Coast Plaza sculpture garden commissioned by Henry T. Segerstrom thirty years ago; 2) What is Sculpture? Akari from the Venice Biennale, from the 1986 Venice Biennale exhibit in which Noguchi, that year’s United States Representative, exhibited his Akari light sculptures; and 3) Noguchi at Gemini G.E.L., consisting of the sculpture multiples that Noguchi created in 1982 at atelier Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles.
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“The akari sculptures on view at Laguna are fascinating, peaceful and contemplative. They’re softly lit and nicely spaced out in the museum’s Main Gallery, hanging delicately as if they are floating.” ~ Richard Chang, The Orange County Register
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ABOUT ISAMU NOGUCHI
Isamu Noguchi (b. Los Angeles, 1904, and d. New York, 1988) was one of the twentieth century’s most important and critically acclaimed sculptors. Through a lifetime of artistic experimentation, he created sculpture, gardens, furniture and lighting designs, paintings, ceramics, architecture, and set designs. His work, at once subtle and bold, traditional and modern, set a new standard for artistic achievement.
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Noguchi, an internationalist, traveled extensively throughout his life. (In his later years he maintained studios both in Japan and New York.) He discovered the impact of large-scale public works in Mexico, earthy ceramics and tranquil gardens in Japan, subtle ink-brush techniques in China, and the purity of marble in Italy. He incorporated all of these inspirations into his work, which utilized a wide range of materials, including stainless steel, marble, cast iron, balsawood, bronze, sheet aluminum, basalt, granite, and even water.
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Noguchi’s contributions are significant to art history and design, and he may be connected to many noteworthy artists, such as Constanin Brâncuşi, Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage, to name a few.
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ABOUT CALIFORNIA SCENARIO
Situated between two office towers at South Coast Plaza Town Center in Costa Mesa is Noguchi’s California Scenario (1980-1982), a 1.6 acre metaphorical abstraction of California’s natural resources. Comprised of trees, plants, water, and sculpture, the garden is a space filled with beauty and tranquility. Commissioned by developer and philanthropist Henry Segerstrom, Isamu Noguchi offered a plan that challenged everyone’s notions of a garden.
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Laguna Art Museum examined the impact of California Scenario on California in the exhibition California Scenario: The Courage of Imagination, which was organized by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum. This exhibition featured ephemera, photographs, and film footage of California Scenario in addition to a new model of the park commissioned for Henry Segerstrom by wife Elizabeth.
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California Scenario suggests an outline of the vastness and diversity of California. With redwoods and cacti, among other indigenous plantings, the garden transports visitors to terrains ranging from the High Sierra to the deserts of Joshua Tree National Park. Noguchi gave the design elements in the garden evocative and allegorical titles such as Land Use, The Desert Land, The Forest Walk, Energy Fountain, Water Use, and Water Source. The masterwork of the garden, Spirit of the Lima Bean, is a seven-foot-high granite sculpture made from seven boulders that fit together as tightly as those of the stone walls at Sacsayhuamán, near the ancient city of Cuzco in Peru.
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In 1980, when Henry Segerstrom envisioned a garden for the site of the family land that had once been a lima bean farm, he saw it as a lushly green and shady space. Instead Noguchi created a bare, stone covered plaza that with time has grown into a magical landscape. Together the artist and the developer created a garden surpassing anything that had been projected and, in Noguchi’s words, “Henry Segerstrom had the courage to imagine the ultimate within our limits.”
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California Scenario: The Courage of Imagination was organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York.
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>> Access Audio Tour
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ABOUT AKARI
Noguchi: California Legacy also included What is Sculpture? Akari from the Venice Biennale organized by the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum and featuring the Akari light sculptures that Noguchi exhibited at the 1986 Venice Biennale.
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Noguchi’s Akari sculptures were inspired by a 1951 visit to the Japanese town of Gifu, known for its manufacturing of lanterns and umbrellas from mulberry-bark paper and bamboo. Inspired by the lanterns illuminating night fishing on the Nagara River, Noguchi designed the first of his lamps that would be produced by the traditional Gifu methods of construction. He called these works Akari, a term meaning light as illumination, but also implying the idea of weightlessness. Extending the concept of illuminated sculpture that he developed during the 1940s in New York, Noguchi employed abstract shapes to unite the simplicity of Japanese aesthetics with the principles of contemporary art and design. More than home furnishing, Akari are light sculptures.
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With the warm glow of light cast through handmade paper on a bamboo frame, Noguchi utilized traditional Japanese materials to bring modern design to the home. Comparing Akari to falling leaves and cherry blossoms, he wrote that they are “poetic, ephemeral, and tentative.” He also said, “All that you require to start a home are a room, a tatami, and Akari.”
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What is Sculpture? Akari from the Venice Biennale was organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York.
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>> Access Audio Tour
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ABOUT GEMINI G.E.L. EDITIONS
In 1982 Noguchi designed 26 sculptures produced by Gemini G.E.L. Los Angeles.
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Founded in 1966, Gemini G.E.L. is an artists’ workshop and publisher of limited edition prints and sculptures from more than 60 highly-accomplished artists, including Isamu Noguchi. At Gemini, the artists do all of the drawing or carving directly onto the printing elements. The edition is hand-printed by Gemini‘s master printers, and each print is signed and numbered by the artist as well as embossed with the Gemini chop.
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In the Gemini G.E.L. catalogue Isamu Noguchi at Gemini 1982-1983, Noguchi writes about his time in California in the early 1980s and his steel plate sculptures:
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“At this point Stanley Grinstein of Gemini suggested their interest in my becoming associated with them in editions. My conscience cleared by a strong motivation, I had only to resort to that often-abandoned aspect of my work which goes back to 1928 when I first made the 3-dimensional out of a 2-dimensional plate. The way pointed to an aesthetic of the flat enhanced by a technology not otherwise practical…May I say that these sculptures are like short poems pertaining to California where I was born, and to the world I have known. They were made in 1982 when I had become involved with two large gardens in the Los Angeles area.” ~ Isamu Noguchi, November 11, 1982
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>> Access Audio Tour
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Isamu Noguchi Lecture by Expert Bert Winther-Tamaki, Ph.D.

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PRESENTING CORPORATE SPONSOR:
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Image credits:
Isamu Noguchi at California Scenario in front of The Spirit of the Lima Bean (c. 1982). Photograph courtesy of The Segerstrom Foundation
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Isamu Noguchi (1987). Photograph by Jun Miki, courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York.
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California Scenario, 1982. Photograph by Gary McKinnis, courtesy of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York.
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Installation view from the 2009 exhibition What is Sculpture? Akari from the 1986 Venice Biennale at The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York.
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Goddess (1982). Galvanized steel edition sculpture, 61 x 41 x 12 inches. Photograph courtesy of Gemini G.E.L. Los Angeles.
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June 12-October 2, 2011

Upstairs Gallery
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Emergence examined two series of works by Lita Albuquerque: Red Pigment Paintings and Beekeeper. Both projects began in 2005. Emergence looked at essentially two works in which complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple processes or actions.
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Red Pigment Paintings are created with pure powder pigments—a medium used by Albuquerque since the 1970s—blown onto panels by wind or Albuquerque’s own breath. Employing air as a conduit of the pigment allows for practically infinite variations and iterations of pigment in space. The intense red hue against each of the sixteen pigmented ivory black canvasses is a record of the air’s movement that normally goes unseen. However, the record of wind and breath recalls representational imagery of natural occurrences as well: splashing waves, volcanic eruptions, bursting flames, and floating dust.
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Beekeeper was created in collaboration with Jon Beasley and Chandler McWilliams. The works in this series include a computer generated digital installation and a set of photographic prints. In the installation, Beekeeper is controlled by generative computer software, creating a continuous flow of pixel movement following a unique path every time. An image of a beekeeper is in a constant cycle, dissolving from a solid form into a sea of wandering pixels, and then emerging whole again as the pixels re-condense the figure.
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Emergence offered a close look at two series of Albuquerque’s works connected in form and process. Both deal with particles constituting a form, and both are enactments of unfolding and becoming. Beekeeper and Red Pigment Paintings function as symbolic models of actualizations of process that point to essential shifts in ways of seeing, forms of representation, and modes of being.
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This exhibition was curated by Grace Kook-Anderson, curator of exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum. Generous support for this exhibitions was provided by:
Robert Hayden III and Richard W. Silver
Judy and Keith Swayne
Ted Baxter
Pamela Banks
Johanna and Gene Felder
Pat and Gene Hancock
Special thanks to Peter Blake Gallery
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Lita Albuquerque was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia and France. In 1968, Albuquerque received her BFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and continued her education at the Otis Art institute from 1971 to 1972. In the late-70s, Albuquerque focused her work from painting to ephemeral works that took place in the open landscape including her large scale ephemeral pieces at public sites such as The Washington Monument (1980) The Great Pyramids (1996) and more recently the ice desert of Antarctica where she led an expedition and team of scientists and artists that culminated in the first and largest ephemeral art work created on the continent—Stellar Axis: Antarctica (2006). Her work has continuously explored the subject matters of mapping, the cosmos, and connectivity. Her paintings are a materialization of the ideas about color, light and perception first created in her ephemeral works. Through her use of pure pigments, gold leaf and copper, she engages perceptual and alchemical shifts in the viewing subject.
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Earlier this year Albuquerque’s sculpture and photography was included in the exhibition Artist’s Museum at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Currently she is working on a monograph of her ephemeral works and a new piece for The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative. Albuquerque will be recreating a site performance from 1980, Spine of the Earth, and adding a brand new performative element, influencing the viewer’s perception at both ground and sky level. Spine of the Earth 2012 will take place on January 22, 2012 in the city of Los Angeles, California.
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From Lita:
I am interested in the fact that we live in an informational universe and that each particle carries with it information that is for us to decipher. Since the mid-seventies I have been attracted to working with pure powdered pigment as an interest in color and its phenomenological resonance on our perceptual system, as well as in the particle of pigment itself being a geological emblem, a historical record of what exists in the earth. With the Red Pigment Paintings I start off by layering dozens and dozens of layers of ivory black pigment onto the canvass and while still wet, let the wind or my breath deliver the particles of red pigment onto the wet ivory black, capturing it, freezing the moment of that movement as in a photographic process. I consider these paintings another record, albeit painterly, but possibly photographic of the motion of the wind or my breath on that particular moment offering to the viewer an image of two elements coming together: earth and wind.
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My initial impetus for Beekeeper was to present the visual similarity between a beekeeper and an astronaut. I created a narrative around which the beekeeper’s aim is to help maintain biological life on the planet and the astronaut became the starkeeper maintaining life in the cosmos. In collaboration with Jon Beasley, and later on Chandler McWilliams who created the computer program, we decided that the idea was really about transmutation, and that the particles that are seen in the animation could be interpreted in numerous ways leaving it more open-ended, that the astronaut was implied in the ambiguity of the representation of the particles being bees or stars or simply particles of energy. And that the particles of energy that are invisible to our gross sensory perceptions are in a continual loop of becoming and unbecoming, that each particle in this informational universe under which we exist is alive and in a continuous state of transformation ad infinitum.
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February 27-May 15, 2011

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Ryan Wirick of Laguna Beach Patch said of Extract: “It would be difficult not to be moved in some unexpected way.”
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Laguna Art Museum’s Permanent Collection reflects both California’s historical interaction with its artists and the museum’s own idiosyncratic history. Founded ninety-three years ago as an “artists’ space” to showcase recent art, the Laguna Beach Art Association matured in the 1940s into a collecting institution that, since 1972, has developed into a museum of American art with a focus on the art of California.
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Over the years, Laguna Art Museum has been fortunate to take into its collection significant holdings by underrepresented individual artists who, though they have had little art historical attention thus far, have made significant contributions to regional and national art. These holdings have inspired a curatorial interest in the artists’ work, enough of an interest to explore the possibility of future exhibitions.
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Extract consisted of several small, one-person shows from the Collection by Florence Arnold, Elanor Colburn, George Brandriff, Laddie John Dill, Jules Engel, Oskar Fischinger, Tom Holland, Peter Krasnow, Ruth Peabody, David Simpson, Vic Joachim Smith, Jean St. Pierre, and Chris Wilder. The exhibition included brief curatorial statements on the importance of each artist’s work, and aimed to assess the potential for fully-formed monographic exhibitions.
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This exhibition was generously supported by Julie Padach-Mathewson and Curtis Mathewson.
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This exhibition was generously supported by Pacific Edge Hotel on Laguna Beach; Las Brisas; OC Weekly; Bluecanvas.com; 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio; Ovation TV, The Arts Network.
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February 13-May 15, 2011

Upstairs Gallery
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Brad Coleman: Reproductions was an attentive look at one series of drawings, Coleman’s Sheep series. Upon first glance, the upper gallery appeared to be occupied by twelve identical drawings of one sheep image. However, it was with careful observation, that viewers began to see differences in each drawing and eventually saw a noticeable difference between the first and last drawing.
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Brad Coleman in his studio. Photo by David Tosti. www.TostiStudios.com

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Inspired by Dolly, the world’s famously cloned sheep in 1996; Coleman began with a photographic reference, each consecutive drawing attempts to meticulously copy the previous one. Through this rigorous endeavor, slight unintentional variances occur, producing what begins as a drawing of a sheep to a drawing of a drawing. Brad Coleman: Reproductions  additionally featured works that relate to an expansive field-perspective.
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Coleman was born in 1961 and raised in rural northwest Ohio. The figurative element of his work stems from this upbringing, using agricultural imagery and the vastness of the Midwest landscape. At the same time, Coleman’s work is equally rooted in conceptualism. Art critic Elizabeth Janus states, “Brad Coleman willingly enters into current discourse surrounding the relationship between man and the machine, between nature and science, with a vision that recognizes our own precarious place in the universe.”
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This was Coleman’s first solo museum exhibition.
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Brad Coleman: Reproductions was curated by Grace Kook-Anderson, curator of exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum. This exhibition was supported in part by John and Lisa Mansour.
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This exhibition was generously supported by Pacific Edge Hotel on Laguna Beach; Las Brisas; OC Weekly; Bluecanvas.com; 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio; Ovation TV, The Arts Network.
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October 31, 2010-January 23, 2011

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John Paul Jones (1924-1999) was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and arts educator. First gaining national recognition in the 1960s with his figurative prints, drawings, and paintings, Jones turned to spare sculptural work in the 1980s. Jones received his bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees at the University of Iowa, where he studied printmaking, and later taught. In 1953, he was recruited to the University of California in Los Angeles to set up a printmaking program. He joined the faculty at the newly opened UC Irvine in 1969 and remained there until his retirement in 1990. He lived in Laguna Beach from the mid-1960s to 1990.
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Even taking into consideration the fickleness of art trends, it is surprising to find that in the 1950s and 1960s John Paul Jones was widely and consistently ranked as among America’s leading printmakers. In 1963, he was the first pick of the eminent curator Una E. Johnson to inaugurate the Brooklyn Museum’s solo exhibition series on distinguished contributors to the media of drawings and prints in the United States. By then, he had also become a nationally recognized painter. With twenty-eight one-person gallery and museum exhibitions across the country in the first decade of his career, Time magazine gave him an illustrated feature article in 1962. Yet today, Jones has been almost entirely forgotten by art historians–by historians of American printmaking, by historians of West Coast art, and even by scholars writing about the art of Los Angeles, where for many years he was championed as a local talent. ~ Susan Landauer
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John Paul Jones was a retrospective, from the Museum’s extensive collection of his work, in the California and Steele galleries, and was be curated by Mike McGee, Professor of Art, California State University, Fullerton. Accompanying the exhibition was the publication John Paul Jones: The Pursuit of Beauty’s Perfect Proof. This exhibition was on display at the same time as Megan Hart Jones: A Tribute, E. Roscoe Shrader, Sean Duffy: Searcher, and Masterstrokes.
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John Paul Jones was generously supported by Anonymous, Estate of John Paul Jones, Dr. James Pick and Rosalyn Laudati, Dr. and Mrs. Eugene Levin, Julie Padach-Mathewson and Curtis Mathewson, SCAPE, Patsy Tartaglia, Dr. Kelly Tucker, Patricia Turnier,
and Dr. and Mrs. Jay M. Young.
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John Paul Jones Process and Philosophy
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Jones had pursued his 1940s and ‘50s cubist and figurative work at the exact moment when Abstract Expressionism emerged and flourished. However, Jones’s geometric abstract works in the 1980s and ‘90s would have been more in tune with minimalism and other prevailing contemporary art themes in the 1960s and ‘70s.
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New York Times art critic John Canaday, who wrote several positive reviews of Jones’s exhibitions, wrote a review of Jones’s first major museum survey, his 1963 exhibition organized by Una E. Johnson at the Brooklyn Museum. Commenting about Jones’s shift from abstract to figurative imagery between 1957 and 1958 Canaday wrote:
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…it makes him a member of an avant-garde that never thought of itself as being ahead of or behind any movement, or even a part of any movement, an absence of self-consciousness that is virtually a contradiction of the term avant-garde as we have come to know it.
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It appears that Jones never considered his work avant-garde—in all his notes and letters the term never appears. Less interested in creating artworks that were ahead of their time, Jones wanted to create artworks that were timeless. Early in his career he claimed to suffer from what he termed, masterpiece-itis. He would struggle his whole life to understand the exact criteria that defined a successful artwork and how to achieve that success. For Jones, the process had a lot to do with intensity and engagement. An artist had to be involved both emotionally and intellectually—art had to be fueled by passion, but it needed structure. Although he believed art was by nature autobiographical, each work of art had a life or a spirit of its own, and the artist had to discover the essence of each work.
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What resulted from Jones’s process were artworks that reflected the mystery he sought to better understand. The critic who may have understood Jones best and who wrote some of the most insightful reviews of his work, Los Angeles Times critic Henry Seldis, wrote, Even at the beginning of his career, Jones was essentially concerned with ambiguities and mysteries of life.” In another review he wrote, “The essence of the appearance which Jones defines seems to exist on the very edge of consciousness.
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~ Curator Mike McGee