November 8, 2009 - January 17, 2010

From the earliest to the most current California art, Collecting California: Selections from Laguna Art Museum outlined some of the most significant works of art created in California over the last 150 years. The exhibition was a celebration of California art and artists and explored what makes California different.

Video from exclusive Members-only opening night reception.
Visit our Flickr site to view and download images from the reception.

Although one may imagine that the Laguna Art Museum collection began with the development of the Laguna Beach Art Association in 1918, the story is much more complex than that.

The collection officially began in 1940, fueled in part by the recognition that many of the artists that came to Laguna Beach at the turn of the twentieth century had passed away. One by one many wonderful works of art were donated either by these artists or their widows and heirs. By the 1970s, the Laguna Beach Art Association had become the Laguna Beach Museum of Art and started to generate significant one person and thematic exhibitions on important California artists and movements. As a result, collectors began to donate major pieces of their collections to the Museum.

A 1977 exhibition with a publication on William Wendt provided one of the first in-depth looks at a significant West Coast impressionist painter. This exhibition helped to validate the importance of the work to many local dealers and area collectors. Subsequently, local dealers and collectors began to explore the work of prominent twentieth century impressionist painters in Southern California, which led to the establishment of significant collections. In the 1980s and 90s, exhibitions and scholarship on California art at the Museum became more sophisticated and began to generate interest from collectors and dealers in the area.

That kernel of interest resulted in the development of some magnificent collections, and some of them have formed the most significant parts of Laguna Art Museum's Collection. As the Museum's mission became more focused on California art, collectors with a similar scope began to take interest.

Collecting California: Selections from Laguna Art Museum focuses on individual collectors and the important gifts they have made to the Museum. Works of art given by Nancy Dustin Wall Moure (the art historian who has pioneered the history of California art and wrote the book California Art: 450 Years of Painting and Other Media), Carl S. Dentzel (a director of the Southwest Museum), Murray and Ruth Gribin (collectors, trustees, and patrons of contemporary Southern California art since the 1960s), Stuart and Judy Spence (trustees, theorists, benefactors of cutting edge Los Angeles art), Mark and Hilarie Moore (long time supporters, dealers, and collectors of contemporary art in Orange County), Diana Zlotnick (an early collector of Southern California assemblage and contemporary art), others including Richard H. Mumper, Lois Outerbridge, Virgina Steele Scott, Joan Simon Menkes, and the Contemporary Collectors Council.

The exhibition was accompanied by a 144-page, soft-cover, fully-illustrated book published by Laguna Art Museum. Featuring over 80 works from the Museum's permanent collection, this book is a celebration of the art and artists of California and of the generosity of many longstanding friends and supporters of the Museum. Included are essays by Susan Anderson (Independent Curator and Art Historian), Janet Blake (Curator of Collections), Jacqueline Bunge (Curator of Education), Bolton Colburn (Director of Laguna Art Museum), Doug Harvey (Artist, Curator, and Writer), Grace Kook-Anderson (Curator of Exhibitions), Will South (Chief Curator for The Dayton Art Institute), and Tyler Stallings (Director of Sweeney Art Gallery at University of California, Riverside).

 

November 8, 2009 - January 17, 2010

This was the first museum exhibition for San Francisco-based artist Jeremy Fish. Fish transformed the upstairs galleries by creating an installation with symbols and characters that he had been developing over the last ten years.

Weathering the Storm was a timely exhibition largely about transformation and rebirth through struggle. Deliberately drawing from the current economic and political events and its impact on us socially and emotionally,Fish's characters revealed a narrative of evolution through struggle to obtain a more magnificent and resilient place. In this exhibition, Fish created paintings surrounded by hand carved wood frames, as well as three-dimensional figures for the gallery wall installation and wooden sculptures. 

Fish's iconography consists of a fairytale world inhabited by beavers, skulls, and birds which he has developed in part as a response to the influence that popular culture, cartooning, and literature like the Brothers Grimm, has had on him.

Video from exclusive Members-only opening night reception.
  Visit our Flickr site to view and download images from the reception.

Fish, who lives in San Francisco, was born in 1974 in Albany, New York, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for the last 15 years. In 2006, Fish worked with Nike Skateboarding and designed the Air Classic shoe. He has also collaborated with hip-hop artist Aesop Rock for the album The Next Best Thing. Fish works his designs on to t-shirts, skateboards, and vinyl toys, and launched his own clothing company superFishal.

He has had exhibitions at Fifty24SF, San Francisco (2008, 2006); Joshua Liner Gallery, New York (2008); and The Don Milan (2008). His publications include Once Upon a Time, published by Fifty24SF Books (2008); Romantic Delusions, published by Drago Books (2008); and the cover of Juxtapoz Magazine (December, 2006).

Jeremy Fish: Weathering the Storm was curated by Grace Kook-Anderson, Curator of Exhibitions at Laguna Art Museum.

>> Click here to read Grace's essay about the exhibition!

This exhibition was supported by:

Media sponsors :

    

June 14 - October 4, 2009

"Games are the most elevated form of investigation." -Albert Einstein

"WoW is the most sophisticated happiness engine that exists now."-Dr. Jane McGonigal

"Games may provide new ways for museums to have a profound impact on society if they are designed, as alternate-reality games are, to change people's real-world behavior." -Dr. Jane McGonigal

Fourteen international artists were selected to consider this movement. These works looked at elements of desire, the collapse of fantasy, medievalism, creative critiques, and public intervention.  Artists in this exhibition took on the visual marker of Worldof Warcraft^® to consider, implications of gaming, and their greater impact on our culture.  In addition to the works of these artists, fan art and the growing culture of machinima (computer animation that uses the graphic engines from video games) was explored in this exhibition.  

Gaming is a movement that encompasses a large population and holds the potential to greatly impact society. Jane McGonigal, a game designer and researcher, states, "This is a new generation of hard-core gamers, and what they're doing is generating unprecedented participation bandwidth. They are donating more cognitive cycles, more heart share to game worlds and virtual worlds than we've seen dedicated to any project before." The artists in this exhibition extended these concerns. 

The exhibition was curated by Grace Kook-Anderson with assistance from Blizzard's curator Tim Campbell and artist Eddo Stern.

Participating artists: selected artists from Blizzard Entertainment^®, including Chris Metzen, Sam Didier (a.k.a., Samwise), Chris Robinson, Justin Thavirat, and Roman Kenney (all from Irvine); Aram Bartholl (Berlin); Jorg Dubin (Laguna Beach); RSG (Alexander Galloway) (New York); Jacqueline Goss (New York); Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, Tale of Tales (Ghent, Belgium); Cyril Kuhn (Los Angeles); Antoinette LaFarge (Irvine); Mashallah Design and Linda Kostowski (Berlin); Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto (Irvine); Airyka Rockefeller (San Francisco); Anne-Marie Schleiner (Singapore); Eddo Stern (Los Angeles); The Third Faction (Azeroth); and Zeng Han (Guangzhou) 

This exhibition was generously supported by Blizzard Entertainment^®, the Samia Family and Tierzero.

>> Click here to read the Exhibition Review!
>> Click here to see videos of the WoW lectures and events!

Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction

Roger Kuntz: The Shadow Between Representation and Abstraction was named by Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight as one of the top 10 most fascinating museum exhibitions in the nation for 2009!

March 15 - May 24, 2009

WhenLife magazine did a special issue on thestate of California in 1962, it focused on five artists: StantonMacdonald-Wright, John McLaughlin, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston, and RogerKuntz.  While four of these artists remain central to our understanding ofthe history of California art and have received numerous monographicexhibitions, little has been written on the art of Roger Kuntz.

Roger Kuntz: TheShadow Between Representation and Abstraction, an exhibition of some seventy paintings,drawings, and sculpture organized by Laguna Art Museum, will be the first majorshowing of the artist's work since his death. It will focus on Kuntz's search for what he called the "middle ground"between figurative and non-figurative painting. By about 1950 Kuntz believedthat post-war abstract expressionism had run its course and that the time wasripe for the reappearance of structure in art that communicated to theviewer.  Kuntz embarked on severalpainting series, culminating in the nationally acclaimed Freeway series.

Thesebare geometric paintings dated 1959 to 1962 of concrete canyons, underpasses,ramps, pedestrian spirals, tunnels, and signs carved in deep shadow and light,embodied Kuntz's search for the union of formal abstraction and mundane reality.This stylistic shift away from gestural abstraction was in synch with the timesand Kuntz was included in the first national survey of Pop Art organized byJohn Coplans, editor of Artforummagazine, in 1963.

The Shadow BetweenRepresentation and Abstraction will place Kuntz's work in a nationalcontext and explore his role in the Southern California art scene of the 1950sand 1960s. The exhibition will feature the Freeway series as well as aselection from the artist's interiors, beach scenes, signs, bathtubs, blimps,and tennis series.  Kuntz lived in Laguna Beach from 1964 until his deathin 1975 at the age of 49. 

A 112-page, hardcover, color catalogue with an essay byguest curator Susan M. Anderson and an introduction by Peter Plagens willaccompany the exhibition.  Plagens, anartist and former critic for Newsweek magazine, observed the vital postwar artscene in California first hand.  He isthe author of Sunshine Muse, thedefinitive survey of West Coast art from 1945 to 1970.

In Nature's Temple: The Life and Times of William Wendt

November 9, 2008 - February 8, 2009 

In Nature's Temple: The Life and Art of William Wendt will be thefirst full-scale retrospective on the art of William Wendt. In 1912 WilliamWendt was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design, thesame year that he built a studio-home in Laguna Beach.  In many ways,Wendt represented the essential nature of California Impressionism bothstylistically and ideologically. No other California Impressionist soconsistently essayed the sweeping, romantic grand landscape view as Wendt, andno other painter so strongly equated his work with the ideology of Nature asCreation, and Nature as a spiritual path. Dapper, distinguished, and muchadmired by his many followers, Wendt functioned as a very visible example ofwhat an artist should aspire to, and his ongoing career summarized the idealismthat was the foundation of California art in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries.

California Impressionism-a hybrid style of painting that retained clarity offorms overlaid with the brilliant French Impressionist palette-was oncecritically unquestioned and regionally preeminent. It nearly disappeared in themaze of 1950s California hard-edge painting and abstract expressionism, 1960spop and funk art, and the deluge of kinetic and performance art forms of the1970s. However, to fully engage and understand the evolution of Americanpainting, we need to understand the nuances of this hybrid approach to imagemaking, as California was, of all the States, perceived as the real land ofopportunity and reinvention and was destined to become the nation's mostpopulace and economically powerful member. And, to understand CaliforniaImpressionism, we need to fully examine its central practitioner, WilliamWendt.

The resurgence of interest in California's early painters over the pasttwo-plus decades has resulted in a number of academically rigorous studies. TheOakland Museum of California Art's landmark exhibition and catalogue,Impressionism: The California View (1981) was perhaps the first attempt tocontextualize California art within the spectrum of American studies, followedby William H. Gerdts still seminal book, American Impressionism (1984), thatrecognized Wendt and a host of other American artists previously consigned to"regional" as opposed to "American" status. A torrent of regional studies ofAmerican art followed in its wake, the majority of these dealing with someaspect of California art history. One of these was a compendium of documents onWendt's life privately published in 1992 that, although useful, is limited ininterpretive scope and compromised by a narrow methodology.

To date, the most referred to work on Wendt is Laguna Art Museum's 1977catalogue written by noted scholar, Nancy Moure, for an exhibition of that sameyear. While this was a careful and focused study of Wendt, it came before(indeed, helped to instigate) the era of intense scholarship noted above. GivenWendt's enormous contribution, the time has come to build on Moure's earlywork. Until an exhaustive study of Wendt exists, a major piece of Californiaart history, and thus American art history, remains missing.

The most obvious reason no detailed monographic study of Wendt has beenundertaken in recent years is the daunting lack of primary research material:the artist left no diary; no scrapbook; and precious few letters. He left nochildren, and thus not even the prospect of family oral histories. Thechallenge now is to reconstruct Wendt's biography taking advantage of all therecent relevant scholarship in the field as a whole and to reassess his art inthe same light. The exhibition will address this challenge with a full-scaleretrospective, accompanied by a book detailing to the fullest extent possiblehis life and achievement. Wendt died in Laguna Beach on December 29, 1946.
 
Organized by Laguna Art Museum, the exhibition will be guest curated by Dr.Will South, chief curator at the Dayton Art Institute, and will be accompaniedby a color book featuring a 50 page essay by the curator. Dr. South's many publicationsinclude Guy Rose: American Impressionist (1995); CaliforniaImpressionism (1998); Color  Myth, and Music: StantonMacdonald-Wright and Synchromism (2001); and In and Out of California:Travels of American Impressionists (2002).

The 320 page book accompanying the exhibition has been published inpartnership with The Irvine Museum.

Major support for this exhibition generously provided by: 

Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles, II
Elma and Earl Payton
City National Bank
Ranney and Priscilla Draper
Kelvin L. Davis
Gail and Peter Ochs
Edenhurst Gallery, Thom Gianetto, Dan Nicodemo, Don Merrill

Additional generous support provided by:

Simon K Chiu; Ray Redfern, The Redfern Gallery; Marcel Vinh and DanHansman; Josh Hardy Galleries; Historical Collections Council; Historical ArtCouncil of Laguna Art Museum; Daryn and William L. Horton and the MacTonFoundation; George Stern Fine Arts; Susie and Jack Kenefick; Mrs. YvonneBoseker; Mary and Matt Lawson; Kurt and Jenny Listug; John and Patty Dilks;Greg Dollarhyde; Allen and Dorothy Lay; Joseph L. Moure and Mr. and Mrs. JohnStrauss.   

In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor

June 22 - October 5, 2008

In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor was an exhibition that presented the work of 150 artists and posited that there has been a huge, but unacknowledged art movement taking place in this country for the last 40 years. Since 1994, this ground swelling of lowbrow, surrealistic, pop, figurative, narrative work has coalesced and found a voice in the pages of Juxtapoz magazine published in San Francisco. This rag has become the most widely read art magazine in the US. It is an influencing force on the aspiring artists of Generation Y and the Millennials, who are now enrolling in art schools in numbers never seen before.

Juxtapoz magazine was founded by Los Angeles-artist Robert Williams. The “Juxtapoz aesthetic or lowbrow art” is almost always figurative, and is inspired by movies, TV, advertising, black-velvet painting, psychedelic posters, pulp porn, sci-fi and horror, carnival art, comics books and all things lower- and middle-class. The Magazine has and does provide a voice and validation for a brand of artist, like Williams, who has not been accepted traditionally by the typical art-world infrastructure of collector, curator, and critic. However, since its founding, it has been the clear focal point for having been the inspiration for the creation of its own infrastructure that supports Juxtapozian art with galleries in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York, collectors, followed by critical attention, followed by museum exhibitions at adventurous institutions. With it’s growing success Juxtapoz has been a major contributor to the reemergence of painting again as a valid practice for artists since the mid-1990s, running counter to forty-years of art-school canon that focused on the Conceptual practice of context, collectivization, and dematerialization of the art object.

For the last decade the art establishment (collector, curator, and critic) has argued that the idea, or construct, of an art movement is outmoded. The exhibition explores the idea of a “Juxtapoz Factor.” Is it an organized movement operating under a singular manifesto? Or is it a wave of talented overlooked artists who decided to reach out to the public and create their own canon?    

This exhibition was organized by Laguna Art Museum and curated by Meg Linton, Director of the Ben Maltz Gallery and Public Programs at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essays by the curator and Laguna Art Museum director Bolton Colburn.

VIEW THE EXHIBITION REVIEW HERE!

 ARTISTS INCLUDED:

This exhibition is made possible through the generous support of Presenting Sponsor:



Media Sponsor:

Additional Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by:

The Segerstrom Foundation
Mark Parker
Bernie Chase/Symbolic Gallery : Collection
Billy Shire/Billy Shire Fine Arts

The DiCaprio Family would like to acknowledge Robert Williams for his sight and insight in this world and the next one over
Copro/Nason Gallery, Culver City
Debra Jacobson/ L'Imagerie Gallery, North Hollywood, California
Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Culver City
MiShell and Jay Nailor- M Modern Gallery
Robert Berman Gallery
Stuart Spence and Judy-Vida Spence
Thinkspace Gallery

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. 

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) traveled to Laguna Art Museum from its premiere at the Las Vegas Art Museum. 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.

Heart and Torch: Rick Griffin's Transcendence

June 24 - September 30, 2007 - 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.

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.

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.