Displaying items by tag: museum of contemporary art los angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has elected four new members to its board of trustees, the latest sign of growing confidence in the museum under new director Philippe Vergne.

Prominent L.A. artist Mark Bradford is among the additions, who also include legislative and public policy strategist Heather Podesta, entrepreneur and art collector Cathy Vedovi and banking executive and philanthropist Christopher Walker.

The additions announced Wednesday raise the number of board members to 50, which the museum said nearly restores the board to its largest size in the last decade.

Philippe Vergne, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, has started talking to Frank Gehry about the possibility of renovating the museum’s Geffen Contemporary branch downtown. The US architect oversaw the initial conversion of warehouses in the early 1980s. The space, which measures 55,000 sq. ft, has proved popular with artists but does not have adequate climate controls for many art loans.

Gehry told "The Art Newspaper" during a fuller interview about a range of museum projects: “Philippe asked me to help him. I don’t think they have a lot of money at this point. He asked about an upgrade of the entrance and some work on the inside. I guess they’re going to try to [install] mechanical systems.”

A rare opportunity to see Andy Warhol's Shadows installation at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) from September 20, 2014 – February 2, 2015 has been announced for autumn. The exhibition marks the first West Coast presentation of Shadows (1978-79), a monumental painting in 102 parts. Andy Warhol: Shadows is organized by Dia Art Foundation and coordinated by MOCA Senior Curator Bennett Simpson.
 
Conceived as one work in multiple parts, Warhol’s exceptional series of variously silkscreened and hand painted canvases features two different compositions, ranging in hue from an electric green to a somber brown. Culled from photographs of shadows taken in The Factory, the artist’s New York City Studio, the Shadowspaintings alternate between positive and negative imprints. With few exceptions, “the peak” or black positive always appears on a colored ground, while “the cap,” a smaller, colored form, hovers before a black background.

Scratch an art dealer, and you’ll often find a curator. That’s the case with Craig Starr, who seems to operate in the secondary art market mainly to support his persistent curatorial itch. For nearly a decade, he has been mounting sharp-focus shows of historical works by prominent American postwar artists in his jewel-box gallery on the Upper East Side.

Mr. Starr’s latest effort — one of his best — is “Robert Rauschenberg: The Fulton Street Studio, 1953-54.” With 15 works borrowed from private collections, this exhibition delves into a formative period in the development of Rauschenberg (1925-2008), when he was in his late 20s and moving fast. It presents his sensibility in a nutshell, his broad aesthetic range, omnivorous curiosity, playfulness and intuitive elegance.

In 2011, when asked about the recently announced Dia:Beacon retrospective of his work, his first in North America in more than three decades, Carl Andre told Randy Kennedy of The New York Times that he had informed the Dia curators, “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.” As it turned out, this wasn’t true; according to Yasmil Raymond, the co-curator of the show, he cooperated plenty. “He had to endure our visits almost every month,” she said a few days before the show’s public opening, “and he came here three times to see the installation.”

The result of more than three years of hard work on the part of Raymond and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Philippe Vergne, “Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010,” which will be on view until next March before traveling to other venues, stretches over six galleries and two floors.