Kenny Scharf is an American painter known for his participation in New York City's interdisciplinary East Village art scene during the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf's do-it-yourself practice spanned painting, sculpture, fashion, video, performance art, and street art. Growing up in post-World War II Southern California, Scharf was fascinated by television and the futuristic promise of modern design. His works often includes pop culture icons, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons, or caricatures of middle-class Americans in an apocalyptic science fiction setting.
April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.
Judith Hoffberg was a librarian, archivist, lecturer, a curator and art writer, and editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artist's books, mail art, and Fluxus art.
Rob Clayton and Christian Clayton are painters based in California.
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles, California based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion."
Larry Bell is an American contemporary artist and sculptor. He is best known for his glass boxes and large-scaled illusionistic sculptures. He is a grant recipient from, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his artworks are found in the collections of many major cultural institutions. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico, and maintains a studio in Venice, California.
Adrian Saxe is an American ceramic artist who was born in Glendale, California in 1943. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. Described as "the most elegant of all art critic cowboys", Berardini works primarily between genres, which he describes as "quasi-essayistic prose poems on art and other vaguely lusty subjects."
Craig Kauffman was an artist who has exhibited since 1951. Kauffman's primarily abstract paintings and wall relief sculptures are included in over 20 museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
Stephen Nowlin is an American curator/artist whose practice superimposes art and science and is associated with the national ArtScience movement. He is a vice president at Art Center College of Design and founding director of the college's Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery.
Nancy Buchanan is a Los Angeles-based artist best known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou.
George Herms is an American artist best known for creating assemblages out of discarded, often rusty, dirty or broken every-day objects, and juxtaposing those objects so as to infuse them with poetry, humor and meaning. He is also known for his works on paper, including works with ink, collage, drawing, paint and poetry. The prolific Herms has also created theater pieces, about which he has said, "I treat it as a Joseph Cornell box big enough that you can walk around in. It's just a continuation of my sculpture, one year at a time." Legendary curator Walter Hopps, who met Herms in 1956, "placed Herms on a dazzling continuum of assemblage artists that includes Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell, as well as California luminaries Wallace Berman and Edward Kienholz." Often called a member of the West Coast Beat movement, Herms said that Wallace Berman taught him that "any object, even a mundane cast-off, could be of great interest if contextualized properly." "That’s my whole thing," Herms says. "I turn shit into gold. I just really want to see something I've never seen before." George Herms lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ferenc Csentery was an abstract metal sculptor known for his conceptual work related to the emergence of the US Space Program in the 1960s. He was particularly known for the high degree of technical precision of the machining and welding in his sculpture.
Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.
The Armory Center for the Arts is a non-profit community arts organization that offers arts education programs and contemporary art exhibitions in Pasadena, California, United States. It originated as the education department of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1947. After the museum closed in 1974, the education program became known as the Pasadena Art Workshops. The workshops in collaboration with the Baxter Art Gallery became the Armory Center for the Arts in 1989.
Ron Linden is a California abstract painter, independent curator, and associate professor of art at Los Angeles Harbor College, Wilmington. He lives and works in the San Pedro area of Los Angeles.
Jill Giegerich is an American visual artist known for her paintings and photography. She has had over twenty solo exhibitions, including those at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Art among others. Her work has been presented in over 100 group exhibitions, including those at the California Museum of Photography, Orlando Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan, among others. A retrospective survey of her art from 1979 to 2001 was held at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California.
Lynn Aldrich is an American sculptor whose diverse works draw on a wide range of high and low cultural influences and materials. Her work can range from what art writers describe as "slyly Minimalist meditations" on color, light and space to whimsical "Home Depot Pop" that reveals and critiques the excesses—visual, formal and material—of unbridled consumption. Critics Leah Ollman and Claudine Ise of the Los Angeles Times have described Aldrich's art, respectively, as a "consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition" and a "witty and inventive brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism" LA Weekly critic Doug Harvey calls her "one of the most under-recognized sculptors in L.A.," whose hallmarks are the poetic transformation of found/appropriated materials, formal inventiveness and restless eclecticism. Aldrich has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum, Santa Monica Museum of Art, and venues throughout the United States and Europe. She has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014) and public art collection acquisitions by LACMA, MOCA Los Angeles and the Portland Art Museum, among others.
