Riko Mizuno (born 1932) is a gallerist, art dealer, and artist. Born in Tokyo, Japan, she moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s to study ceramics at Chouinard Art Institute. [1] Between 1966 and 1984, Mizuno operated galleries at three locations in Los Angeles.
Artist Vija Celmins characterized Mizuno's contribution to the art world in a 1993 interview with Susan Morgan of the Los Angeles Times: "Riko Mizuno was very important to artists in Los Angeles. She created an incredibly nurturing atmosphere. We would sit around her kitchen, drinking sake, eating her delicious food, and always talking, talking." [2]
In 1966, Mizuno opened Gallery 669 on La Cienega Boulevard. She collaborated briefly at 669 with Eugenia Butler. In 1969 she re-opened the gallery as Mizuno Gallery. [3] Mizuno Gallery operated until 1984 at three locations: on La Cienega Boulevard, in Little Tokyo, and on N. Robertson Boulevard. [4] Over this period, she exhibited the work of artists such as Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, and Ken Price, many of whom had been associated in the 1960s with the Ferus Gallery, as well as the early works of artists who later became notable, such as Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, Mike Kelley, Alexis Smith, and Doug Wheeler. [4]
In a 1973 article on Burden, Peter Plagens referred to Mizuno's gallery, where Burden had recently performed Dead Man, as a "young artist showplace". [5]
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The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.
Vija Celmins is a Latvian American visual artist best known for photo-realistic paintings and drawings of natural environments and phenomena such as the ocean, spider webs, star fields, and rocks. Her earlier work included pop sculptures and monochromatic representational paintings. Based in New York City, she has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions since 1965, and major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Lawrence Gilbert "Larry" Gagosian is an American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries. Working in concert with collectors including Douglas S. Cramer, Eli Broad, and Keith Barish, he developed a reputation for staging museum-quality exhibitions of contemporary art.
The Ferus Gallery was a contemporary art gallery which operated from 1957 to 1966. In 1957, the gallery was located at 736-A North La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. In 1958, it was relocated across the street to 723 North La Cienega Boulevard where it remained until its closing in 1966.
Gemini G.E.L., formally Gemini Ltd., is an artists‘ workshop, exhibition space, and publisher of limited edition prints and sculptures, located at 8365 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, California.
Felix Henry Landau was an American art dealer whose Los Angeles gallery was a showcase for modern and contemporary art in the 1960s.
The Rosamund Felsen Gallery is one of the longest-running art galleries in Los Angeles, California, involved in and influencing the broader American art community since its establishment in 1978. The gallery has operated four locations since its inception: first on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, then on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, later at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, and finally in the Arts District, Los Angeles in Downtown Los Angeles.
Charles Christopher Hill is an American artist and printmaker. Hill lives and works in Los Angeles, California and was married to the late Victoria Blyth Hill, an art conservator. He has been artist in residence at Cité International Des Arts, Paris, France, at Chateau de La Napoule, La Napoule, France and at Eklisia, Gümüslük, Turkey (1994).
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.
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.
Eugenia Louise Butler was an American art dealer and collector. In 1963, she became the American representative of Galleria Del Deposito, which featured work by European artists who made functional art objects, such as trays or jewels. She co-directed the Los Angeles Gallery 669 with founder Riko Mizuno from 1967. Butler ran the Eugenia Butler Gallery on La Cienega from 1968 to 1971. Her gallery showed the work of conceptual artists, including John Baldessari, James Lee Byars, Douglas Huebler, and her daughter, Eugenia P. Butler.
The Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA) was an exhibition venue for visual arts that ran between 1974 and 1987 (approximately) in Los Angeles, California. It played an important role in showing experimental work of the era as well as supporting the careers of young artists in Los Angeles.
The Huysman Gallery was an art gallery in Los Angeles, California that operated from December 1960 to summer 1961. It was located at 740 North La Cienega Boulevard, across the street from the noted Ferus Gallery. Curator Henry Hopkins, who founded the gallery, named it after the French decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. The gallery showcased the works of several young artists who later had great success, including Joe Goode, Ed Ruscha, and Larry Bell.
Cirrus Gallery and Cirrus Editions Limited Publishing and Printing is an art gallery, print workshop and publishing venue in Los Angeles, California. Cirrus Gallery, which houses Cirrus Editions, was founded by Jean Milant and opened in 1970 in Hollywood, before moving to its permanent location in 1979 on Alameda Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Notable artists whose works were shown and printed with Cirrus Editions include Peter Alexander, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Judy Fiskin, Craig Kauffman, Allan McCollum, Ed Moses, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Betye Saar, Gloria Kisch, Alexis Smith, and Mary Weatherford.
Ed Bereal is an American artist best known for his work in assemblage and for his participation in exhibitions and performances that addressed political issues and racial stereotypes from the 1960s onward. In 1961, his work was included in the controversial exhibition War Babies at the Huysman Gallery in Los Angeles, along with work by Larry Bell, Joe Goode, and Ron Miyashiro. In the 1960s he and other artists like Vija Selmins, Craig Kauffman, and Robert Irwin taught at the new campus of the University of California, Irvine in the Fine Arts department.
Helene Winer is an American art gallery owner and curator. She co-owned Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City with Janelle Reiring. Metro Pictures closed in late 2021. Her career deeply involved the postmodern artists of the 1970s and 1980s known as the Pictures Generation. She lives in Tribeca.
The Claire S. Copley Gallery was a Los Angeles gallery on La Cienega Boulevard that existed from 1973-1977. Together with the galleries of Eugenia Butler, Rolf Nelson, Nick Wilder, and Riko Mizuno, the Claire Copley Gallery played an important role in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. The gallery provided a venue for emerging American and European minimalist and Conceptual artists, among them Bas Jan Ader, Terry Allen, Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, David Lamelas, William Leavitt, Allan McCollum, Allen Ruppersberg, and William Wegman.
Franklin Sirmans is an American art critic, editor, writer, curator and has been the director of the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since October 2015. His initiatives there include ensuring that PAMM's art program reflects the community in Miami and securing donations. In his first six months at PAMM, he managed to secure the largest donation of works in the museum's short history, over a hundred pieces of art were donated by Design District developer Craig Robins.
Jim DeFrance was a West Coast artist known for his abstract, shaped panel paintings and meticulous constructions. He utilized a reductive process while incorporating architectural references, geometric foundations, and fine carpentry into his work. He was most known for his “Slot” paintings, where he developed a surface structure of trapezoids on top of a bold color field.
Nicholas Walter George Wilder was an American art dealer and owner of an eponymous contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. He later closed his gallery, returned to his native New York, and developed a second career as a painter.
