Edward Ralph Kienholz was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and fifth wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.
Jason Fayette Rhoades was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs with African, Caribbean, Creole and hip hop slang for the female genitalia.
Terry Alan Fox was an American Conceptual artist known for his work in performance art, video, and sound. He was of the first generation conceptual artists and he was a central participant in the West Coast performance art, video and Conceptual Art movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fox was active in San Francisco and in Europe, living in Europe in the latter portion of his life.
Jack Zajac is a Californian West Coast artist who has been concerned with the “Romantic Surrealist tradition”.
Paul McCarthy is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Located in Hollywood, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) is a nonprofit exhibition space and archive of the visual arts for the city of Los Angeles, California, United States, currently under the leadership of Sarah Russin.
Sterling Ruby is an American artist who works in a large variety of media including ceramics, painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, video, and textiles. Often, his work is presented in large and densely packed installations. The artist has cited a diverse range of sources and influences including aberrant psychologies, urban gangs and graffiti, hip-hop culture, craft, punk, masculinity, violence, public art, prisons, globalization, American domination and decline, waste and consumption. In opposition to the minimalist artistic tradition and influenced by the ubiquity of urban graffiti, the artist's works often appear scratched, defaced, camouflaged, dirty, or splattered. Proclaimed as one of the most interesting artists to emerge this century by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, Ruby's work examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint. Sterling Ruby currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His studio is located in Vernon, south of downtown Los Angeles.
Howard Fried is an American conceptual artist who became known in the 1970s for his pioneering work in video art, performance art, and installation art.
May Sun is a Los Angeles-based artist known primarily for her public art projects. Sun works in the mediums of sculpture, mixed media, photography and installation. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was born in Shanghai, China, moved to Hong Kong at the age of two with her family and immigrated to the United States in 1971 to attend the University of San Diego. "May Sun often refers to aspects of her Chinese heritage in her work, which consistently crosses cultural and political boundaries as well as the boundaries traditionally separating art forms and disciplines."
Susan Mogul is an American artist primarily known for her work in video art. She also works in photography, installation art, and performance art. Originally from New York City, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
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.
Eric Orr (1939–1998) is an American artist who lived and worked in Venice, California from 1965 to 1998. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1965, Orr was a civil rights worker in Mississippi. A key figure of the Light and Space movement, Orr developed alongside Southern California conceptual art and created perceptual-based installations commonly associated with Light and Space art. Orr's work spanned a variety of artistic practices (including installation art, sculpture, painting, and performance art that challenged the definition of art making. Orr's work incorporated a broad range of cultural references, including space icons found in ancient religions and cultures, Egyptian symbolism, and Buddhist spiritualism.
Ilene Segalove is an American conceptual artist working with appropriated images, photography and video whose work can be understood as a precursor to The Pictures Generation.
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.
Harry Dodge is an American sculptor, performer, video artist, professor, and writer.
Charles Sherman is an American artist best known for his continuum sculptures based on a three-dimensional form of the Möbius strip. Sherman’s work is included in museum and public collections, such as the San Diego Museum of Art, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership at Metropolitan State University of Denver. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and Asia. His sculpture and jewelry designs have appeared in contemporary design and architectural publications. Serenity (2006), part of his monumental ceramic Infinity Ring body of work, is installed lakeside at the Fountain Park Sculpture Garden in Fountain Hills, Arizona, and also in the front of the John Entenza House in Santa Monica, California, a precursor to the Case Study Houses.
Elana Mann is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Coleen Sterritt is an American sculptor known for abstracted, hybrid works made from a myriad of everyday objects and materials, combined in unexpected ways. Writers root her work in the tradition of post-minimalists Jackie Winsor, Eva Hesse and Nancy Graves, and assemblage artists such as Louise Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Marisa Merz; she is sometimes associated with contemporaries Jessica Stockholder, Nancy Rubins, and Tony Cragg. Sculpture critic Kay Whitney suggests Sterritt's work "expands and reinterprets three of the most important artistic inventions of the 20th Century—collage, abstraction and the readymade"— in play with the traditions of Arte Povera bricolage and Surrealist psychological displacement. Curator Andi Campognone considers Sterritt one of the most influential post-1970s artists in establishing "the Los Angeles aesthetic" in contemporary sculpture, while others identify her as an inspiration for later West Coast artists creating hand-made, free-standing sculpture counter to trends toward interventions, public art and environmental works. Constance Mallinson writes that Sterritt's work "walks a line between charm and threat, the natural, the industrial and the hand fabricated, rejecting easy associations for complex reads." Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel calls it smart, funky and "subtly rebellious" in its refashioning of discarded material, dumpster finds, and art-historical lineages.
Jim Isermann is an American artist. He is based in Palm Springs and Guerneville, California. In 1977 he graduated from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then received an MFA from CalArts in 1980. His artwork has focused on post-war industrial design and architecture. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in art galleries and museum, and has also created large scale commissioned projects utilizing industrial manufacturing processes. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Richard Telles, Los Angeles, Praz-Delavallade, Paris (2010), Corvi-Mora, London (2011), Mary Boone Gallery, New York and others. Recent commissioned projects include works for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, CA, Yale University Art Museum in New Haven, CT, University of California, Riverside, Los Angeles Metro, and an installation for the Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, TX.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture is an art museum and cultural center headquartered in the Schindler House in West Hollywood, California, United States. Affiliated with the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna (MAK), it is known for its site-specific and artist-centric programming situated in three significant architectural landmarks by the Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler. The center operates a residency program and exhibition space at the Mackey Apartments and runs residencies and a study center at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles. The MAK Center has a mandate to act as a “think tank” for current issues, encouraging exploration of both practical and theoretical ideas in art and architecture by engaging the Center’s places, spaces, and histories.
