Suzanne Muchnic | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of Muchnic by Sylvia Shap, 1984 | |
| Born | 1940 (age 81–82) |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Art Writer |
| Known for | Art criticism and art reporting. Author of Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture (1998), and LACMA So Far: Portrait of a Museum in the Making (2015) |
Suzanne Muchnic (born 1940) is an art writer who was a staff art reporter and art critic at the Los Angeles Times for 31 years. She has also written books on artists, collectors, and museums. [1]
Muchnic is a graduate of Scripps College and received a Distinguished Alumna Award in 1987. [2] She graduated from Claremont Graduate School (now Claremont Graduate University) in 1963 and was subsequently inducted into its Alumni Hall of Fame in 2000. [3] In 2010, Muchnic was a Warhol Foundation Arts Writing Workshop leader and mentor. [4] She has lectured on art history and art criticism at University of Southern California, Los Angeles City College and Claremont Graduate University. [2]
On the importance of her Scripps College education to her career, Muchnic said: "It's impossible to imagine working as an art critic, reporter, and feature writer for a major urban newspaper without the kind of background Scripps provided. Just as no academic course stood alone in my Scripps years, no art world event can be isolated from the larger cultural sphere. My editors at the Los Angeles Times are under the delusion that I am a 'special' writer–one who concentrates on a specific subject and, presumably, has a narrow viewpoint. Thanks to Scripps, I know that I am a generalist. My endlessly intriguing challenge is to create a context and bring a broad perspective to the complex processes of creating, interpreting, exhibiting, conserving, collecting, and marketing art." [2]
Aside from her decades long career as an art critic and art writer for the Los Angeles Times (1978-2009), Muchnic was the Southern California editor of Artweek and has published articles in ARTnews , Harper’s Bazaar , Gannett Center Journal, Arts, Picture and Photoshow. [2]
She is the author of Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, [5] a biography of the California industrialist and art collector, published by the University of California Press in 1998. [1] Muchnic’s biography of a Los Angeles painter, Helen Lundeberg: Poetry Space Silence, [6] was published by the Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation and Louis Stern Fine Arts in 2014. The Huntington Library Press published her most recent book in 2015: LACMA So Far: Portrait of a Museum in the Making, [7] which tells the story of how the Los Angeles County Museum of Art became a major West Coast cultural center.
As a reporter, Muchnic took Los Angeles Times readers to all corners of the world to give art its proper context. From Moscow in 1988, she reported on the Soviet Union’s first auction of long-repressed Russian avant-garde and contemporary Soviet art, conducted by Sotheby's, introducing many works of art to an international audience. She also traveled to the world’s oldest continuously operating Christian monastery, Saint Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, to write about the ancient home of icons and other artworks lent to an exhibition at the Getty Museum. She also accompanied a Getty Conservation Institute project to China to report on the restoration of the world’s richest trove of ancient Buddhist wall paintings and sculptures in a complex of art-filled caves along a riverbed in the Gobi Desert. [8]
About her experience reviewing art for the Los Angeles Times, she said "I was primarily interested in contemporary art when I started writing, but over the years I developed a much deeper knowledge and love of art history. One of the best things about my job was that it was an ongoing education." [9]
Her art journalism earned her a Distinguished Alumna Award from Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University. She was awarded a first prize for arts and entertainment reporting from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Her book, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture, won the 2002 Donald Pflueger Local History Award of the Historical Society of Southern California. [10] This award-winning biography tells the story of how the wealthy entrepreneur Norton Simon (1907–1993), enriched the West Coast art world with his collection of art.
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Elise Alyse Cavanna was an American film actress, stage comedian, dancer, and fine artist. She went by the following names: Elise Seeds, Alyse Seeds, Elise Armitage, Elise Cavanna, and Elise Welton.
Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999) was a Southern Californian painter. Along with her husband Lorser Feitelson, she is credited with establishing the Post-Surrealist movement. Her artistic style changed over the course of her career, and has been described variously as Post-Surrealism, Hard-edge painting and Subjective Classicism.
The Getty Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California at the Getty Center, awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts". In the past, it funded the Getty Leadership Institute for "current and future museum leaders", which is now at Claremont Graduate University. Its budget for 2006–07 was $27.8 million. It is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Lorser Feitelson (1898–1978) was an artist known as one of the founding fathers of Southern California-based hard-edge painting. Born in Savannah, Georgia, Feitelson was raised in New York City, where his family relocated shortly after his birth. His rise to prominence occurred after he moved to California in 1927.
Fourteen Rembrandt paintings are held in collections in Southern California. This accumulation began with J. Paul Getty's purchase of the Portrait of Marten Looten in 1938, and is now the third-largest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the United States. Portrait of Marten Looten is now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Meg Linton is an American curator of contemporary art and a writer. Her curatorial efforts have ranged from historical investigations such as "Doin’ It in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman’s Building", "The Los Angeles School: Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, June Harwood, Helen Lundeberg, John McLaughlin", and "In the Land of Retinal Delights: The Juxtapoz Factor" to showcasing the work of single artists who are stylistically different such as "Alison Saar: STILL.. .", "Robert Williams: Through Prehensile Eye," and "Joan Tanner: On Tenderhook" to group exhibitions such as "Mexicali Biennial 2010," "Do It Now: Live Green!" and "Tapping the Third Realm."
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.
Helen Pashgian is an American visual artist who lives and works in Pasadena, California. She is a primary member of the Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, but her role has been historically under-recognized.
Edith Robinson Wyle was an American artist and arts patron, founder of the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.
Eileen Cowin is a Los Angeles-based artist known for photography, video and mixed-media installations that draw on the language of mass media and art history and explore the relationship between narrative, fiction and non-fiction, memory and experience. Associated with the 1970s Los Angeles experimental photography scene and the Pictures Generation artists, her work combines familiar human situations and carefully chosen gestures, expressions and props to create enigmatic images whose implied, open-ended stories viewers must complete. Cowin has exhibited in more than forty solo shows in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Armory Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center. Her work is included in more than forty institutional collections, including LACMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has been recognized with awards and commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, LACMA, the City of Los Angeles (COLA), Public Art Fund, and the Sundance and USA film festivals. New York Times critic Andy Grundberg wrote that her multi-image work "sets up a tension between the familiar and the mysterious, creating a climate of implied danger, sexual intrigue and violence" in which clues abound to intimate various narratives. Jody Zellen observed that Cowin "manipulates the conventions of photography, film, and video to tell a different kind of story—one that explores where truth and fiction merge, yet presents no conclusions. Cowin's work provokes."
Jo Ann Callis is an American artist who works with photography and is based in California. Her work is held in various public collections.
Charlotte Cotton is an independent curator of and writer about photography.
Pratapaditya Pal is an Indian scholar of Southeast Asian and Himalayan art and culture, specializing particularly in the history of art of India, Nepal and Tibet. He has served as a curator of South Asian art at several prominent US museums including Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has organized more than 22 major exhibitions and helped build the museums' collection. He has also written over 60 books and catalogs, and over 250 articles on the subject, taught at several universities, and served as the editor of the Indian art magazine, Marg. In 2009 he was awarded Padma Shri by the Government of India for his contributions to the study of Indian art.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is an art gallery located at 9002 Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, California, in the heart of the city’s Avenue of Art and Design.
Suzanne Deal Booth is an American art director, collector, philanthropist, and winemaker. She has worked as an arts advisor and is the Founder and the Director of Friends of Heritage Preservation (FOHP).
Liz Young was a Los Angeles-based artist known for diverse work investigating body- and nature-focused themes, such as loss, beauty, the inevitability of decay, and the fragility of life. She produced sculpture, installation, performance, painting, drawing and video incorporating fabricated and recontextualized found objects, organic materials, and processes from industrial metalworking to handicrafts, taxidermy and traditional art practices. Young exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and alternative spaces such as Hallwalls, Randolph Street Gallery (Chicago) and New Langton Arts ; she participated in group shows at Exit Art, Art in the Anchorage, and Armory Center for the Arts, among others. Her art was discussed in ARTnews, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Village Voice, and is included in the LACMA permanent collection. Critic Peter Frank wrote that her work "reflects both on life's relentless erosion of body and spirit, and on our indomitable struggle against these nagging cruelties." Artillery Magazine critic Ezrha Jean Black called her 2017 installation a "mordant yet elegiac show" in which "craft bears out the work’s consciousness." In 2016, Young received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; she was recognized with awards from the Getty Trust and Andy Warhol Foundation, among others. Young lived and worked in Los Angeles from 1981.
Nancy Selvin is an American sculptor, recognized for ceramic works and tableaux that explore the vessel form and balance an interplay of materials, minimal forms, and expressive processes. She emerged in the late 1960s among a "second generation" of Bay Area ceramic artists who followed the California Clay Movement and continued to challenge ceramic traditions involving expression, form and function, and an art-world that placed the medium outside its established hierarchy. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Denver Art Museum, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and Kohler Arts Center, and belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian Institution, Oakland Museum of California, and Crocker Art Museum, among others. Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists." Writer and curator Jo Lauria described Selvin's tableaux as "elegiac and stylistically unified" works that serve as "forceful essays on the relationship between realism and abstraction, object and subject, decoration and use." Selvin lives and works in the Berkeley, California area.
Stickney Memorial Art School, also known as Stickney Art Institute and Stickney Memorial School of Fine Arts, was an art school in operation between c.1912 until 1934 in Pasadena, California. The school was an early precursor to the Norton Simon Museum, founded in 1969.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
