Well this just made my morning. I just read that this commissioned Matisse ceramic has been donated to LACMA’s permanent collection. This is quite the destination piece.
hyde or die
“(T)he art handlers marked various options on the wall, and I taped out approximately where the other paintings would hang. But as they lifted Watson up—it takes five people—and it rose past the lower line, I stopped them. It was clearly going to look too high. And then I realized that at the NGA it hangs on the wall all by itself, and it doesn’t matter how high it is there. Context is everything.”
— Bruce Robertson, Consulting Curator, American Art at LACMA talking about hanging one of my all-times.
John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778
One of my all time favorite paintings is up at LACMA right now. Iam so excited to finally see this in person, I can’t even tell you!
Steve Craig Where Am I Supposed to Put This 2010
Lana (Johnson, Collections Manager) had commissioned the work on view from Senior Art Preparator and artist Steve Craig. Inspiration came to Steve from a conversation with Lana where she told him of her never-ending quest to find space for the storage and protection of LACMA’s permanent collection as well as the crates that contain them—a dilemma that often prompts her to ask herself: Where am I supposed to put this? via…
Fact: Preparators are frequently the best artists.
“The bookstore will be much more of a performative space, a theater. All of the bookcases will be on wheels so we can push them aside to make room for talks, signings, music, theater. Why not have a band in there? Or a poetry slam? There will be webcams that can stream performances live. I don’t want to go backwards to having lunches in the store like I did in the old days because I didn’t have any customers. Yet, I would like to do some version of that today because I want to have a dialogue. Art is art and it’s all connected.”
—
Dagny Corcoran on her new Art Catalogues Space at LACMA.
This is very exciting. She used to have the greatest space at the PDC that she had in collaboration with MOCA* which unfortunately went out of business. I am glad Michael Govan is seeing the great potential with this venture and letting her have her freedom at LACMA.
*If you go to the MOCA Geffen bookstore, they still have a lot of her old inventory on super sale. I got 4 catalogues (awesome catalogues) the other day for around $15 and Atencio got a great Hirschfeld book for $5! It’s a bit of a mess, organization wise, but it is worth the look.
I feel very silly right now. How am I JUST learning that these two banners outside of BCAM at LACMA are done by John Baldessari? File this under things LACMA needs to promote better.
It is nice to know that I am not the only one late to the game, LACMA is JUST now starting to talk about people using iphone’s for creating art. Catch up LACMA, I (and other people) have been talking about this for days…
LACMA is going to live tweet the sold out film preservation “discussion” between Michael Govan and Martin Scorsese (which I guarantee you will be tame and probably a little boring with the mutual admiration). You can follow them @lacma.
While you are at it, why don’t you follow me to? @hydeordie*
*I’m shameless.
» Was All the Fuss Over LACMA's Film Program Cuts Worth It?
But now that the dust has settled and everyone’s back to being best friends, the blog Hyde or Die asks if all of this was even necessary to begin with and if maybe Govan was right from the start, that the program needed to be re-evaluated and re-launched once the museum had a better idea on how to make it work (instead of just relying on handouts when things got grim).
Media Bistro is making me feel like an authority this morning.*
*Translation: I feel good knowing sometimes people read my rants.
