Tag Archives: textiles

Pacific Standard Memories

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San Diego Museum of Art and Mingei International Museum
Balboa Park
January-February 2018
LACMA
Hancock Park
March 18, 2018

Over the winter we attended several exhibitions, now gone by, in the Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA series. Life got away from us, so we did not write them up here at the time. We did enjoy getting in touch with Latin American art spanning many centuries and revisiting some museums we had not been to in a while.

The first Pacific Standard Time series celebrated mid-twentieth century Southern California arts; it ran from October 2011 to April 2012. We took Meredith’s mother Margaret to six or more exhibitions in that first series. It was fun discovering small venues and offbeat subjects. Margaret was very taken by a vintage Studebaker Avanti on display at LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and joked about driving off in it while the guard was looking the other way. The thought of Margaret leaping out of her wheelchair and hotwiring a collector car still brings a smile. That first series of Pacific Standard Time visits took place before we started our blog.

The newer LA/LA series explored artistic connections between Latin America and Southern California (mainly Los Angeles) and ran from September 2017 to early 2018. Both PST series were organized by the Getty Museum, which brought together dozens of So Cal museums, each with their own special focus exhibit.

Earlier this year, we saw: (1) Modern Masters from Latin America: The Pérez Simón Collection at the San Diego Museum of Art; (2) Art of the Americas: Mesoamerican, Pre-Columbian Art from Mingei’s Permanent Collection at the Mingei Museum; and (3) Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici at LACMA.

In January, we saw the Pérez Simón Collection show at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park. It brought together art (mostly paintings) from eight different Latin American countries, spanning a little over a century, from the late 1800’s to now. We particularly liked the landscape scenes and portrayals of people in their daily lives. The abstract pieces interested us less. After we finished seeing the Perez Simon collection, we stopped in to see a visiting Monet painting, which was on loan from the Denver art museum and has since been returned.

The next month we headed to the Mingei Museum, also in Balboa Park. We had not been there in years, and it was fun to get reacquainted. The term “mingei” means “everyone’s art,” and this museum features objects from around the world made for everyday use. Although some are very beautiful, none were made purely to be decorative. Their Pacific Standard Time exhibition displayed an extensive collection of objects, particularly ceramics, from a variety of pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico, Central America, and South America. We particularly liked seeing the Mayan textile fragments – so fragile they were shown under dim lighting.

While in the Mingei we also strolled through a display of Native American weaving from the American Southwest. There were some strikingly handsome pieces on display, and the curator’s explanatory signs were very thorough. Two thumbs up on the Mingei visit; we will definitely come back.

Early this year we purchased a Balboa Park Explorer one year family pass, and we used the pass for both the SDMA and Mingei visit.

In March, we met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen to see Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici at LACMA. This was an exhibition of Mexican painting during the 18th century. Over 120 works were on display, many of which had never been shown publicly before, and some were specially restored for this exhibition. Religious paintings predominated, but there were secular themed paintings as well. The works displayed were high quality, sophisticated pieces; this New World art can definitely take its place alongside the best of the Old World. We saw the exhibition on its final weekend in Los Angeles; it went on the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it will be on display through July 22.

We looked through several other LACMA areas. Outside we were amused by a sculpture that looks like a balloon animal. A little hard to take seriously, but hey, we took a picture, didn’t we?

Bowers Museum

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Bowers Museum
December 17, 2018
Santa Ana

We headed north to see the Bowers Museum, which has a large and eclectic art collection. Meredith’s sister Kathleen had suggested visiting it, and after several unsuccessful attempts to find a date in common with her, we decided to see it on our own.

We spent much of our time in two special exhibitions: first we saw Endurance, the Antarctic Legacy of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley, and next we visited Empress Dowager Cixi, Selections from the Summer Palace. We also toured the oldest parts of the museum and looked at the early California collection.

We were fascinated by the Shackleton exhibition. It is built around the stunning photographs and motion pictures taken by expedition photographer Frank Hurley, of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-1917). The negatives have been newly digitized and show remarkable detail, and his compositions are striking. The museum has laid out the exhibition in chronological order, with brief explanations of the various hardships and twists and turns of the expedition’s journey, illustrated by Hurley’s photos and films. The museum is also screening an hour long documentary about the Shackleton expedition from the first sailing to Antarctica, through the long confinement in the pack ice, the row to uninhabited Elephant Island, the open water journey to South Georgia island, and the trek across that island to the whaling station, where Shackleton finally returned to the outside world. A replica of the boat in which Shackleton sailed from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island, a distance of over 720 nautical miles, is displayed in the courtyard of the museum just outside the restaurant.

The Empress Dowager Cixi (whose name is transliterated Tz’u Hsi in older western texts and pronounced “she she,” we think) was originally an imperial concubine. When her son became emperor as a child, she ruled as regent and continued her regency during the minority of her nephew. In all, she ruled China for nearly five decades, from 1861 to 1908. The special exhibition at the museum has many decorative items from her Summer Palace. The furniture on display includes a beautiful and ornate throne set. There are many beautiful Chinese art works, including some calligraphy and painting done by the empress herself. Beautifully embroidered silk gowns are displayed. Bob’s eye was caught by a large carved tourmaline stone mined in San Diego and exported to China, where it was carved as a decorative object. The Empress was interested in Western technology and art, and her interest is reflected in the collection, with objects such as English table clocks. Meredith enjoyed seeing the 1901 Duryea Surrey automobile which one of the empress’ generals imported from the United States as a gift to her. It had a three cylinder, 10 hp engine and was capable of speeds up to 25 mph.

The Shackleton exhibition runs through January 28, 2018. The Empress Dowager exhibition runs through March 11, 2018.

We had lunch at the museum restaurant, Tangata. Service and food were both excellent. It is somewhat pricey. It can be accessed by the general public as well as museum visitors.

After lunch, we visited the oldest parts of the California collection, the Native American and mission era rooms. The California collection is housed in the oldest part of the museum complex, the original building constructed in the 1930’s. There are some very beautiful woven baskets which Meredith‘s late mother Margaret would have loved. In addition to the artifacts on display, the Segerstrom gallery features a beautiful carved wooden ceiling.

We decided to leave for another day the rest of the museum’s permanent collections, which include such things as California plein air paintings, Mexican ceramics, Pacific Island art and artifacts, Pre-Columbian art, and Chinese and Japanese art.

General admission is $15 for adults on weekends, $13 on weekdays; the Empress Dowager exhibit had an additional entry fee. Students and seniors enjoy discounts, and children under 12 are free with paid adults. The museum is closed on Mondays. Parking costs $6, but is free with restaurant validation. Handicapped access is good. In the modern building, everything is at a level. In the older building, there are some steps down into the Native American room, but it was retrofitted with a wheelchair lift.

Fowler Museum — Native American Art

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Fowler Museum
UCLA Westwood
October 10, 2015

Fowler_group

We took Margaret to the Fowler Museum to see two new Native American exhibitions. We first saw Zuni World, a series of paintings displayed around the atrium. They were created by contemporary Zuni artists and feature traditional places, symbols, and subjects. We enjoyed the balance and colors and the fine details. Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon were each depicted in several paintings, reminding Margaret of visits she had made to those sites. This exhibit will run through January 10, 2016.

We then went into a gallery featuring textile art of the Southwest, mostly made in the period 1860-1880. This exhibit, Treasured Textiles from the American Southwest: the Durango Collection, was written up by Jessica Galt in the Los Angeles Times the same day we went, although we did not see the article until after we had been there. The majority of those pieces were blankets woven by Hopis and Navajos. Different designs were represented, and the display showed the evolution of designs over time. We were impressed with how vibrant the red pieces still are. The final pieces in the gallery were woven by Hispanic artists. Interspersed with the textile pieces were some historic photographs providing context, and there were good explanatory notes with each piece. This exhibit likewise runs through January 10, 2016.

Our final stop at the Fowler was a room displaying ancient Colombian pieces from the Magdalena Valley, both ceramic and metal, from about 900 to 1600 A.D. These pieces will be on exhibit through January 3, 2016. We did not spend much time in the permanent collection on this visit. It contains some excellent anthropological pieces from around the world, and also the splendid Francis E. Fowler, Jr. silver collection.

We had lunch before the museum visit, at an Italian café in the Anderson business school, Il Tramezzino, just a few buildings over from the museum. We each had a panini and enjoyed our meal. There were very few people in the restaurant when we arrived at noon, but as we finished a number of students crowded in. The restaurant is up a level from the museum, so we had to go into a classroom building and take an elevator up. We blundered into what turned out to be a service elevator letting us out in a kitchen, but the staff were quite nice and showed us the way through the kitchen out onto the Anderson plaza. After we ate we found the passenger elevator for our return trip, and a fellow passenger made sure we were oriented in the right direction to head back toward the Fowler.

Admission to the Fowler is free. There is a donation box at the entrance for those who wish to contribute. We parked in a nearby underground garage and paid $5 to park. There was ample parking for our Saturday visit; we do not know what the weekday parking situation may be.

Fowler_Zuni_video

Margaret was fairly talkative and alert at the beginning of our outing, and chatted with us about family over lunch. We reminded her that her oldest grandchild had a birthday coming up the following week, and helped her pick out a card in the museum gift shop. Margaret grew tired as the afternoon went on and was struggling a bit for words at the museum, but she did enjoy the videos there. The Zuni exhibit included a video explaining the origin of the art project, and showing several of the artists at work. She also watched two short videos in the permanent collection, one about potlatch ceremonies in British Columbia and the other about Hopi culture in the Southwest. She perked up a bit and joined in the conversation when we met up with Meredith’s sister Kathleen for coffee at the end of the day. The transfers from wheelchair to car and back remain hard for her, and we are now planning our outings so we can eat at or near whatever museum we visit, and not have to make an additional transfer. For smaller places that do not have a café on site, we may bring a picnic or get sandwiches to go.

Hammer Museum

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Hammer Museum
Westwood
August 1, 2015

Enough digression for now! Time for a blog post which is both about a museum AND located in Southern California. On this visit we took Margaret to the Hammer Museum. We have taken her there several times before, although not since we started keeping this blog. The Hammer has several things to recommend it: admission is free, the permanent collection includes some very nice pieces, and it is relatively close to Margaret’s home in the Valley, although traffic is usually bad on the West Side. We are not big fans of contemporary art, which is the Hammer’s focus, so we only visit there when there are exhibitions of particular interest to us.

Today we saw all three of the featured special exhibitions. The Afghan Carpet Project is displayed in a small gallery on the ground floor and consists of six handmade carpets, all designed by contemporary Los Angeles artists, then handmade by weavers in Afghanistan. That exhibit runs through September 27, 2015, and when it has closed the carpets will be sold and the proceeds given to the nonprofit organization Arzu Studio Hope, working in Afghanistan.

Hammer cat

We enjoyed the photography exhibition Perfect Likeness: Photography and Composition, which runs through September 13, 2015. Meredith had seen a review of the exhibition in the Los Angeles Times, Making Photos, Not Taking Them. As the title of the exhibition suggests, the photographs featured are very beautiful and carefully composed, truly works of art in photographic media. Meredith was particularly taken by a large photo of a river landscape. Margaret was struck by a still life featuring a cat statuette and a vase of flowers. Bob liked a camera shop photo staged recently but based on an old snapshot of a camera store in the 1930s. The third special exhibition, Scorched Earth, features paintings and mixed media pieces by Mark Bradford. It runs through September 27, 2015.

We finished our visit with a swing through the permanent collection, which features traditional art, mainly paintings, from the Renaissance through the Impressionist era. Several signature pieces are currently not on exhibit, and a guard said they were on loan to other museums. The galleries have been rearranged so no obvious holes in the collection exist. There were plenty of nice pieces left for us to enjoy, including a large Eakins painting and a small Monet.

Hammer cafe

Partway through our visit we stopped to have lunch in the museum café. The menu was more extensive than we had recalled, and we all enjoyed our meals. Margaret had a BLT, Bob a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, and Meredith salmon benedict. The café is located in the museum courtyard, and the setting is quite pleasant, shaded by Chinese elms. The menu prices were a little high, but not unusually so for a museum restaurant or for Westwood.

As noted above, museum admission is free. (Their slogan is “free for good.”) On Saturday and Sunday parking costs a flat $3 charge for all day; during the week parking costs $3 for 3 hours with validation by the museum. Wheelchair accessibility is generally good. The elevator is quick and serves all floors. However, doors into galleries are heavy and do not have automatic opening mechanisms. Staff and other patrons assisted us with those doors today.

Margaret finds the car to wheelchair transfers harder than before. She tires easily. We are hoping that physical therapy will help her build strength so she can stand longer and take more steps, and we are trying to encourage her.

Fowler Museum (UCLA)

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Fowler Museum
November 29, 2014
Westwood

We went to the Fowler Museum of Cultural History on the UCLA campus. It is a small to midsize facility which at any given time shows several special exhibitions and also has two galleries devoted to items from its permanent collections. The main focus of our visit this time was a set of exhibitions with textiles as the theme. In a press release last summer, the museum’s curators referred to it as a “textile trifecta”, and so it was.

The first exhibition we looked at was Bearing Witness: Embroidery as History in Post-Apartheid South Africa, which featured some hand embroidered modern pieces made in South Africa. They were mounted on the walls around the central atrium, and we strolled along looking at each piece in turn.

We then saw Yards of Style, a display of African print cloths from Ghana. The bright colors were a feast for the eyes. The explanatory material in the gallery described the different manufacturing methods and contrasted qualities of the higher end fabrics, made in the Netherlands and in Africa, with the less expensive ones made in China. There was an interesting array of prints, from traditional geometric and abstract designs to common everyday items like cell phones and clothespins.

We next went into the exhibition called Textiles of Timor, Island in the Woven Sea. The gallery featured many hand woven items, both women’s tube skirts and men’s shoulder cloths. There were several videos playing inside the exhibition, with interviews of native weavers and displays of the dyeing and weaving processes.

Margaret particularly liked the hand embroidered pieces and the videos showing the hand weaving process in Timor.

The Fowler sometimes showcases a modern artist, and this time was no exception. We strolled through World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou. There were some interesting pieces, but all in all it was not really to our taste.

We decided not to visit the anthropological permanent collection gallery this time, but we did revisit the Francis E. Fowler Jr. silver collection, which we have seen several times before. It includes a number of strikingly beautiful pieces both American and European.

Admission is free, but visitors have to pay for parking. We parked in the hourly parking section of parking structure 4, off Sunset Boulevard, as recommended on the museum website. From the underground garage a visitor can take either the elevator or the stairs up to the plaza level, and it is a short walk to the museum from there. After our visit to the museum we strolled around the campus a little bit, over to the campus store and to visit the UCLA Bruin statue, then back to our car.

LACMA

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Los Angeles County Museum of Art
October 12, 2014
“Miracle Mile” Wilshire Boulevard

We took Margaret to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) to see a special exhibition, “Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s.” The exhibition featured over 150 drawings and set photos from German movies of the 1920s, both silent and early sound era. There were also several screens showing clips from the movies featured in the exhibit, and a number of contemporary movie posters were displayed on the wall. We first heard about the exhibition through an article we saw in the Los Angeles Times. The set design drawings were quite evocative. Meredith was struck by the skill and artistry of some of the watercolors. Bob was amused by the directions written on some of them including the word “achtung.”

LACMA haunted-screens

We next went to see another special exhibition, “Big Quilts in Small Sizes: Children’s Historical Bedcovers.” The museum has drawn on some of its reserve collection and displayed a dozen quilts, mostly from the 19th century and a few from the 20th century, all handmade and small in size. This was the exhibit Margaret liked best. She has been quite adept at handwork of all sorts and particularly likes quilting. She admired the careful work on several of the pieces displayed. After seeing the quilts we strolled through some of the permanent collection in the Art of the America’s building, stopping to admire a gigantic mirror that once adorned a mansion in Menlo Park, then served as a Hollywood prop for decades, before finally joining the museum collection in the 1990s. On our way out of the museum complex we went through the Japanese art building and stopped to browse through the special exhibition of modern kimonos. We particularly liked the ones that illustrated abstract flowing water designs, especially one that had dragonflies on it.

The museum complex is quite large and encompasses nine different buildings. It has an impressive collection spanning many countries and eras. One could certainly spend a full day there and still not see everything. The museum is located at the west end of Hancock Park; the Page Museum, better known as the La Brea tar pits museum, is at the east end of the park. The park is a fun place to stroll, and features the novel sight of various tar pits large and small interspersed throughout the lawn area that makes up the park. The aroma of liquid tar may not be to everyone’s taste, however!

We parked at the east end of Hancock Park, in the lot that is actually associated with the Page Museum. That lot cost $9 – the weekend rate – and put us closer to our favorite area restaurant, Johnnie’s New York Pizzeria. (There is also parking in a garage at the west end of the museum, which costs a little more.)

We met up with our youngest daughter and her boyfriend for lunch at Johnnie’s before going over to the museum. Margaret surprised us by choosing something other than her regular dish, turkey panini. This time she had what Johnny’s calls its Italian quesadilla – thin pizza dough with melted mozzarella and pesto sauce. It was quite good. The young people had other plans so did not join us at LACMA. Discussion over lunch of our visit to the Torrey Pines reserve prompted Margaret to recall a very large white pine which grew in the yard at the Dresden Avenue home where she grew up, in Gardiner, Maine.

Admission to LACMA is $15 for adults, $10 for seniors. Bank of America customers who visit on the first full weekend of the month can get in free by showing a B of A debit or credit card. Wheelchair accessibility is good, although one sometimes has to hunt for the ramps and interconnecting bridges between buildings.