Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver @ Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles - "Fade to West" Exhibition

Fade to West

Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles

Through September 13, 2025

Fade to West is a photographic exhibition that brings together the visionary work of Paul Jasmin and Todd Weaver—two artists who have made tangible the fleetingness of Los Angeles’s beauty and sunsets.

Though neither artist was born in California, both were drawn to a city as radiant and restless as them. Now deeply rooted in its culture, they embody its essence—capturing not only its landscapes and people, but its elusive atmosphere. The exhibition pairs Jasmin’s evocative portraits and cinematic vignettes with Weaver’s ethereal scenes of nature, offering a dual portrait of a place defined by light, youth, and transience.

Paul Jasmin helped define the visual language of Los Angeles, staging moments of youth and intimacy against the soft glow of the city’s ambient warmth. His photographs are imbued with compassion and quiet curiosity, revealing a version of the city that feels personal, suspended, and tenderly observed.

Todd Weaver, meanwhile, explores the edges of California—its windswept dunes, sunlit surf, and shifting horizons. Through analog processes and in-camera experimentation, his work transforms familiar vistas into one-of-a-kind impressions—each frame a meditation on movement, time, and atmosphere.

Together, Paul Jasmin and Todd Weaver render California not as an ideal or illusion, but as a living, breathing place—one that glows brightest in moments that never last.

Fade to West was developed in collaboration with Paul Jasmin prior to his death, and we are honored to present it as intended—celebrating his artistry and his enduring love for the city of Los Angeles.

PAUL JASMIN (1935–2025) was an American photographer, illustrator, and educator whose work distilled a precise and evocative vision of beauty. Born in Helena, Montana, Jasmin began his career as a painter and actor before turning to photography in the 1970s, encouraged by his friend Bruce Weber. Drawn to themes of youth, innocence, and sexuality, Jasmin created dreamlike tableaux that transport viewers into a world of seductive beauty and languid allure. Set largely in and around Los Angeles, his images explored the tension between aspiration and reality, reflecting a lifelong fascination with glamour, the American dream, and fleeting moments of becoming. His editorial and commercial work appeared in Vogue, GQ, W, Interview, V Man, Teen Vogue, Vogue Hommes, and in campaigns for APC, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, Nordstrom, and others. He published three monographs: Hollywood Cowboy (2002), Lost Angeles (2004), and California Dreaming (2010, Steidl/7L).

Paul Jasmin was also a dedicated teacher at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where he mentored generations of emerging artists with a quiet rigor and an unshakable belief in the power of imagination. Known affectionately as “Jazz” by his friends and students, he brought the same sensitivity and elegance to his teaching as he did to his images. Paul Jasmin passed away peacefully at his home in Los Angeles on May 24, 2025, at the age of 90.

TODD WEAVER (b. 1970) is an American photographer recognized for his expressive use of color and intimate portraits of artists and musicians. His work is distinguished by a bold and exploratory approach to color, which brings emotional depth and vibrancy to his images. Todd Weaver began his career under the mentorship of established photographers including William Claxton, Ellen von Unwerth, Herb Ritts, Steven Klein, and Randee St. Nicholas. Developing his own distinctive style, he has created portraits of figures such as André 3000, Lita Albuquerque, Paz Lenchantin, Devendra Banhart, and Father John Misty, and collaborated with brands including Nike, Veuve Clicquot, and Cadillac. His first monograph, 36 (2018), features portraits taken with a vintage half-frame camera, emphasizing spontaneity and intimate moments.

More recently, Todd Weaver has focused on Southern California’s surf culture, creating atmospheric, analog portraits that explore the relationship between surfer and wave. Combining experimental film techniques with a strong compositional sensibility, Todd Weaver has participated in several group exhibitions and has been selected multiple times for the American Photography Annual. His work has also been included in two recent publications by Taschen.

FAHEY / KLEIN GALLERY

148 North La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036

www.faheykleingallery.com

Upcoming Exhibition @ Fahey/Klein:

Matthew Rolston - Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits

September 25 - November 8, 2025

Fade to West: Paul Jasmin & Todd Weaver

Fahey / Klein Gallery, Los Angeles, July 10 – September 13, 2025

Helen Berggruen @ Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

Helen Berggruen

Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco

June 26 – August 14, 2025

Berggruen Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings by California artist Helen Berggruen. This marks Berggruen’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Helen Berggruen's paintings exude energetic universes—microworlds overflowing with character. Her full-spectrum palette and abundant use of mixed patterns and textures are packed with robust detail. Berggruen’s scenes feel familiar—landscapes, still lifes, and interiors reminiscent of the Post-Impressionists—her lively renderings animate the utilitarian into the fantastical through expressive gestures. Living room curtains twist; trees and florals reach and writhe. Streams of water and sky are filled with emphatic dabs of blue, yellow, and lavender.

Berggruen’s paintings sing with worlds beyond, with windows acting as portals to fictional universes just out of reach. In Powerlock, a desktop comes to life as everyday objects dance across its surface—paint brushes, scissors, and stacks of books abound. Tractors and trucks move hurriedly down Parisian cobblestones and through rural industrial landscapes; the storybook quality of Berggruen’s work playfully hints at narratives full of folly and adventure. Plucking her characters from her own drawings based on art historical sculptures and paintings, Hellen Berggruen breathes new life into her subjects, building stages and worlds in which they might self-actualize or drift into the cosmos through her painterly world-building. Filled with warmth and movement, her depictions of quotidian scenes become spirited worlds, each object and detail with its own allegorical significance; they act as celebrations of observation and rearrangement. Based in San Francisco, California, Helen Berggruen has exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY

10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105

www.berggruen.com

James Turrell: The Return @ Pace Gallery, Seoul

James Turrell: The Return

Pace Gallery, Seoul

June 14 - September 27, 2025

James Turrell 

After Effect, 2022 

© James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of five recent installations by James Turrell—including a new, never-before-seen, site-specific Wedgework made specifically for this presentation—at its Seoul gallery. Spanning all three floors of the gallery, The Return also features a selection of photographs and works on paper that shed light on the artist’s process for his installations and the construction of his massive Roden Crater project. Marking Turrell’s first solo exhibition in Seoul since 2008, this show is organized as part of Pace’s 65th anniversary year celebration, during which the gallery is mounting exhibitions around the world of work by major artists with whom it has maintained decades-long relationships. 

Born in Los Angeles in 1943, James Turrell is a key member of the California Light and Space movement. He has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed “perceptual art,” working with the materiality of light and space. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with light, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his Projection Pieces from the 1960s, his work with light and perception has expanded in various series, including his Skyspaces, which he began creating in 1974, and his Ganzfelds, which he initiated in 1976.

Today, the artist is known worldwide for his immersive installations that, he says, require “seeing yourself seeing.” His work can be found in major museum collections around the globe, including the Museum SAN in Wonju, Korea, which is home to five of his installations; the Bonte Museum on Jeju Island in South Korea; the Chichu Art Museum on Naoshima Island in Japan; the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others. With his monumental, ongoing Roden Crater project near Flagstaff, Arizona, James Turrell is forging a large-scale artwork and naked-eye observatory within a dormant volcanic cinder cone in the landscape of the Painted Desert of Northern Arizona.

Arne Glimcher, Pace’s Founder and Chairman, first met James Turrell some 60 years ago, and the gallery has represented him since 2002. The artist’s presentation in Seoul—his first ever solo show at Pace’s space in the Korean capital—is an ode to the longevity of his relationship with Arne Glimcher and Pace. The Return includes a new, never-before-exhibited Wedgework installation—in which planes of projected light intersect within a darkened room, lending light a “thingness” through which the room seems to expand beyond its physical limits—made by James Turrell this year. Also featured are two large, curved glass installations, a circular glass installation, and a diamond-shaped glass installation. In these pieces from the Glassworks series, shifting planes of light give the illusion of infinite depth. Rarely exhibited together, these Glassworks of different sizes and dimensions are installed throughout the Seoul gallery, offering visitors a special opportunity to experience the breadth of the artist’s recent work.

The works on paper complementing these installations, which the artist has been producing over the course of his career, speak to the importance of printmaking in Turrell’s practice. At Pace in Seoul, he is showing his new series of Wedgework prints, which explore the chromatic variations and formal possibilities of the Wedgework installations. Works related to the artist’s Roden Crater project also figure prominently in the exhibition, alongside aquatints and woodcuts that depict qualities of light in Turrell’s 2014 installation Aten Reign at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Artist James Turrell

James Turrell, associated with the Light and Space Movement initiated in the 1960s, has dedicated his practice to what he has deemed perceptual art, investigating the immaterial qualities of light. Influenced by the notion of pure feeling in pictorial art, Turrell’s earliest work focused on the dialectic between constructing light and painting with it, building on the sensorial experience of space, color, and perception. Since his earliest Projection Pieces (1966–69), his exploration has expanded through various series, including Skyspaces (1974–), Ganzfelds (1976–), and perhaps most notably, his Roden Crater Project (1977–), a large-scale work in a volcanic cinder cone in the Painted Desert region of northern Arizona. Turrell’s practice has also materialized in small-scale works, including architectural models, holograms, and works on paper.

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Mary Corse @ Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

Mary Corse

Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

June 21 – August 16, 2025

MARY CORSE

Untitled (White Diamond with Black 

Reflective Inner Band), 2024 

© Mary Corse, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works by Mary Corse at its Los Angeles gallery. This presentation marks the artist’s first gallery show in LA since 2017 and her first solo exhibition in the city since her 2019 survey at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Corse’s show at Pace in Los Angeles features new paintings and her 'Halo Room', a new architectural installation that she has been developing over the past few years. Holistically, the exhibition will trace her latest experimentations in painting, shedding light on her radical inquiries into the phenomenological dimensions of art and her role as a key figure in the LA arts community for more than six decades.

Throughout her storied career, Mary Corse—who has lived and worked in Los Angeles since she was a student at the city’s Chouinard Art Institute in the 1960s—has explored light, space, and perception in sublime, scientifically rigorous, and boundary-crossing abstractions across mediums. She is often associated with the California Light and Space movement and has always been committed to the possibilities of painting as her primary concern. As part of her empirical and highly tactile approach to art making, she has continually investigated the ways in which light can be both subject and material.

A sunset drive along Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in the late 1960s changed the course of her practice. Searching for a way to embed light inside her paintings, Mary Corse investigated the industrial materials in the illuminated road markings along PCH and discovered glass microspheres. Soon after this revelatory event, she began applying these refractive microspheres onto the surfaces of her White Light paintings, endowing her works with a sense of illumination projected from within the picture plane itself that changes with the viewer’s position.

The artist’s presentation at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery centers on her new body of Diamond paintings—a continuation of the first diamond-shaped canvases she made in 1965—and includes several never-before- exhibited works produced this year. With her latest Diamond paintings, Mary Corse delves deeper into the fundamental concepts that have defined her practice from its outset. She expands the scope of her inquiry into the metaphysical dimensions of her oeuvre through new iterations of ideas that have long been essential to her work. In addition to Corse’s Diamond paintings, the show features one of her iconic, glowing light boxes. Early in her practice, the artist’s efforts to free her artworks from the wall led her to quantum physics, and she subsequently created a series of highly engineered light boxes, which she referred to as “light paintings.” Suspended using monofilaments, the light boxes are powered wirelessly by Tesla coils—high-frequency generators that transmit electromagnetic fields through walls, producing uncanny, spectral effects.

The exhibition also showcases Corse’s new 'Halo Room', an architectural installation that debuted in her 2024 presentation at Pace’s New York gallery. This work, which is installed in the Los Angeles gallery’s outdoor courtyard, offers a participatory, intimate experience of scale, space, and light. When a viewer enters the room, they encounter a white light painting and as they approach the painting the resulting effect produces a glowing halo around the viewer’s shadow, registering their presence but also incorporating it into the painting itself.

This installation hinges on the energetic relationship between individual and object, producing a moment of intersubjective collision that facilitates a spiritual manifestation of bodies within space. Up to two participants will be allowed inside the installation at a time, and each viewer will only be able to see their own halo—a phenomenon that speaks to the personal nature of experiencing Corse’s art. The presence and presentness of the viewer within the Halo Room become a pure expression of grace, reflecting the ethos that has animated Corse’s practice for decades: as she puts it, “the art is not on the wall, it’s in your perception.”

ARTIST MARY CORSE

Mary Corse (b. 1945, Berkeley, California) investigates materiality, abstraction, and perception through the subtly gestural and precisely geometric paintings that she has made over her sixty-year career. Earning a BFA in 1968 from Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles, Corse developed her initial work during the emergence of the Light and Space movement in Southern California. Throughout the 1960s, she experimented with unconventional media and supports, producing shaped canvases, works with plexiglass, and illuminated boxes. In 1968, Mary Corse discovered glass microspheres, an industrial material used in street signs and dividing lines on highways. Combining these tiny refractive beads with acrylic paint, she creates paintings that appear to radiate light from within and produce shifts in appearance contingent on their surroundings and the viewer’s position. First developing her White Light paintings, by the 1970s she began making her Black Light series with black acrylic and microspheres. The Black Earth works followed-large ceramic slabs that she fired in a custom-built kiln and glazed black. After thirty years of working monochromatically, she reintroduced primary colours into her paintings based on her understanding of colour as constitutive of white light. Corse’s art emphasizes the abstract nature of human perception, expanding beyond the visual to include subtleties of feeling and awareness.

In 2021, Mary Corse was the subject of a major solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai which traveled to the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul. Mary Corse: A Survey in Light, the artist’s first solo museum survey, was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Comprehensive catalogs were published with both surveys. A focused presentation of Corse’s work was on view at Dia: Beacon in New York for four years highlighting historical works from the collection.

Mary Corse was also included in the major presentation Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A., Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970 at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2011. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Dia Art Foundation, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Long Museum, Shanghai; Amorepacfic Museum, Seoul; and other institutions.

PACE GALLERY LOS ANGELES

1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.pacegallery.com

Mary Corse @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

Mary Corse

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

April 3 - May 17, 2025

MARY CORSE  

Untitled (White Multiband With White Sides, Beveled), 2023

Acrylic and glass microspheres on canvas, 58 x 96 x 4 1/2 inches

© Mary Corse, courtesy of Locks Gallery

“My interest is in more of what I think of as pure abstraction … just as in mathematics, you’ll make a formula. . . asking a question into an invisible world.” –Mary Corse, 2011

Locks Gallery presents its first exhibition with California-based artist MARY CORSE (b. 1945). This presentation features a selection of recent ethereal White Light paintings, a body of work she has been making since 1968. 

Mary Corse is one of the few women associated with the 1960s Light and Space movement in Southern California. Her luminous White Light paintings are made of glass microspheres, an industrial material which refracts light and shifts in appearance according to the viewer’s position and environment. Prompted by her studies of quantum physics in the late 1960s, Corse was searching for a way to put light into her paintings. Driving on the Pacific Coast Highway at night, she was captivated by the changing luminosity of the street signs and highway lines. She began combining these tiny glass beads with acrylic paint to create the illusion of light as both the subject and material of her work.

Each of Corse’s paintings is composed of geometries with precise proportions, prompting specific physical and metaphysical experiences of light. The surface of her paintings are rarely pristine; visible brushstrokes reflect the physical labor and systemic application behind each painting. Some works feature vertical bands, activating the verticality of the viewer’s stance. The luminosity of each band shifts in appearance through space, activating a subjective experience of light. Stripes seem to appear and disappear. At times, the surface appears flat while at others, it emits an ethereal light, seemingly radiating from within the canvas. “Nothing’s static in the universe. So why make a static painting?” says Mary Corse. “It’s an outer light, but when you relate to it, it becomes an inner light,” says the artist.

With over five decades of experimentation with her White Light paintings, Mary Corse proves her unrivaled exploration into the abstract nature of human perception. In her paintings, materiality and light is both absent and present, visible and invisible. As put by Art historian Drew Hammond, Corse’s paintings “reveal innumerable oscillating variations between these two poles of unity and multiplicity.” 

This inaugural exhibition celebrates Corse’s dedicated exploration of light in her subtle and powerful paintings. Her ongoing and evolving White Light paintings challenge world views based on external fixity and objectivity, honoring the power of subjective individual experiences, embodied perception, and change.

MARY CORSE (b. 1945) lives and works in Topanga Canyon, California. In 2018, Mary Corse: A Survey in Light was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and in 2019 traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is found in permanent collections including the Dia Art Foundation, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

California as Muse: The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews at Oakland Museum of California - A Retospective Exhibition

California as Muse 

The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews

Oakland Museum of California

October 28, 2006 – March 25, 2007

The Oakland Museum of California presents California as Muse: The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews, a major retrospective of the signature artworks, furnishings, and decorative objects by the couple considered among the outstanding California artists of the twentieth century.

Organized by Harvey L. Jones, senior curator of art, California as Muse includes nearly 150 works by Arthur Frank Mathews and Lucia Kleinhans Mathews, creators of what has come to be known as the California Decorative Style, a unique fusion of artistic European influences at the turn of the last century and the ideals of the International Arts and Crafts movement— in a California setting.

The exhibition includes the Mathewses’ light-filled landscapes, murals, and stained glass, carved frames and furniture, graphic design and illustrations, and decorative pieces. More than two-thirds of the objects are from the museum’s collection.

“Arthur and Lucia Mathews are among the most important rediscoveries from a long list of neglected California artists,” said Harvey L. Jones, “a result of (belated) attention from scholars and collectors to the art history of California. It has become the privilege of the Oakland Museum of California to maintain the artists’ visibility.”

Arthur Mathews (1860-1945) was born in Wisconsin; Lucia Mathews (1870-1955) was a native San Franciscan. The couple met in 1893 at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, in San Francisco, where Arthur served as director and teacher. Lucia was enrolled in his women’s life class. Arthur was by then an established artist who had studied in Paris, where in 1886 he won the first Grand Gold Medal to be awarded at the Académie Julian in several years. Lucia had spent a year at Mills College before coming to the Institute. They married in 1894 and toured Europe in 1898-99, returning to San Francisco so Arthur could resume his teaching duties.

The 1906 earthquake marked a turning point for the Mathewses. In keeping with the philosophy of the Arts and Crafts movement, they sought to help rebuild San Francisco, incorporating aesthetic standards in the design and production of practical necessities. Gathering around them a loosely defined circle of like-minded artisans, architects, city planners, and dreamers, they threw themselves into the re-conceptualization of San Francisco.

With local entrepreneur John Zeile Jr., they established the Furniture Shop, which produced their designs along with commissioned work. Built on Zeile family land, at 1717 California St., the Furniture Shop was the first artists’ studio to open for business after the Great Fire. For 15 years the Mathewses successfully combined their art with commerce, serving commercial and residential clients.

The Furniture Shop was also home to Philopolis Press, which published the monthly magazine Philopolis (“published for those who care”) and books and ephemera (note cards, calendars, bookmarks) designed by Arthur and Lucia that are prized as collectors’ items.

Although the Mathewses did occasionally collaborate and shared a love of the rich, nuanced tones in nature, each had a distinctive style. Arthur was a traditionalist and man of his time, but also made many contributions to modern California art. His paintings and murals often drew on classical references, with mythological figures placed in idyllic California settings, dancing or admiring the bountiful land and vistas. His skills and prodigious output as an architectural designer, graphic designer, and painter defy categorization.

From the foundation of Arthur’s vision Lucia Mathews developed her own personal style and philosophy. Her work centered on images of children, botanicals, and landscapes. Lucia’s work may have proved more enduring vis-à-vis popular appeal and contemporary art sensibilities. Her portraits, painted screens, and floral studies seem remarkably fresh today.

An authority on the Mathewses’ lives and work, Harvey Jones has presented two previous exhibitions of their work at the museum, in 1972 and 1985. For California as Muse, Jones has published a companion book, The Art of Arthur & Lucia Mathews (Pomegranate, 2006), with a foreword by Kenneth Starr and an essay by Kenneth R. Trapp.

OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA

10th & Oak Streets, Oakland, CA 94607

www.museumca.org

Sculpture by Bruce Beasley: A 45-Year Retrospective at Oakland Museum of California

Sculpture by Bruce Beasley: A 45-Year Retrospective

Oakland Museum of California

April 16 – July 31, 2005 

One of the first things visitors notice as they enter the Oakland Museum of California from 10th Street is a clear polygon rising from the open-air koi pond. This is Tragamon, a cast-acrylic sculpture by Oakland abstract artist Bruce Beasley, created and installed in 1972. On sunny mornings the sculpture acts as a prism, refracting the light up the museum steps in bright bands of color.

The Oakland Museum of California presents Sculpture by Bruce Beasley: A 45-Year Retrospective, the first retrospective survey of his work. The exhibition covers more than four decades of Beasley’s sculpture, and includes approximately 75 works in aluminum and acrylic, cast and fabricated bronze, stainless steel, iron, granite, and wood. A tableau of the artist’s studio, with his tools and examples of his collection of animal skulls and other source material, are also on display.

“ The museum decided to offer a retrospective of Bruce’s work now to mark this milestone year in his career and to pay tribute to the completion of Vitality, his 37-foot bronze commissioned by the city of Oakland for the Frank Ogawa Plaza,” said Philip Linhares, chief curator of art at the museum. “We’ve long admired Bruce’s thoughtful, analytical work, and its unexpected emotional content.”

The Oakland Museum of California organized the Beasley retrospective and produced the exhibition catalog. Published by Wilsted & Taylor, Oakland, the catalog includes a foreword by Linhares; essays by Albert Elsen, noted professor of art history at Stanford University, and Los Angeles critic Peter Frank; a personal statement by the artist; an illustrated chronology; and photography by M. Lee Fatherree.

In his essay, Peter Frank notes, “Beasley hews to modernism’s formalist position, the art-for-art’s-sake strain that has constituted the bedrock of modernist practice for a century and a half. Being a good modernist, however, he has always been engaged in and influenced by innovation, not novelty, but true inventiveness. What makes Beasley the artist he is is the integrity of the art he makes.”

BRUCE BEASLEY - BIOGRAPHY

Born in Los Angles in 1939, Bruce Beasley is recognized as one of the most noteworthy and innovative sculptors on the West Coast. He began his art studies at Dartmouth College before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley art department in 1959. His timing was excellent: Berkeley was the epicenter of a revival in sculpture in the late 1950s. Beasley was exposed to distinguished sculptors Sidney Gordin, Richard O’Hanlon, Harold Paris and, most importantly, Peter Voulkos. Beasley joined Voulkos, Paris, and foundryman Donald Haskin to build the Garbanzo Works, a foundry in west Berkeley where they created major works in cast bronze and aluminum.

Even as a student Beasley’s dynamic and space-enveloping sculptures generated interest: his work Chorus was acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, making him the youngest artist at the time to be included in its permanent collection. After graduation, he was one of 11 sculptors to represent the U.S. at the Biennale de Paris in 1963. His piece Icarus was acquired by Minister of Culture Andre Malraux for the French National Collection. This led to acquisitions by Le Musée d’Art Modern in Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and prominent private collections.

Bruce Beasley bought a run-down warehouse complex in west Oakland in 1964 and turned it into a foundry and living quarters. His early works from the 1960s used iron from industrial scrap he found at junkyards and cast aluminum. By mid-decade Beasley’s work was characterized by his forthright interest in technical experiments and new technology and by his involvement in the arrangement of elementary structures, especially crystals. By the end of the 1960s he had turned to a new medium—cast, clear acrylic, an untried material with daunting technical hazards.

Bruce Beasley approached the DuPont Corporation in 1968 for technical and financial support to produce a monumental cast-acrylic sculpture commissioned by the state. DuPont instead donated a generous amount of acrylic material and Beasley began his casting experiments. In 1969 he made a major breakthrough in casting technology, creating a process that enabled him to produce Apolymon, the 13,000-pound commissioned work. This technology also made possible the creation of an all-transparent bathysphere in 1976 for underwater exploration and the large clear walls in today’s aquariums. His innovation was awarded a commendation by NASA and was the subject of a television program produced by the Smithsonian Institution in 1991.

After a decade of prolific production in cast acrylic, Bruce Beasley turned to large-scale metal sculpture. In 1978 he created three large metal pieces, for the Miami International Airport, a state office building in San Bernadino, and the San Francisco International Airport. In 1983 Beasley created Arristus, a 14-foot stainless steel piece for the Djerassi Foundation, in Woodside, California. That same year Stanford University purchased his 28-foot stainless steel sculpture Vanguard. He created a 32-foot piece, Artemon, for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

In 1988 Bruce Beasley began conceiving his pieces on a computer, and was one of the first artists to use computer-assisted design (CAD) technology. He learned and modified a three-dimensional computer solid-modeling system to visualize complex geometric relationships prior to construction. His progress was interrupted by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; his studio, only blocks from the collapsed Cypress Freeway, was damaged. Within a year he resolved his technical problems associated with the precision of his new style and created Pillars of Cypress, cast from the freeway’s crushed rebar steel.

Bruce Beasley has traveled to Japan, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Alaska, and Spain to lecture and attend exhibits and installations of his work. In 1998 he visited Egypt for the Cairo Biennale; the Egyptian government purchased his sculpture, Ally II, for its national collection. His travels to the prehistoric caves of France and Spain and his collection of Oceanic and Alaskan art and artifacts have served as important source material.

A self-described “unrepentant modernist,” Bruce Beasley advanced the idea of sculpture with formal structures that could be simultaneously observed in multiple views, and in changing and reflecting light, as in Tragamon (the gift of Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Novy). The museum’s retrospective of his work demonstrates the artist’s growth, range, and ingenuity over the past four decades. Never static, Bruce Beasley continues to work from his West Oakland compound, using new materials and new technologies.

OAKLAND MUSEUM OF CALIFORNIA

10th & Oak Streets, Oakland, CA 94607

www.museumca.org

Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950 – 2000 at San Jose Museum of Art - A Major Exhibition

Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950 – 2000

San Jose Museum of Art

June 1 - November 3, 2002

Parallels and Intersections, which will occupy the entire Museum when it is fully installed, is divided into two parts and will be opened and closed in two phases.

Part I: Media-based Works and Performance

June 1 - October 13, 2002

Part II: Painting, Sculpture and Mixed Media

June 22 - November 3, 2002

Parallels and Intersections: Art/Women/California, 1950 – 2000 documents a compelling range of work produced by more than 90 women artists working in California during the last half of the 20th Century. It is the first survey exhibition to highlight the historical implications of the period and includes a range of artists diverse in age, background, and formal training. According to Guest Curator Diana Fuller, a Bay Area-based independent curator, the overarching objective of the exhibition is the consideration of the vast socio-political changes of the post-World War II era in California and how they affected these women artists and their art. “Parallels” refers to historical and separate realities experienced by each woman within the California context; “Intersections” refers to the points of contact found in the themes, issues and artmaking practices of the individual artists.

Due to its proximity to the Pacific Basin and Latin America, California epitomized the new frontier that emerged after World War II — it became a gateway to waves of immigrants that affected many aspects of life. The radical activism that resulted from these post-war conditions and subsequent technological advances, empowered such artists as Eleanor Antin, Ruth Asawa, Judy Baca, Joan Brown, Vija Celmins, Judy Chicago, Jay DeFeo, Kim Dingle, Helen Mayer Harrison, Mildred Howard, Hung Liu, Catherine Opie, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alexis Smith, Diana Thater, Patssi Valdez, and Kara Walker, among others, who are represented in the exhibition.

Part I: Media-based Works and Performance

During the late 60s and early 70s, the art world, like the world at large, was in a state of flux. Process art, earthworks, happenings, performance and conceptual art all challenged the hegemony of modernism in the visual arts while feminism, student uprisings, the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement attacked the political status quo. Women were becoming more vocal, and women artists more visible, as they began to create and claim images of themselves that challenged traditional stereotypes.

It was also during this time period, that artists began to investigate the art making potential of new electronic and telecommunications technologies: video, fax, computers, lasers, holograms, xerography and satellite transmission. In California, home to Lockheed, Xerox Parc, the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, new technologies originally developed for defense and aerospace were starting to find their way into everyday life. Concurrently, women artists were eager to access the knowledge and facilities housed in these venerated (and predominantly male) bastions of invention and innovation.

The works presented in Part I reflect the impact of a direct engagement with technology by some of California's most inventive and adventurous women artists. They range from pioneering works by Sharon Grace, Theresa Hak Kyung-Cha, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and Sherrie Rabinowitz, using early video, surveillance, image synthesizing, satellite transmission, video phone and interactive laser disc technology to contemporary works by Cindy Bernard Rebeca Bollinger, Margaret Crane, Sharon Lockhart, Jennifer Steinkamp, Christine Tamblyn, and Victoria Vesna, who use more recent technologies such as digital and computer-generated imagery, projection and the Internet. Women artists in California also had an exceptional influence on both performance and single channel video art. The exhibition includes video documentation of performances by seminal performance artists such as Nancy Buchanan, Nao Bustamente, Suzanne Lacy, Barbara McCullough, Linda Montano, Rachel Rosenthal, and Barbara Smith, and, as well as historic, single channel video works from the 1970s and 80s. Newer video works by Jeanne Finley, Tran T. Kim-Trang and Meena Nanji will also be on view.

Part II: Painting, Sculpture and Mixed Media

Part II of the exhibition focuses on painting, sculpture, and mixed media. It includes seminal works by artists such as Ruth Asawa, whose intricate woven wire shapes, created in the 1950s, reconcile aspects of nature and geometry. Also on view will be works from the late 1950s and early 1960s by such early trailblazers as Vija Celmins, Karen Carson, Jay DeFeo, Mary Lovelace O’Neil, and Deborah Remington, all of whom broke the prevailing mold of male-dominated and accepted formalist theories. Fueled by the political turmoil of the late 1960s, these pioneering artists were followed by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, who together founded the Feminist Art Program at the Los Angeles-based California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s. Chicago subsequently created the highly publicized collaborative installation titled The Dinner Party (1970s), which is documented in the exhibition, and pattern and decoration painter Miriam Schapiro countered dismissive criticism by incorporating blatantly feminine icons into her work. The forces of feminism within the California art scene elevated the importance of content in a work of art over the prevailing interest in abstraction. New styles and strategies put personal experience at the core: painter Joan Brown introduced the personal and figurative into her rich abstractions. Yolanda Lopez and Judy Dater explored issues of personal and collective identity.

The 1980s proved to be rich in ideas and further aesthetic exploration. The interpretation of memory and experience through narrative themes, cultural mythology, and folk/craft elements were reactivated by women such as painters Hung Liu and Faith Ringgold, photographer Linda Connor, and mixed media artists Mildred Howard, Betye Saar, and Amalia Mesa-Bains. In San Francisco, the historic Las Mujeres Muralistas collective brought muralmaking to a new prominence and in Los Angeles Judy Baca developed the “Great Wall” project. Artists like Ester Hernandez, Irene Perez, and Jean LaMarr produced politically charged printed images. The late 1980s and 1990s brought a wide range of works that include the lyrical minimalist abstractions of Anne Appleby and Ingrid Calame’s stain abstractions that document time. Countering these approaches, the 1990s also gave rise to aggressively confrontational works such Kara Walker’s wall installations, which expose racial stereotypes, and Catherine Opie’s photographs that address issues of sexual identity and marginalization.

The exhibition tracks a new and still expanding artistic vocabulary developed by women over the last 50 years. According to Diana Fuller, Parallels and Intersections gives a context to this vocabulary and recognizes the artists whose work served as landmarks representing the individual strands of self discovery that are integral to a more accurate profile of California today.

A 350-page book with full-color reproductions, Art/Women/California, 1950 — 2000: Parallels and Intersections, accompanies the exhibition and is published by the University of California Press in association with SJMA. The publication includes essays by Angela Davis, Whitney Chadwick, Rosa Fregoso, Jennifer Gonzalez, Karin Higa, Phyllis Jackson, Amelia Jones, Pamela Lee, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Joline Rickard, Tere Romo, Moira Roth, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, Judith Wilson, and others.

SJMA - SAN JOSE MUSEUM OF ART

110 South Market Street, San Jose, CA 95113

www.sjmuart.org