Catherine Opie @ Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie: Portraits
The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
January 30 - May 22, 2016

CATHERINE OPIE 

Glenn, 2013 

Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. (83.8 x 63.5 cm)

© Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

One of the preeminent artists of her generation, Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, Ohio) is known for her evocative photographs of contemporary America. The artist has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Obama’s first inauguration ceremony. Her pictures of the people, places, and events of the past 30 years are documents of the artist’s life as well as of our times. Catherine Opie’s work draws as much from Renaissance painting as from the traditions of street photography, and her most recent body of work most directly engages with old master portraiture. Selected from her own circle of creative friends—visual artists, fashion designers, and writers—her sitters emerge from the darkness as if lit from within. The Hammer Museum will present 12 portraits from this recent series, including Jonathan Franzen, Kate & Laura Mulleavy, Mary Kelly, Matthew Barney, Glenn Ligon, John Baldessari, Kara Walker, Miranda July, Raymond Pettibon, Ron Athey, Ryan McGinness, alongside a new abstract landscape.

Catherine Opie: Biography

Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2008, Catherine Opie: American Photographer, a mid-career survey of her work, was on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Aldrich Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; The Saint Louis Art Museum; the Photographers’ Gallery in London; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the Long Beach Museum of Art in California. Catherine Opie was a recipient of the Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. Her latest book 700 Nimes Road, a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, has been published by Prestel. Photographs from this body of work will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles concurrently with her exhibition at the Hammer Museum. She is currently working on an installation for the new Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, to debut the Summer of 2016. Catherine Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Photography at UCLA.

This exhibition is organized by chief curator Connie Butler with Emily Gonzalez-Jarrett, curatorial associate.

Concurrently on view from January 23-May 8, 2016, Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road at MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood.

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
http://hammer.ucla.edu/

Simon Henwood, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Simon Henwood

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001

British artist and filmmaker Simon Henwood will exhibit a new 3-D computer-animated video entitled "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" in the Museum's Lobby gallery. Henwood's paintings and mixed-media works explore the complex social and cultural terrain of childhood. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" tells the story of a pumpkin-headed boy whose extreme sensitivity to UV light forces him to remain indoors during the daytime. The exhibition will also re-create a portion of Henwood's studio and will include preliminary sketches for his cartoon as well as gouache paintings of adolescent children. Henwood began his career as a writer and illustrator of children's books. He is the founder of the 'zine, Purr, which features the work of internationally-known artists, writers, and filmmakers; and Alice, an ongoing journal exploring the representation and recycling of childhood in the arts, media, and culture. "Poor Johnny Pumpkin" is currently in development as a series for SKY TV, the Fox TV network's sister station in the UK.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Paul Morrison, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Paul Morrison

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001

British artist Paul Morrison will create a mural for the UCLA Hammer Museum's lobby wall. Using botanical guides, children's storybooks, and cartoons as his inspiration and source material, Paul Morrison creates large-scale monochrome landscapes that have been described as "Disney without the characters." Not unlike Alice's psychedelic-tinged Wonderland, many of Morrison's hypnotic fantasy environments seem to pivot between innocence and malevolence in the blink of an eye. Paul Morrison alters our sense of scale, perspective, and positive-negative space to create visually striking compositions. Spiky brush and trees often obscure the view beyond the immediate foreground. Dandelion plants and other flora are enlarged to many times their normal size. Referencing Pop art and Op art as well as neo-romantic bookplate illustrations and the graphic art of Aubrey Beardsley, Morrison's Pop-naturalist landscapes flirt with abstraction in jarring and unexpectedly seductive ways.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Pentti Monkkonen, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Pentti Monkkonen

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

October 4, 2000 - January 21, 2001

L.A.-based artist Pentti Monkkonen will exhibit a new sculpture in the UCLA Hammer Museum's Vault Gallery. Monkkonen's buoyantly off-kilter sculptures are absurdist versions of the sorts of miniature amusement park rides that are often seen outside of grocery stores. For his Hammer Project installation, Monkkonen will create a chateau. Pentti Monkkonen received his B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1997 and has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Hammer Projects create exhibition opportunities for emerging or under-recognized artists as well as present international contemporary artists who are not well-known to the general audience in Los Angeles.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

February 6 - April 2, 2000

The exhibition "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking," organized by artist Julie Ault, presents a dynamic visual dialogue between two artists of different generations. Both Sister Corita Kent and Donald Moffett have engaged bold graphic design and montage techniques to form compositions that communicate their ideas and social convictions.

For Sister Corita Kent (1918-1986), later known simply as Corita, distribution as a populist principle was key in determining her medium of expression. She learned printmaking in order to reproduce affordable images in large volume. Hailed the "modern nun" on the cover of "Newsweek" Magazine in 1966, Sister Corita embraced the new freedoms engendered by the Vatican Council II in her art and in her capacity as teacher and chair of the art department at the Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Using her art as a platform in the 1960s, Sister Corita Kent turned her attention to issues ranging from conflicts between radical and conservative positions in the Catholic Church; advertising and market culture; U.S. imperialism abroad in Vietnam; and racism at home. By 1969, suffering from frequent censure from local Church officials, among other factors, she left the order and her religious community and moved to Boston, Massachusetts. Her serigraphs included in "Power Up" span the 1960s and include examples from the Grunwald Center's extensive collection of serigraphs bequeathed to the Center by Corita herself.

As artist, designer and activist, Donald Moffett (b.1955) has broadly contributed to the gay liberation and AIDS-activist movements. Moffett's art is conceptually driven and includes photographs, paintings, sculpture, postcards and posters. A member of the collective "Gran Fury" from 1987-1993, Moffett worked individually and collaboratively on graphic campaigns designed to communicate the seriousness of the AIDS crisis. Moffett made a series of images in the form of disarmingly simple photo-text montages for the "Age of AIDS" column in "The Village Voice," a New York weekly newspaper. These temporal pieces relied on metaphor and expressed commentary in visual shorthand form, often with complex implications and wicked humor. These works are featured in "Power Up," alongside Moffett's mixed media works addressing public morality as interpreted and legislated by conservative religious and political institutions. The serigraphs of Sister Corita Kent and the mixed-media works of New York-based Moffett are juxtaposed in "Power Up" to show both artists and their works in a new context.

Beginning with her work with "Group Material" (1979-1996), a collective which organized exhibitions and public projects that explored interrelationships between politics and aesthetics, Julie Ault takes on the role of curator as part of her artistic practice. Julie Ault has said "I view an exhibition akin to an artwork in which every conceptual and concrete aspect requires attention and involves choice, not convention. An exhibition is not simply a frame for presenting artworks or artifacts; from its overall structure to its every detail an exhibition is content itself."

Julie Ault's lively exhibition design for "Power Up" derives from the formal features and aesthetic strategies of Corita's and Moffett's artworks. Ault's installation of "Power Up" includes the construction of displays and seating, overlaid in news articles or quotations to illustrate the context in which the artists created their work. Ault's exhibition deepens the rich legacy and interplay of art, design and social relevance.

Also on view in the exhibition are Baylis Glascock's film "Corita Kent: On Teaching and Celebration" and "Target City Hall," a video produced by DIVA TV in 1989 about one demonstration organized by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP).

The "Power Up: Sister Corita and Donald Moffett, Interlocking" exhibition is an expanded version of a project Ault originally organized for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1997.

UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024

www.hammer.ucla.edu