Changing the Focus:Latin American Photography (1990-2005)

February 14 – May 2, 2010.

This is the first survey of Latin American photography and photo-based art to be presented in the Los Angeles area. All the works in the exhibition were created between 1990-2005. They explore the artists’ personally-charged response to the local and global issues grounded in the contemporary Latin American experience. There are over 75 works created by 35 artists from the four regions of Latin America (Mexico, Central and South America and the Spanish speaking Caribbean). The exhibition is organized by  MOLAA and curated by Idurre Alonso.

Manchuria: Vision Periferica- A Felipe Ehrenberg Retrospective

May 23 – August 15, 2010.

Ehrenberg is Mexico’s most celebrated conceptual artist. He was also a proponent of the 1970s Fluxus movement whose innovative and critical approach included experimentation with performance art, installation and media art.  This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City and curated by Fernando Llanos.

Dr. Atl and the Genesis of the Mexican Cultural Revolution

September 12, 2010 – January 2, 2011.

This landmark exhibition explores the legacy of Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo, Mexico 1875-1964) as the leading proponent of the Mexican Renaissance and its School of Modern Mexican painting and muralism. The exhibition will explore this shift in the direction of Mexican art led by Dr. Atl and adopted by Mexican masters Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros, among others. Major works by these artists will be gathered from leading U.S. and Mexican private and public collections. This exhibition is organized by MOLAA and curated by Cynthia MacMullin.

Image credits in order:

Aziz+Cucher, Chris, 1994, Chromogenic print, Courtesy of the artist and ClampArt, New York

Felipe Ehrenberg, Collages en papel de la serie de Obras irreproducibles / Collages on paper from the series irreproducible works, Clyst Hydon, Devon, 1975.

Dr. Atl (1873-1964) Photograph by Edward Weston, 1926 (detail)

Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt), one of the most important artists of the Venezuelan constructivist movement, was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1912 and moved to Venezuela in 1939. During her first decades in Caracas she worked as an architect and designer of furniture, and taught architecture at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas. In the 1950s, Gego became committed to the art of abstraction, and she began experimenting with the conversion of planes into three-dimensional forms through drawing, watercolor, engraving, collage and sculpture. Her interest was to explore architectural space based on the elements of line and movement.

In Gego’s work, the use of the line as a constructive module became one of the most important elements in her art. She believed that the line could express what is not physically present in nature – including thought, intuition and emotion. Her work of the 1960s was made of industrial materials such as steel, wire, lead and nylon to create delicate nets and grid-like forms that play with space, movement and shadow. One of her most significant series from this period is Reticuláreas, made of aluminum and steel that are interwoven nets and webs suspended in space. The two Reticuláreas on view in the exhibition are important examples of her abstract art, which emphasize a focus on endless lines and a repetitive layering of threads to shape space.

Image credits:

GEGO, Reticulárea Cuadrada, 1972, Courtesy the artist and The Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami

Photo: Oriol Tarridas

A new selection of works drawn from the MOLAA Permanent Collection is on view now in the Permanent Collection Gallery. MOLAA’s new Chief Curator, Cecilia Fejardo-Hill, has curated the exhibition of 50 works which offers both broad and specific views about the art. The works span multiple periods, techniques and perspectives from the traditional to the most contemporary and experimental works by Latin American masters, mid-career and young emerging artists.

Displayed as an intersection of five simultaneous displays, the selection of works spans the decades (1930s – 2008) chronologically. They offer a wide  range of techniques from traditional painting, drawing and etching to newer art forms of video art, performance and digital photography; spanning from Abstraction, New Figuration to Postmodern expressions. Each display places in concert the old with the new, the traditional with the contemporary and experimental to provoke new perspectives about the art.

To pose a connection with the exhibition, Sites of Latin American Abstraction: Selection from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, the first exhibit highlights works by José Gurvich (Lithuania b. 1927, Uruguay d. 1974 and paintings by seminal artists such as Joaquín Torres Garcia (Uruguay, 1874-1949) and Augusto Torres (Uruguay, 1913-1992) from the School of the South. Within this context, several correlating contemporary works are shown by artists such as Silvana Lacarra (Argentina, b. 1962), Edgar Guzmanruiz (Colombia, b. 1969) and Eva Castiel (Brazil, b. 1944). They are counterbalanced with two exceptional video works by Eduardo Costa (Argentina, b. 1940) and emerging artist, Amilcar Packer (Chile/Brazil, b. 1974) to create an extraordinary exchange between the historic and contemporary.

The axis of the display is the four intimate monographic exhibitions (including the first Gurvich display) which profile a collection of pieces by master artists José Luís Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1933), Roberto Sebastián Matta (Chile, 1911-2002) and Francisco Toledo (Mexico, b. 1940). Generating a new and unexpected visual and conceptual dialogue, these artists are juxtaposed with key works by contemporary video artists Javier Tellez (Venezuela, b. 1969) and Fabiana Cruz (Venezuela, b. 1984). This interchange expands the frame of reference and understanding about each artist exhibited, and generates a sequence of ideas and experiences that relate to modern and contemporary issues in Latin America.

The final exhibit is devoted to contemporary photography, reuniting a select group of photographic works by Atelier Morales (Cuba, b.1961 and b.1960), Amalia Caputo (Venezuela, b. 1964), Leo Correa (Nicaragua, b.1965), Roberto Huarcaya (Peru, b. 1959) and Veronica Riedel (Guatemala, b.1961), among others. Placing these photographic works together reveals common visual traits and calls attention to the primacy of the human figure placed in both interior domestic settings, and the representation of somewhat dislocated urban landscapes.

Image Credits:

José Luis Cuevas (Mexico, b. 1933) El grabador Gavarín / The Engraver-Printmaker Gavarín, n.d., RobertGumbiner Foundation Collection.

Roberto Sebastián Matta (Chile, b. 1911 – d. 2002) Sans titre / Untitled, 1970, Gift of Hector Ziperovich, M.D.

MOLAA has taken a proactive stance to help the environment while it helps its own “bottom line” through the use of solar power, water-wise landscaping and printing its publications on FSC certified paper. “Now more than ever it is critical for all of us, including the museum community, to do our part to save the planet”, said Richard P. Townsend, MOLAA’s President and CEO.

MOLAA, in partnership with Permacity Construction Corp., will be among the first California museums to use solar energy. Coming online this month with a photovoltaic energy system, MOLAA will capture the powerful southern California sun with a 50kW system that utilizes 340 solar panels on the roof of the museum. The panels will generate13% of the electricity used by the museum on an annual basis. Permacity will own the system and sell the power to the museum at a significantly lower price then its existing electricity. This relationship will amount to an annual savings of approximately $6,000 in electricity costs and allow the museum to decrease its carbon footprint.

The Long Beach Water Department’s Landscape Grant Program provided support for the Museum’s exterior landscaping as well as for the landscaping of MOLAA’s 15,000 square foot sculpture garden. The desert-like natural landscape design utilized at MOLAA provides beauty, low water requirements, low/no chemicals, low/no runoff and low maintenance. The Museum has been commended for its unique design that helps inspire people to use water efficiently, protect our environment and improve quality of life.

(Photo by Lisa Bevins)

The Sites of Latin American Abstraction:Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection is on view now through through January 24, 2010. The exhibition proposes a fresh approach to the Latin American tradition of geometric abstract art produced between the decades of the 1930s and the 1970s.

The unorthodox and innovative exhibition format, curated by Juan Ledezma and organized by the Cisneros-Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami,  embraces a broad collection of works by 81 Latin American artists such as Joaquín Torres-García, Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Gego, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Mira Schendel, Julio Le Parc, Alejandro Otero and Carlos Rojas. Ledezma’s curatorial perspective allows a much broader connection between well-known masters and newly recognized or lesser known artists and photographers who were active in the artistic centers of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Exhibition curator Juan Ledezma’s approach to the reading of this history is organized according to a conceptual and aesthetic structure and visual balance of sites, locales or focuses. The visually engaging display of 200 works gives the viewer the opportunity to appreciate an abstract aesthetic which spans from traditional forms of media (painting, sculpture and drawing) to public spaces, established by the axis of locating the grid, writing and the city as sites where the art and its place of creation is conceptually considered as an interaction between the concrete (city, urban or industrial) and the abstract (line, plane, rhythm, movement and mechanization). The reference to the city is amplified by the novel inclusion of photography, grounding the abstract aesthetic to the concrete sites where artists and ideas converge.

To cite a few examples of the exhibition’s format, a selection of paintings and photograms by Geraldo de Barros (Brazil, 1923-1998) pose vigorously composed geometric representations of domestic objects, industrial buildings and technical processes in concert with paintings by Alejandro Otero (Venezuela, 1921-1990) and Waldemar Cordeiro (Brazil, 1925-1973), whose use of line and plane generate a rhythmic force that, according to Otero, expand the pictorial landscape beyond the frame and push out into the public sphere. Hélio Oiticica’s (Brazil, 1937-1980) gouache on paper of a grid pattern references the city structure, pulling it into the confined framework of the picture, while the large scale of Gego’s (Germany 1912-1994, worked in Venezuela) suspended sculpture, titled Reticulárea Cuadrada (Square Grid) expands the structural form beyond itself. Kinetic structures by Julio Le Parc (Argentina, 1928) and Abraham Palatnik (Brazil,1928) redefine the concepts of collective interaction, inviting the viewer to participate in the operation of the pieces.

The Sites of Latin American Abstraction is accompanied by a fully-illustrated 248-page hardbound catalog for sale in the museum store.

El grito II / The Cry II, 1983, oil on canvas, (detail of triptych, 41 5/16 x 68 15/1 in.),Collection of Fundacion Guayasamín

Beginning Saturday, April 18, Of Rage and Redemption: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamin, will be on view at MOLAA. This traveling exhibition will make its final national stop at the museum. Heralded as the “painter of Latin America” for being an activist against violence, war and social injustice, Ecuadorian, Oswaldo Guayasamin is one of Latin America’s most important and recognizable artists.

This retrospective exhibition features more than 80 paintings, prints and drawings created between 1937-1996.

Do you ever find yourself reminiscing about your childhood? Do you think about the childhood friends with whom you laughed and played with? Or maybe you think about old classmates and the teachers who not only taught you about school subject-matters, but who also taught you life lessons that have remained with you.

Currently on view at molaa is Entre la Memoria y el Olvido/Between Memory and Oblivion by Argentinean artist, Claudio Gallina. Through his work he establishes a connection between the dramatic and the real, his art poses questions about the individual, childhood learning and the schoolroom environment as early influences that shape our behavior and world view.

The exhibition is on view until May 3.

]]> http://molaa.wordpress.com/2009/03/19/between-memory-and-oblivion/feed/ 0 molaa 2_el_rescate_de_ariadna_molaa_low_ress http://molaa.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/molaa-announces-new-presidentceo/ http://molaa.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/molaa-announces-new-presidentceo/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:22:46 +0000 molaa http://molaa.wordpress.com/?p=122 ]]>

After a yearlong national search, MOLAA has announced that Richard P. Townsend will be its new President and CEO. He was most recently the Deputy Director of External Affairs at the Miami Art Museum. He will begin at MOLAA on May 1.

Please click on any of the following media articles to learn more about the museum’s new President and CEO:

http://tinyurl.com/c3pfc7

http://tinyurl.com/cvlcdh

http://tinyurl.com/ccp9hf

http://tinyurl.com/dapbgf

http://tinyurl.com/cy3rrk

MOLAA received a $25 million dollar endowment from its late founder, Dr. Robert Gumbiner, who passed away in January. In a time when many arts organizations are going through financial hardships it is comforting to know that MOLAA, the only museum that features contemporary Latin American art in the West Coast, has a solid financial footing well into the future. However, only the earnings of the endowment are to be used to defray the museum’s operating expenses, and out of those earnings 10% need to be reinvested in the endowment. Dr. Gumbiner also left the museum an undetermined amount to the endowment of the Robert Gumbiner Foundation.At least half of the earnings of the Foundation’s endowment will also be used to support the museum. The money generated by both endowments is intended to provide the museum with 35 – 40% of its operating costs which are currently $3.6 million.

Dr. Gumbiner also left his entire collection of Latin American art to the Robert Gumbiner Foundation which has an agreement with MOLAA, in perpetuity, to care for and display the art.

However, even though Dr. Gumbiner’s generosity will help ensure MOLAA’s long term viability, the growth and future success of the museum depends upon the institution’s ability to raise the remainder of its operating budget every year.

The holidays are right around the corner and since many of you will have time off from work and/or guests visiting in from out of town, you should bring them to molaa. We are the only museum in the western U.S. that features contemporary Latin American art and that showcases exhibitions that you won’t see in any other museum in the greater Los Angeles area. We are nestled in the East Village Arts District in Long Beach.

Read what people at YELP.com have to say about us.