Author: Haley Gray
Two years ago, in his inaugural address to the student body, Occidental College President and native Angeleno Jonathan Veitch declared that “Los Angeles is a city of artistic ferment.” He pledged that the College would utilize that ferment by engaging the city’s “extraordinary writers, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, composers, actors and directors.”
With the advent of “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945-1980,” an unprecedented arts collaboration between Southern California’s major museums, realizing Veitch’s ambition to connect Occidental students to L.A. culture just got a little bit easier.
Over the course of its six-month run, Pacific Standard Time will invite art aficionados worldwide to reexamine an age of art during a time when the world was nursing its wounds from World War II, wrestling Communist revolutionaries in the jungles of Asia and dipping its toes in alternative lifestyles of all sorts. The project pays respect to urban denizens across the nation who were pushing for new ways to understand the rapidly changing world around them through art.
The Getty Research Institute has invested $10 million to bring about the showcase of the underrated post-WWII art scene in L.A. It is a small price to pay to lay claim to the largest undertaking of its kind and to give an important but largely forgotten epoch of L.A.’s art history its rightful due.
As a whole, the all-encompassing, six-month exhibition at over 70 prominent locations in Southern California is the most comprehensive visual presentation of the era in the region’s history.
Initial sketches for the Pacific Standard Time masterpiece were drawn in 2002, when the Getty Research Institute surveyed influential L.A. artwork created between 1945 and 1980, offering grants to institutions willing to preserve pieces for the project and make them accessible to the public.
Since then, the project has expanded while taking shape, culminating now in what the New York Times calls–in a fitting nod to L.A.–a “sprawling” affair.
The project’s official launch date is Oct. 1, but as of mid-September, 10 exhibits are already open, with the rest to follow between now and spring 2012.
The implications of the show are culturally significant for both Los Angeles and its unrecognized artists. Pacific Standard Time is affording a momentous recognition for long-forgotten works of art.
Asco, for example, a little-known Chicano artist collective from East Hollywood, is featured in a retrospective exhibit at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. While the group made landmark performance art in the 1970s, their cultural relevance has always outstripped their recognition, and the group spent their career marginalized by museums and collectors. For Asco, Pacific Standard Time is righting a longstanding wrong.
By putting hundreds of L.A. artists like Asco into the spotlight for the first time, Pacific Standard Time is also forcing a reevaluation of the city’s place in modern art history.
In an overview of the collection for the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Holland Cotter suggested that because of Pacific Standard Time, the story of modern American art may no longer be limited to just New York.
“For contemporary art in the 1950s and ’60s, there was New York and that was it,” Cotter wrote on Aug. 19. “So the old story goes. But it’s wrong. If there’s one thing that recent globally minded art history has taught us, it’s that after World War II, new art, and lots of it, was turning up in cities everywhere. Los Angeles was one, and in the late ’50s, almost to its own surprise, it had a big art moment.”
It is not just professional critics who see Pacific Standard Time as a sweeping reexamination of Los Angeles’s role in the postwar art movement. Occidental art history major Lauren Cooley (senior) was born and raised in Manhattan. She went to high school across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on New York’s Upper East Side. “It’s validating L.A.,” she said of the project.
“So often, the discourse on American art during this period focuses on the New York School and what was going on in New York City during the period. When there are discussions about Los Angeles, they mainly focus on the Ferus Gallery and iconic figures like Andy Warhol and Walter Hopps,” Cooley said.
But thanks to the project, new places and new figures will enter discourses about L.A. art. “PST is able to bring to the public a new story about art in postwar Los Angeles,” Cooley said.
With installations in locations as varied as banks in Pasadena, coffee shops in West Hollywood and museums on Wilshire Blvd., it is a story that is hard to miss.
“It’s not just the big museums that are a part of this. It’s all of Southern California, which is really important because L.A. is really fragmented. It has all of these microcosms of society, different cities within cities within L.A. and different demographics,” Cooley said. “It’s awesome to have something that’s so widespread where people can collaborate.”
As associate art history professor Amy Lyford put it, “Pacific Standard Time is creating the history of art in Los Angeles as we speak.”
To take full advantage of this hard-to-pass-up opportunity, Professor Lyford is teaching a four-unit seminar this semester centered around Pacific Standard Time. The aptly-named course, “Art in Los Angeles: 1945-1980,” has attracted 15 students who will delve into the postwar period through readings, discussions, guest lecturers and field trips.
Lyford is thrilled about the class and the relevance of Pacific Standard Time to current art history students in Los Angeles like hers.
With an ear-to-ear grin, she effused about the project, especially the opportunity provided for her and her class to “focus on something that’s so vivid and present in a way that’s really alive and there.”
The workload of the class is substantial–one student likened it to a pre-comps course–but the perks are plentiful: unique learning opportunities, a dynamic classroom setting and a passionate, attentive professor.
“She’s the kind of professor that really engages with her students and takes note of what they say,” art history major Hillary Holmes (junior), who has
taken several of Lyford’s classes, said of the professor. “She really wants them to learn. Her classes are very discussion-based. She wants you to engage with the material.”
And engage they will. Lyford is known for encouraging independent ventures into the local museum scene. Holmes reports that the professor begins class by listing current exhibits for students to check out. She provides public transportation directions for students without cars.
But even students without cars in Lyford’s class will get to see the exhibits up close. The course’s syllabus plans for no fewer than eight field trips by the end of the semester, and students are encouraged to make even more on their own.
For the class’s first field trip on Sept. 11, members trekked to the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach to view the exhibit “Mex/L.A.: Mexican Modernism(s) in Los Angeles, 1930-1985.”
Back on campus, the class will experience Pacific Standard Time through frequent guest lecturers. Holly Myers, an accomplished freelance writer and Los Angeles Times art critic, for example, will give a lecture on her own profession.
Later in the semester, students will have the chance to meet featured artists and visit their studios. By any measure, the extensive field experience students are getting in the art world in Los Angeles is incalculably beneficial.
Eventually, students will pick a specific topic that interests them to explore throughout the semester. The culmination of the seminar will be a 15-page research paper on their chosen topic.
Throughout the class, not only do students get to observe the history of art in Los Angeles through a liberal arts lens, but they also get to develop an intimate understanding of the city around them.
“I’m a big advocate of using Los Angeles, what we have here. That’s what drew me to this school,” Holmes said.
She praised the course’s applicability for students with future work aspirations involving art. “I think there are going to be a lot of things in the future that are going to help people who do want to work in museums or do art history research,” Holmes said.
Cooley, also enrolled in the course, is excited about the opportunities it provides to witness the process of archiving, critiquing and curating art.
“A subject like art history really does require hands-on experience,” Cooley said. “A large part of the reason why I came even to Oxy in the first place is because I wanted to study art history, and I wanted to study it in a place where I could engage with the community and engage with it through my studies. I’ve definitely gotten to do that here.”
Cooley also recognizes the unique opportunity the class gives students to make valuable connections in the art world.
“Going out and being introduced to these types of people in the industry is really important. You can always ask one of them for a business card,” Cooley said.
“Art in Los Angeles” is not Professor Lyford’s first class to use the surrounding city as a vast canvas.
Last year, students participated in a walking tour of Pasadena as part of her class on Los Angeles architecture.
For next semester, Lyford is preparing a two-unit class that will be taught by the curator of “Under The Big Black Sun,” a Pacific Standard Time exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
It is just one small part of a push to encourage collaboration between L.A. art museum bigwigs and Occidental.
“We want to move forward in this direction with either courses taught by Oxy faculty or by visiting curators and critics to help students engage with the city,” Lyford said.
The bridge that Lyford is building between Los Angeles and Occidental is something President Veitch has sought from the beginning of his time at the college.
In his inaugural address, Veitch stated, “Occidental does not exist in ‘splendid isolation’ like so many of its sister institutions. Rather, it is located in a city that is fashioning the future.”
To capitalize on this location, Veitch argued that as a college, “We have a responsibility to engage the city.”
But long before President Veitch, Occidental was considering its relationship with the surrounding metropolis.
Associated Dean for Curriculum and Student Issues John Swift recalls a time when Occidental actually thought of itself as a pastoral school, unrelated to the city next door.
“When I first came to Oxy 30 years ago, we tended to act as though the city wasn’t here,” he said. “We don’t do that any more.”
Swift said a paradigm shift began in the late 1980s, when the school hired faculty with expertise in their fields and in the study of Los Angeles.
In that era, Occidental was far from alone in trying to bridge the town-gown divide. Colleges nationwide pursued ways to include their urban neighbors in their mission.
“Higher education in general began to understand itself as having a clearer social mission and social purpose,” he said. “Cities are an advantageous place to be to think about the complexity of human experience,” he said.
With that view, Occidental started to develop coursework that incorporated the academic study of Los Angeles.
In 2001, the opening of the Center for Community-Based Learning marked a new high point in the relationship between the college and the city.
And this year, the brand-new California Immigration Semester, offered to first-years as part of the Core program, gives 36 students and three faculty the chance to examine the timely topic of immigration in L.A. through trips to nearby museums, historic immigrant communities and schools.
All around, professors are now increasingly urged to put their courses in an Angeleno context.
To help them do this, Dean Swift administers a fund aimed at supporting professors who wish to get students into the city for academic purposes.
“It’s something faculty have been doing formally and informally for quite a long time now, and it’s something that the college increasingly encourages,” he said.
Even with so many courses centered around the city, some students still feel that Occidental could do a better job incorporating L.A. into campus life.
“Oxy does O.K. with it,” Cooley said. “As you mature with your experience here and as an upperclassman, you get opportunities to take classes like this, but they could definitely do better. I think that there should be a mandatory kind of class for underclassmen to take on L.A. Or something about L.A. should be a core requirement. There’s no point in living here if you’re just going be in
Eagle Rock and Oxy.”
Holmes agreed that the Occidental community should put more into exploring Los Angeles, and she has taken it upon herself to help students stuck in the bubble do so. To highlight under-the-radar and affordable spots worth checking out in the city, Holmes is hosting a CatAlist segment called “At Home She’s a Tourist,” which premieres next Monday.
“The show will have a lot of variety. Coming from Tennessee, I feel like L.A. is my adopted city, and by spending the summer here I have discovered places I’d love to share with peers,” she said. She hopes that through the show, viewers will get to add their own piece of L.A. to the puzzle.
But despite helpful projects like Holmes’s, it can still be enormously difficult to get outside of Eagle Rock, let alone embark on a trip to a local museum. It is a predicament that is painfully apparent when opportunities to get to know L.A., such as Pacific Standard Time, come up.
One bright spot is that Dean Swift and Assistant Dean of Students for Residential Education and Housing Services Tim Chang have recently come together to make it a little easier for students to get off-campus.
The two discovered they had spare change in their budgets and wanted to use it in a way that would help Occidental students get out of Eagle Rock for cultural enrichment.
The solution they reached seems obvious now: free Metro day-passes. The program is only two weeks old and still being finalized, but the plan so far is for professors to request passes for academic purposes and for students to e-mail Dean Chang to request them for recreational purposes.
Pacific Standard Time encourages viewers to take advantage of the unique, diverse culture that Los Angeles has to offer. As they do, students may be reminded that for their four years here, they are not just Occidental Tigers but Angelenos too.
Classes like “Art in Los Angeles” and programs like the Metro day-pass system are helpful tools available to explore Los Angeles as Angelenos.
In the process of exploring, students may find that they disagree with Woody Allen, who famously quipped that he would never live in Los Angeles, where “the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light.”
Check out the A&E section throughout the semester for profiles on Pacific Standard Time exhibits.
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