A. Quincy Jones: 'Building for Better Living' opens today @ The Hammer Museum -

 

A. Quincy Jones Building for Better Living 

May 25, 2013 - September 8, 2013

 

A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living is the first major museum retrospective of the Los Angeles-based architect’s work and pays special attention to the unique collaborative nature of his practice. The exhibition is presented as part of the larger Getty-sponsored initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Archibald Quincy Jones (1913–1979), who was known as Quincy, practiced architecture in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1979. A quiet modernist and dedicated architecture professor at the University of Southern California, Jones worked to bring a high standard of design to the growing middle class by reconsidering and refining postwar housing and emphasizing cost-effective, innovative, and sustainable building methods. In addition, Jones is among the first architects of this period to view developments as an opportunity to build community through shared green spaces, varied home models, and non-grid site planning. Jones is credited with over 5,000 built projects, most of which still exist today, as the clients and homeowners shared Jones’s compassion for ‘better living.’ Known by architects for designing from the inside out, Jones’s homes and buildings are celebrated for expansive interior spaces, thoughtful and efficient building layouts, and a reverence for the outdoors, which still resonates in contemporary design today. A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living is organized by guest curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Head of Department/Associate Curator of Architecture + Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

 
The exhibition and the accompanying publication are significant additions to the field of architecture history as they illuminate Jones’s largely under-recognized contributions to late mid-century modern architecture and planning. To demonstrate Jones’s ability to work at many scales and across a wide variety of building types, the exhibition is organized thematically. On view in Gallery 4 of the Hammer, the exhibition groups similar architectural typologies together to give a sense of how he designed to enhance the use of a building—the groupings include community developments, large-scale single family homes, work spaces, churches, schools, and libraries. In addition, a central space will be dedicated to mapping Jones’s collaborative practice, which was often aligned with corporate sponsors, developers, and design colleagues with a shared goal of improving livable space not just for economic gain but for societal betterment as well.
The show draws from significant design collections including Jones’s personal and professional archives, which are housed at UCLA in the Charles E. Young Research Library’s Department of Special Collections. The exhibition presents original architectural drawings, a rare Case Study House model, and vintage photographs by Julius Shulman, Ernest Braun and other notable photographers of the period. The architectural drawings include a range of sketches, architectural plans, and exquisite perspective and axonometric drawings by Jones and associate architects in Jones and Frederick E. Emmons’s office, including Kaz Nomura. New photography of many of the projects, which the Hammer commissioned from the photographer Jason Schmidt, are also included in the exhibition with a few key images enlarged to close to actual scale in order to give the visitor a sense of a physical experience of Jones’s architecture.
 

JONES’S PRACTICE

 
Jones is equally well-known for the glamorous homes he designed for clients like the actor Gary Cooper and the art collectors Frances and Sidney Brody, as he is for his sensitive and modest housing developments built in the 1950s and 1960s. From 1946 to 1950 Jones worked with a collaborative team of other architects, engineers, and landscape architects to design the Mutual Housing Association of Crestwood Hills, a unique housing cooperative of more than 160 homes in Los Angeles’s Santa Monica Mountains. Additionally, with his professional partner Frederick E. Emmons, Jones designed many Eichler Homes developments in California around San Francisco and Los Angeles. Easy-going and ambitious, Jones worked closely and often with other designers, including architects Paul R. Williams, Frederick Emmons, Whitney Smith, and Edgardo Contini; landscape architects Garrett Eckbo and Thomas Church; developer Joseph Eichler; and interior designer William Haines, among others, throughout his career.

 

In addition to residential architecture, A. Quincy Jones also designed churches, restaurants, libraries, university buildings, schools, and commercial buildings. Jones prioritized the spatial experience of each building’s interior space, used lightweight structural systems, and had an interest in ‘greenbelt planning,’ making him a premier architect for the residential developments and corporate campuses that flourished during the post-war period. He constantly experimented with materials including steel, plywood, and masonry block construction and put particular emphasis on the siting of buildings to ensure access to light, air, ventilation, and views.

Projects include work for John Entenza’s Case Study House program, Sasha Brastoff ceramics factory, USC’s Annenberg School of Communications, expanded headquarters for furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, and a Tiny Naylor’s restaurant and bar. Notable built projects around Los Angeles, which are still in use, include St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church (Studio City, 1962) and the Northridge Congregational Church (Northridge, 1962), both of which feature soaring interior spaces that utilize laminated timber construction, and the headquarters for Warner Bros Records (Burbank, 1975), which brought the warmth of materials associated with the domestic scale to a large office building. 

 

Learn More Here...

John Baldessari: 'Crowds' Artist Reception this Saturday 5-7pm at FYA @ 6020 Wilshire Blvd.

John Baldessari: Crowds May 18 -June16, 2013 -

ForYourArt will host Mixografia‘s latest collaboration with John Baldessari. The featured series, Crowds with Shape of Reason Missing: Examples 1-6, 2012, examines the idea of removing the predominant subject of an image and replacing it with a nondescript white form. Baldessari chose vintage movie stills that seem at once recognizable and yet unfamiliar. The classic cinematographic images that once informed a clear storyline now raise more questions than they answer. The work depicts individuals gathered together in formation or haphazardly while captivated by the unknown. Soldiers, onlookers, harem girls and a wide assortment of people become participants in an event that was undoubtedly defined before the artist altered the image. The lack of closure in these reinvented images creates a tension that entices the viewer to project ideas and possibilities of what the amorphous white shapes may embody.

Over the past 18 years Baldessari has utilized the Mixografia printing technique to play with notions of texture, color and subject. Beginning in early 1993 Baldessari utilized the resources and technologies of the workshop, to re-define the relief print, first by ignoring the notion of volume altogether in his 2-dimentional deployment of a common table lamp rendered with its inherent shadow, and later by the embracing the variation in his picture plain by acknowledging a foreground-middle ground-background through the demarcation of relief with his work on Stonehenge (With Two Persons), 2005. Sailboat completed in 2008 emphasizes volume through paper sculpture. Baldessari’s A B C Art (Low Relief): A/Ant, Etc. (Keyboard), 2009 embraced the model of high and low relief generating depictions of food, body-parts, toys and sly popular culture references.

A selection of Baldessari’s 18 years of collaboration with Mixografia will also be on view at ForYourArt at 6020 Wilshire Blvd.

Learn More Here...

 

 

 

At CINEFAMILY - Final Run Tonight of 'The Source Family' Documentary.

A radical experiment in ’70s utopian living, L.A.’s The Source Family was known for their outlandish style, popular health food restaurant, rock band, and beautiful women, all of which made them the darlings of the Sunset Strip — but their outsider ideals, and the unconventional behavior of spiritual leader Father Yod caused controversy with local authorities. Fleeing to Hawaii, the Family met a dramatic demise in 1975 — but decades later, former members have surfaced and the rock band has reformed, revealing how Father Yod shaped their lives in the most unexpected ways. The Source provides an intimate insiders’ view of this incredible group of people through contemporary interviews and a treasure trove of photographs, home movies and audio recordings preserved by Family documentarian/archivist Isis Aquarian.

Serving as a highly personal guide to the Seventies counterculture movement, The Source is inspired by the cult classic book “The Source: The Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wa 13, and The Source Family” (Process Media), written by Isis Aquarian & Electricity Aquarian, and edited by The Source co-director Jodi Wille.

Directed by-  Jodi Wille & Maria Demopoulos, 2013, digital presentation, 98 min.
Watch the trailer for “The Source Family”!

The Source Family (Trailer) from Eternal Now on Vimeo.

LA Weekly's 1st annual ARTOPIA Party - May 16, 6p -11p in Chinatown's Central Plaza

LA Weekly presents ARTOPIA - Their 1st annual party celebrating our Best of LA People Issue while honoring some of their favorite talents in the art and music scene of Los Angeles. 

Party on with legendary DJ Keith Morris and a live set of future punk rock classics by FIDLAR. Exclusive, interactive art installations curated by Mastodon Mesa will include local artists visions of utopian Los Angeles including work by Alia Penner, Albert Reyes, Isaiah Frizzell of pHeast, Amy Fortunato, Olive Emanuel, James Rojas, and more.

LA Weekly’s ARTOPIA opens to ticket holders on Thursday, May 16, from 6 to 11 p.m. $15 for general admission includes hosted bar, music and art. Starry Kitchen, Ricky’s Tacos, Seoul Sausage Co and Lobos truck will be serving your favorite dishes.

About FIDLAR: Sure, the noisy riffs and shouted lyrics contained within FIDLAR’s short, sonic assaults aren’t the world’s most atonal — many of them even have, brace yourself, melody — but their punk bona fides can’t be questioned. Take their name, an acronym for “Fuck It Dog, Life’s a Risk,” or even better, their intoxicating live shows, from which even those who avoid the pit might emerge with a bloody nose or a black eye. There’s little doubt the Highland Park foursome is headed somewhere, just don’t expect them to be sober when they arrive. - Ben Westhoff 

About KEITH MORRIS: Three decades as a punk rock icon — frontman and co-founder of genre legends Black Flag and Circle Jerks and now the voice of super-buzz supergroup Off! — have barely dulled Keith Morris’ signature dreadlocked irreverence and restless revenge-of-the-nerds wrath. Behind the decks, Morris is as likely to spin some Brian Jonestown Massacre or Spacemen 3 as he is a little Stax or Motown (not to mention his beloved hardcore punk) — often in the same set.

About MASTODON MESA: Mastodon Mesa is a nomadic art gallery, founded by Mya Stark in 2009 as part of the Pacific Design Center’s Design Loves Art program and currently operating out of the Melrose Trading Post. Mastodon Mesa, co curated by C.W. Moss, was born out of curiosity, friendliness, and an accident of fate caused by roaming around Los Angeles at random. 

More info Here...