Last Week for John Baldessari at LACMA - Now on View through September 12, 2010

Currently on view at LACMA is “Pure Beauty,” a retrospective of work by John Baldessari. The exhibition features one hundred and fifty objects produced by one of the most influential living American artists, representing over five decades of his storied career. The show is curated by LACMA’s Leslie Jones, with Jessica Morgan, curator of Contemporary Art at the Tate Modern.

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty @ LACMA opens Sunday, June 27

John Baldessari : Pure Beauty

June 27, 2010–September 12, 2010

John Baldessari is one of the most influential American artists working today. This long overdue retrospective will feature more than 150 works spanning the artist's career from 1962 to the present day, and include works on canvas, photography, videos and artist's books. Baldessari's text and image paintings from the mid-1960s are widely recognized as among the earliest examples of Conceptual Art, while his 1980s photo compositions derived from film stills rank as pivotal to the development of appropriation art and other practices that address the social and cultural impact of mass culture. Throughout and continuing today, Baldessari's interest in language, both written and visual, raises questions about the nature of communication. The exhibition is curated by LACMA's Leslie Jones, Prints and Drawings, with Jessica Morgan, Contemporary Art, at Tate Modern. It will also feature a special installation conceived just for this retrospective.

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@ The HAMMER MUSEUM - Outside the Box Edition Jacob Samuel, 1988-2010

This summer the Hammer Museum will host a major exhibition marking the joint acquisition of the complete archive of prints by Los Angeles publisher Edition Jacob Samuel by the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since 1988 Jacob Samuel has published 43 portfolios of prints made by a diverse group of international artists, including Marina Abramovic, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mona Hatoum, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Barry McGee, Ed Moses, Matthew Monahan, Wangechi Mutu, Gabriel Orozco, Nancy Rubins, Ed Ruscha, Robert Therrien, James Welling, Christopher Wool, and Andrea Zittel, among many others. Working primarily in series in intaglio mediums such as etching, drypoint, and aquatint, Samuel has invited artists to create prints in his Santa Monica studio but has also traveled internationally to collaborate with artists in their own studios. The number of prints included in each portfolio range from 6 to 36, with more than 550 individual prints included in the 43 portfolios. The exhibition will be situated in the museum’s main temporary exhibition galleries and will include all the published portfolios, as well as related proofs and other preparatory works.

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Go See - Allen Ruppersberg : You and Me or The Art of Give and Take - Now on View thru Dec.19

The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or The Art of Give and Take. Among the first generation of American conceptual artists that also includes John Baldessari, Douglas Huebler, and Bruce Nauman who redefined artistic practice during the 1970s, this exhibition features two new major interactive installations created especially for the occasion. Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or The Art of Give and Take is now on view through December 19, 2009.

Ruppersberg’s vast oeuvre includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations and books that explore the intersection of art, literature, and life. His work is often participatory, like that of Allan Kaprow and others, and he finds source material in the everyday. Ruppersberg’s vast collection of early to mid-twentieth-century cultural ephemera–which includes calendars, snapshots, magazines, comic books, newspaper clippings, postcards, posters, and instructional films–form the basis of much of his recent work.

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