Arts & Power

In the past few years L.A. has finally solidified its position as one of a select group of international art capitals. A city long derided as a shallow backwater finds itself leading the 21st-century high-culture conversation with a booming collector base, innovative artists, teeming schools, profitable galleries and energetic museums. In a dramatic show of collective force, the latter have, of course, mounted this fall’s regionwide Pacific Standard Time initiative with a single purpose: to remind people that this efflorescence didn’t just blossom in the desert overnight. There is a significant history here, and now it’s been brought to the fore. This year, we’re spotlighting a group of emergent artists as well as other key figures—a historian, a conservationist, a fabricator and others—who are instrumental right now in crystallizing what the L.A. art world has become, and where it’s going.

Artist Of The Year
Zoe Crosher
Silver Lake-based artist Zoe Crosher investigates, reimagines and mines ideas of L.A. and its sense of place. The CalArts MFA grad, who’s taught at UCLA and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, examines, as she puts it, “the fiction of documentary and the singular image; the schism between the fantasy of an idea, a place, or a photograph and its reality.” An upcoming exhibition at the soon-to-open Hollywood gallery of newly transplanted New York City dealer Perry Rubenstein will be the culmination of her current multipart work, titled The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, based on the real life of a call girl and aspiring flight attendant who worked the Pacific Rim during the 1970s and ’80s. Also on the horizon is a series of events that will include a feast on the roof of Rubenstein’s new exhibit space featuring a conceptual menu based on the Hollywood sign.

On the Make
This year alone painter Bobbi Woods had a solo exhibition at Annie Wharton Los Angeles and was included in numerous group shows, such as Greater LA and the Hedi Slimane-curated California Dreamin in Paris. Her enamel-covered movie posters rework Hollywood promotional strategies and speak to the visual vocabulary of L.A.

Liz Glynn gained notice for rebuilding Rome in a day at Machine Project. Now she’s wrapping up her three-month residency with Engagement Party (MOCA’s ongoing social-practice lab). In January she’ll organize the nightly after-party and performance area Black Box for the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.

Joel Kyack popped up on everyone’s radar after last year’s popular Superclogger, a puppet show he performed out of the back of his pickup truck in rush-hour traffic on the 405 Freeway. He is also known for his assemblage sculpture recently shown at François Ghebaly.

A recent UCLA MFA grad, ceramicist Matthias Merkel Hess has made clay pieces out of everything from KitchenAids and milk crates to garbage cans and whiskey bottles. Art world insiders are fans of the hand-thrown line, which he’s dubbed MerkelWare.

Mario Ybarra Jr. and the artist collective Slanguage Studio just finished an installation and newly commissioned public artwork at LACMA in collaboration with Watts House Project, as well as a performative installation at Art Platform-Los Angeles, where a prison chef turned out jailhouse delicacies for passersby.

Fresh from earning her MFA in studio art at UCI, artist Alison O’Daniel combines sculpture, film, drawing, performance and sound-baths for a visual and sonic overload. She already had her film Night Sky shown at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives in conjunction with Performa 11, and won the Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Community Foundation.

Artist Alex Israel, who received his MFA from USC, has collaborated with conceptual art heavyweight John Baldessari to create a limited-edition pair of sunglasses for Freeway, Israel’s brand of Duchampian luxury artwork-cum-eyewear.

With a recent appearance in Workspace’s booth at Art Platform-Los Angeles and an upcoming show at the Pepin Moore gallery, Amir Nikravan’s geometrically painted screens and prints of abstract billowy fabric provide meditations on self-reflection and performative image making.

Performance artist and co-founder of CamLab, a performance duo that counts MOCA on their résumé, Jemima Wyman also incorporates installations, video and psychedelic photo collages to investigate the potential of camouflage with respect to collective identity.

The Fabricator
Jack Brogan
Eighty-one-year-old fabrication specialist Jack Brogan may just be the most crucial L.A. art world figure of the past half century that almost nobody knows about—except art world ultra-insiders, that is. Whether it’s blue-chip out-of-town collectors who clamor for an invite to tour his South Central studio, desperate mega-dealers in need of last-minute repairs to postwar minimalist pieces before Basel, or LACMA head Michael Govan bringing in his 1989 BMW 325is for a custom paint job, the ever-unassuming Brogan remains in constant demand. His workshop is currently stuffed with De Wain Valentine discs, John McCracken planks and Larry Bell boxes—as well as fused Plexiglas prism columns that the Korean War vet is currently producing for his longtime friend Robert Irwin, whom he met at a Mexican restaurant on Pico Boulevard in the 1960s. “For many years, back in New York, it was always a put-down: ‘You work in plastics,’” says Brogan. “Not anymore.”

The Gallery
N.Y.C.’s Matthew Marks Gallery opens its L.A. outpost Jan. 19 with an inaugural show featuring the new relief paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, who also embellished the exterior of the gallery with a floating black bar reminiscent of his landmark works “Study for Black and White Panels” (1954) and “Black Over White” (1966). 1062 N. Orange Grove Drive, L.A., matthewmarks.com

The Exhibit
Weegee in Los Angeles
Just months after its blockbuster Art in the Streets graffiti show, MOCA is again putting its imprimatur behind the hitherto lowbrow with Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles. Curated by art historian and USC prof Richard Meyer, the exhibition, which runs through Feb. 27, chronicles the local shots of famed photojournalist Weegee, who captured the less-than-glamorous side of the Hollywood culture and publicity machine in the ’40s and ’50s, juxtaposing the constructed allure of the movie industry with the cult-like devotion of fans. For Meyer, Weegee’s proto-paparazzo pics—many of which are reproduced in the eponymous accompanying catalogue ($45, Skira Rizzoli) and were originally meant for pulp magazines and tabloids—are not out of place in a contemporary art museum. Says Meyer: “Especially after Warhol, it’s no longer such a shameful thing to be seen as having one foot in the art world and one foot in the commercial art world.”

The Advisor
Sarah Jane Bruce
Sarah Jane Bruce has the ear—and the wallet—of some of the most important up-and-coming collectors in town. She got her start in N.Y. assisting art advisor Barbara Schwartz and working at contemporary gallery Cheim & Read before moving to L.A. in 2004 and going solo three years later. “I heard the art scene was starting to explode,” she says. “There is a pioneering spirit here that I felt was missing in New York.” Bruce first worked with individuals before taking on commercial projects developing art programs for hotels. Today, her specialty is working with private clients from a variety of backgrounds including finance, real estate and entertainment. For one of them, Bruce has spent the past two years amassing works by California artists from the ’60s and ’70s, such as Joe Goode and Larry Bell. Another client, Andrew Franklin, says of Bruce: “Art is insular, and she makes it friendly and productive.”

The Conservationist
Tom Learner
The Getty Conservation Institute’s Dr. Tom Learner, a senior scientist and head of modern and contemporary art research, has carved himself a niche in plastics, focusing on the conservation of acrylics and polyester, industrial-use materials utilized by many of the city’s most prominent postwar artists. His goal has been to sensitively revive midcentury masterpieces made from polymers, resins and acrylic paints that have been in storage (and possibly damaged) for decades, many of which—including De Wain Valentine’s 1975 “Gray Column” of cast polyester—are now on view as part of the ongoing Pacific Standard Time initiative. “Do you just say that this is a material that changes with time and the small ripples seen in the surface are part of the natural aging phenomenon of the material?” Learner muses of one of his central dilemmas. “Or do you sand it down, refinish it and make it like new?”

The Historian
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
From Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibit in ’62 at L.A.’s groundbreaking Ferus Gallery to the death of abstract painter John Altoon in ’69, art journalist Hunter Drohojowska-Philp recounts that turbulent decade in her recently released book, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s ($32.50, Henry Holt and Co.). The Benedict Canyon resident buoyantly captures the behind-the-scene stories, rivalries and friendships, set against the backdrop of the region’s counterculture. Rebels in Paradise is the culmination of more than three decades chronicling local art. “The people I wrote about when I came to L.A. are the same people I write about today,” she says. Still, as a longtime advocate for L.A.’s most innovative artists, there’s been one major change over time: “It’s taken for granted that we have a vital scene here. That story doesn’t need to be written anymore.”

The Arbiter
Focusing on the recent work of photographer and fashion designer Hedi Slimane, MOCA’s California Song exhibition (through Jan. 22) features photography from the artist’s “California period,” which began in July 2007.

The Revitalizer
Susan Gray
When the W Hotel opened in Hollywood in 2009, it was instantly acclaimed not just for adding a massive, glamour-infused economic engine to the neighborhood in the midst of the recession, but for its ambitious public art program, too. Featuring pieces by Pae White, Erwin Redl, Christian Moeller and Jennifer Steinkamp, the art at the hotel is both monumental and somewhat miraculous—wrangling multiple regulatory agencies, developers, city planners and artists isn’t easy. Yet Susan Gray, the cultural arts planner at L.A.’s Community Redevelopment Agency, navigates this tricky terrain. A trained artist in her own right, the Aussie is committed to making the most of the city’s Public Percent for Art Program, which requires developers to contribute 1 percent of their project costs to public art. “Artists are at the table, making critical decisions along with politicians, planners and architects,” says Gray. “They can help turn a neighborhood around.”