‘SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA ARTS’ TO OPEN AT LACMA ON AUGUST 19

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LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will present the exhibition, “SoCal: Southern California Art of the 1960s and 70s from LACMA’s Collection,” on view August 19–March 30.

“SoCal” explores the myth of California — and particularly of southern California — that has long loomed large in the modern psyche. Portrayed in the early years of the Twentieth Century as the land of gold and sunshine, California was understood in the popular imagination in more nuanced terms by the mid-Twentieth Century.

Images of both the utopian and the dystopian took shape in the vision of artists working in the 1960s and 70s in southern California, emerging on the one hand in the sleek, elegant, at times even transcendental works of the so-called “light and space” and “finish fetish” artists and on the other hand in the gritty, even tawdry imagery and materials of assemblage and California pop art.

The exhibition features approximately 50 works from LACMA’s permanent collection by 26 artists including Larry Bell, Wallace Berman, Lyn Foulkes, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz and Doug Wheeler.

The museum is at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard. For more information, www.lacma.org or 323-857-6000.