More than 800 artists, more than 70 galleries, museums and installation sites, all animated by the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time, a once-every five year Southern California art event that speaks to the power of art to explore issues both civic and personal and promotes spaces in Southern California where culture happens.
Many of the exhibitions are ongoing (and if you haven’t been to the La Brea Tar pits to see Mark Dion’s installation there, Excavations, on view until September 15, 2025, it’s a treat). But recently PST held an all-day event (1PM-11PM) at the Wilshire Ebell, that was in some respects a last hurrah, featuring panel discussions on art and science colliding, and an art book fair organized by Printed Matter.
The Art Book fair was small but really fun because everyone at each publisher or bookstore was a person who loved talking about art and were eager to share what they loved. It really brought home how much LA is animated by artistic endeavors.
Was this iteration of PST ART a success? It certainly was successful at getting art institutions of all sizes to come up with fascinating exhibitions all over Southern California. Were they well attended or what percentage of them were well attended or better attended than if they were not under the PST umbrella? Hard to say. Did PST lose steam after the first month or so? It seemed so – I can say that the first weeks there were all sorts of organized trips to see groupings of shows – I wish they had a second round in November and in January to do the same. Maybe next time in 2030!
I probably saw half the exhibitions. I did not write about all of them. But here are few exhibitions (not all of them PST related) that I do want to mention:
OCMA, the Orange County Museum of Art, had several interesting shows that I got to see in November: There was the restaging of Chris Burden’s 1981 installation, A Tale of Two Cities, which was incredible and also slightly insane: One the one hand, like child’s play, it is an array of tiny figures and toys arranged in a way that looks the massing of opposing armies (and there’s an airport and a runway that all looks like some fantastic FAO Schwartz display. When you really look at the detail, the precision of this arranged world, this imagined city, you might think: It’s crazy. And it’s wonderful.
OCMA also had a Liz Larner show, Transformative Currents: Art and Action in the Pacific Ocean, which was on view from September 6, 2024 to January 5, 2025, was an exhibition of work made from plastic waste and marine debris that looked like artfully arrayed post-apocalyptic strings of seaweed – and was more interesting and way cooler than it sounds.
Speaking of OCMA, its Pritzker-prize-winning architect Thom Mayne of Morpheus Studios had his first North American exhibition of his artworks, Shaping Accident, at LA Louver Gallery in Venice, CA. Turns out Mayne has in recent years began to make art (I first saw a piece in LA Louver’s summer show last year).
Mayne’s work is actually not painted but constructed, layer after layer 3D printed, algorithm-drawn or etched. Then Mayne sets instructions for the software to tackle issues of stacking and opacity.
The resulting artworks look like abstract paintings, somewhat Anselm Kiefer-esque but they are all UV ink 3D printed on the surface of aluminum, wood or paper panels, exploding with bursts of color.
LA Louver held an evening where Mayne talked about his work. Here’s the thing: When you see architects on film (The Brutalist, The Fountainhead) or East Coast architects in general, they generally present as the master builder, makers of ego-driven monuments. However, listening to Mayne, and having interviewed Frank Gehry a few times, there is something to California that allows these architects to be as much artists as builders.
Another exhibition that I regret not writing about sooner was PACE gallery LA’s Loie Hollowell exhibition, Overview Effect, her first solo presentation in Southern California which ran from November 9, 2024 to January 18, 2025.
The Overview Effect is a term philosopher Frank White used to describe the visual, emotional and philosophical response to the view of planet Earth from space. Astronauts have spoken of the awe they experience as well as the interconnectedness of the planet that they see and the feeling it provokes in them.
For Hollowell, the Overview Effect is more earth-bound and rooted in the female body but no less deserving of awe. She describes this series of paintings as “abstraction to capture the brief moments and breaks between contractions during childbirth.” The paintings present as a series of orbs stacked and surrounded by other circles, divided by an oblong form. The colors used delineate what we see and the repetition of forms impart feelings of harmony.
Seeing Hollowell’s striking canvases of geometric forms, her largest works to date, you feel like you are seeing something old but that’s at the same time new. The Orbs at the center of the paintings (one, as is above, the other, so is below) are surrounded by colors that reverberate in complementary color s schemes that nonetheless are strikingly separate. The strict geometry and hard lines recalls painters from earlier decades such as Emil James Bisttram and Sonia Delaunay
Hollowell hails from the Central Valley of California and her work also conjures the California Light and Space movement, in how the painted orbs particularly the work of Helen Pashgian. Finally, as so much of Hollowell’s work is inspired by the female body, form, and her own body, it also recalls feminist art from Georgia O’Keeffe and Judy Chicago.
Beyond the large canvases in the main room, Holliwell had installed a series of smaller paintings in the southernmost space at Pace Gallery LA, in a long narrow room. Holliwell sees this series of smaller paintings, each a slightly different color gradient (reminiscent of Barnett Newman’s explorations).
Each of these works has a crenulated indentation and a line descending it (or drip as the case may be). The indentations, Hollowell told me at the press preview, were the nipples of six of her friends who agreed to be cast in the work. Who knew?
PST ART: Art & Science Collide was itself a giant canvas allowing artists to express and extend themselves and their work in creative ways. It also gave curators the opportunity to showcase artists work in ways that gave rise to many memorable exhibitions in institutional, academic, gallery, and public spaces, over Southern California, affirming the dynamism and distinctiveness of Greater Los Angeles for contemporary art and the art historical importance of Southern California.