Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980
Various Locations – Greater Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs
October 2011 to March 2012

This upcoming fall and winter are the first in which the regional arts community, from San Diego to Santa Barbara, is working together to showcase the history of art in California. If you’re not familiar with Pacific Standard Time, it’s a six month-long series of exhibitions demonstrating the wide breadth of California artists from the post-war period to now. There’s no prevailing narrative in the series, just as there’s no geographical center to the region. The series sweeps across the full range of artists working from different regional, ethnic and conceptual backgrounds.

Although New York still remains a monolith of the art world, California has always been a strong counterpoint. It was at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles that Andy Warhol first exhibited his Campbell’s soup can paintings. What better place for the soup cans than among the subdivisions of post-war California? If one is inclined to think of Warhol’s work as a reflection (and illusion) of American uniformity and industry, Southern California is perhaps the best setting to have introduced Warhol to the world.

Another New Yorker, Jean-Michel Basquiat, understood the allure of California. To escape the spiraling dramas of New York life, he once sought asylum in Los Angeles and found enough peace to focus on his work. It’s probably a stretch to say that his remaining in the southland could have spared his life, but many outsiders before and after Basquiat have found refuge in the west coast.

What’s also compelling about Pacific Standard Time is the examples of artists who suffered exclusion or censure from local institutions and authorities. The LACMA recently opened a retrospective of the Los Angeles-based art group ASCO which famously tagged its name outside the LACMA in 1972. Asco: Elite of the Obscure assembles videos, photographs, paintings, costumes and printed matter produced by the members of the Chicano art collective.

Over 60 museums and galleries are mounting special exhibits from now until March.

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http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/