Six Long Beach museums will open their doors for free this Sunday to celebrate the launch of “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” an exploration of the Latin American and Latino artistic community.
Pacific Standard Time is an organization sponsored by the Getty Foundation and Bank of America which seeks to preserve artistic history. This year, PST decided to focus on the modern and contemporary art of the Mexican, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan and other various Latino communities and their relationship to the history of Los Angeles.
Long Beach residents can see LA/LA this weekend at the Museum of Latin American Art and Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum. Additionally, fifty museums throughout Southern California will offer free admission to visitors, including institutions such as the Getty Center, the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Broad Museum and the Museum for Contemporary Art.
The University Art Museum is participating in the event by featuring its own exhibition, “David Lamelas: A Life of Their Own” for “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.” The exhibition will include post-minimalist sculpture, photography, video installations and films from Lamelas’ career.
The art pieces in LA/LA will be featured in museums from September 2017 to January 2018. PST says on their website that the collection “… will implicitly raise complex and provocative issues about present-day relations throughout the Americas and the rapidly changing social and cultural fabric of Southern California.”
The collection was put together by PST participants utilizing $16 million in grants from the Getty Foundation. With the funding dispersed among 50 institutions, researchers were able to identify and catalogue materials from the ancient world and the pre-modern era and started the collection of Latin American and Latino art now up for display throughout Southern California.
By partnering up with museums across Southern California, the collection of archival materials traveled as far as Santa Barbara to Palm Springs.
The LA/LA collection is expected to include pieces from the pre-Columbian Americas, Mexico City and more. Exhibitions will include collections from individual artists as well as grander surveys that span entire regions. Most of these exhibits will be heavily based in visual arts, but PST says that LA/LA will also include music, performative art, literature, and the culinary arts.
A full list of museums throughout Southern California that will be offering free admission this Sunday can be found at http://dola.com/p/free-museum-day.