The University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach will soon trace back the history of video art in Long Beach for a large-scale collaborative art project.
The UAM will work with the Long Beach Museum of Art for “Exchange and Evolution: World Wide Video/Long Beach,” exhibits that will simultaneously be held at the UAM and the LBMA in 2011-12.
The two organizations, which have never worked together before, were awarded a $175,000 grant from the Getty Foundation for the exhibitions, which are part of the initiative “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980,” exploring the Los Angeles post-World War II art scene.
“This project marks a great opportunity for us to develop an exhibition, publish a catalog and really explore Long Beach’s incredible history in video art,” said Christopher Scoates, director of the UAM.
The LBMA chose to partner with the UAM because of the museum’s knowledge of video art. The museum has had several video art exhibitions in the past, including the recent “arts/tapes/22.” According to Robert M. Swayze, the Long Beach manager of economic development, CSULB also has the largest enrollment of art students compared to other universities west of the Mississippi River.
“There’s a great synergy of discussion of art and the future of art here in Long Beach, and we want to be a part of every bit of this dialogue,” said CSULB President F. King Alexander. “We want people … to see Long Beach as one of nation and world’s great art communities.”
In two weeks, the curatorial team of the exhibition will begin their research. The team includes Kathy Rae Huffman, a former LBMA video coordinator and curator, Alice Hutchison, UAM’s curator of exhibitions, Nancy Buchanan, a video artist and professor at California Institute of the Arts, Glenn Phillips, a senior project specialist and consulting curator for the Getty Research Institute, and Carrie Lambert-Beatty, an assistant professor from Harvard University. A team including artists, scholars and curators will be developed to act as advisers for the project.
“Through our research we will be conducting … interviews from artists here and around the world and explore the international holdings of the Long Beach Museum of Art video collection now housed at the Getty,” Hutchison said.
“I think this is an amazing time for the museum, for the city and for the world,” said Bill Viola, an artist who lived off grants until he was 41. “Video art was not saleable when it was invented. The galleries really didn’t know what to do with it, so it took us a long time to get to this point, and now it’s known around the world.”
According to Hutchison, few details have been decided about the exhibits, but the museums hope to have monitors, contemporary art, and outdoor screenings and installations. Some of the works they plan to display have not been seen for 20 to 40 years, according to Ron Nelson, LBMA’s executive director.
The LBMA is the first museum on the West Coast with international-standard playback equipment, giving the museum the opportunity to display many video art exhibitions in Long Beach. At the start of video art in the 1970s and 1980s, many artists created their work at the LBMA Video Annex, a video art facility of the time.
According to Scoates, working on the project allows the two museums to stand at the same level as other larger museums in the area. It also allows the UAM to work with world leaders in art, he said.
“This collaboration really, I think, allows us — the two institutions — to put Long Beach back on the world stage as it relates to art and allows the museums to, I think, up the level of the definition of the arts culture in Long Beach,” Scoates said.
The initiative involves several institutions throughout Southern California, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center and UC Santa Barbara. The Getty Foundation gave out a total of $2.8 million in grants for the 15 organizations involved with the project.