Coming up: See the unapologetically punk print s of Raymond Pettibon; reset your mind in Oscar Oiwa's immersive dreamscape; learn how African Americans shaped leisure culture in the S o uthland ; explore construction as both practice and performance; and honor the late Dion Neutra's efforts to preserve his father Richard Neutra's buildings.
1) Raymond Pettibon: Prints, Raymond. Prints.
American print artist Raymond Pettibon is known for his stylized ink drawings combining images and text. His narratives blend historical content with consumer culture to yield incisive critiques of contemporary society. “I was making my work as transparent as possible, without equivocations, without calling attention to itself, without apology,” he explains. “There's a lot of conventions in the art world that are not to be transgressed, but my economy of means doesn't abide by those strictures.” Deriving inspiration from comics, cartoons, and other pop culture iconography, Pettibon started designing album covers and ephemera for his brother’s band Black Flag in the mid-1970s and went on to produce cover art for Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and the Foo Fighters.
A selection of Raymond Pettibon prints will be on view through Feb 1.
When: Ongoing through Feb 1, 2020
Where: The Lodge, 1024 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles 90029
Tickets: Free
Oscar Oiwa in front of one of his large scale immersive dreamscapes.2) Oscar Oiwa: Dreams of a Sleeping World
Just how much can an environment open and shape our minds? Japanese American (by way of Brazil) artist Oscar Oiwa, known for his giant canvases and large frescoes, has created the immersive art of Dreams of a Sleeping World to ask a poignant question: What do we do when we are paralyzed by the chaos of our times? Oiwa is concerned that when the noise of our everyday world surges, we shut down our otherwise radiant minds. In this “sleep” state, we look to our dreams to reset, searching our subconscious for the wisdom to better face the dysfunction of our world. To that end, Oiwa invites visitors to enter his 360° dreamscape and find the nourishment to transform clenched fists into open hearts.
Dreams features an installation of a new immersive space, created specific for USC PAM, and large-scale artworks for which Oiwa is renown. Created by Oiwa, his assistant and four MFA students from USC, the inflatable artwork took two weeks and 120 sharpie markers to complete. Complimenting this immersive experience is a dynamic installation of Oiwa’s large scale paintings shedding light on his surrealist and imaginative dreamscapes.
When: Ongoing through April 26, 2020
Where: Pacific Asia Museum, 46 N Los Robles Ave, Pasadena 91101
Tickets: General admission $10
3) Living the California Dream | Alison Rose Jefferson Book Signing and Talk
As Southern California was reimagining leisure and positioning it at the center of the American Dream, African-American Californians were working to make that leisure an open, inclusive reality. By occupying recreational sites and public spaces, African Americans challenged racial hierarchies and marked a space of black identity on the regional landscape and social space.
In her book Living the California Dream, independent historian Alison Rose Jefferson examines how African Americans pioneered America’s “frontier of leisure” by creating communities and business projects during the Jim Crow era. By presenting stories of Southern California African American oceanfront and inland leisure destinations that flourished from 1910 to the 1960s, Jefferson illustrates how these places helped create leisure production, purposes and social encounters. Jefferson argues that Black communal practices and economic development around leisure helped define the practice and meaning of leisure for the region and the nation and confronted the emergent power politics of recreational space. Living the California Dream presents the overlooked local stories that are foundational to the national movement to open recreational accommodations to all Americans and to the long freedom rights struggle.
When: Thursday, Jan 16, 7 - 8:30 pm
Where: Chevalier's Books, 126 N Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles 90004
Tickets: Free. More information here
4) Materials & Applications Winter 2020 | Staging Construction
Through its messy web of relations, construction practices draw architecture into the orbit of other systems, including technical procedures, bureaucratic governance, and negotiated temporalities. Staging Construction invites architects and designers with research-based practices to present new work that investigates construction as both an act of building and as an expression of industry. Drawing on seemingly disparate topics, including material specification, material history, aggregate sourcing, and data systems, the winter program asks how architecture’s entanglement with technical systems is evidenced in the preliminary acts of building, rather than its finished form. Staging Construction takes the form of an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang , alongside an electronic music performance by Neil Denari , lectures by Alex Maymind and Tommy Hill, and a participatory workshop that explores building without binding by yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu , and is produced in partnership with the Mak Center for Art and Architecture with support from the Contemporary Council of M&A (CCMA) .
When: Opens Saturday, Jan 18, 5 pm; exhibition runs through April 11.
Where: Mackey Apartments, 1137 S Cochran Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Tickets: Free. More information here.
5) A Celebration of the life of Dion Neutra, 1926-2019
Dion Neutra, son of modernist architect Richard Neutra and an architect in his own right, died back in November at the age of 93. He championed his father's legacy and fought for decades to preserve the elder Neutra's iconic homes, which were noted for their minimalist aesthetic of glass, steel, concrete and wood, and for the way they incorporated the Southern California outdoors. Shortly before he fell ill, Dion also helped produce a play by Tom Lazarus called The Princes of Kings Road about Richard Neutra and fellow architect Rudolf Schindler's relationship. Members of the architecture and preservationist community will gather this Sunday to celebrate Dion's contributions to Los Angeles' built environment.
When: Sunday, January 19 from 2-4 pm
Where: Eagle Rock Recreation Center, 1100 Eagle Vista Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90041
Tickets: Open to all.