Monday, January 9, 2012

Pacific Standard Time: The Gallery Scene

ANOTHER bit of catching up here: My latest article concerns the art galleries that made Los Angeles an important center for contemporary art in the years before the LACMA opened. I looked primarily at three gallery owners -- Irving Blum of Ferus, Virginia Dwan and Riko Mizuno.

The late, great Wallace Berman
HERE is the story, which due to the Times' layout looks like it is almost entirely a correction. (It's not.)

It's notable, of course, that two of these key figures were women, especially given how macho the LA art world was in the first few postwar decades. (Ferus included.) Here is a page about a show at Crossroads School about woman gallerists in the '60s and '70s.

Some of these themes will be part of a West Hollywood branch of Pacific Standard Time called It All Started Here.
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1 comment:

  1. John Michael CummingsJanuary 12, 2012 at 8:18 AM

    re: book review request by award-winning author

    Dear Scott,

    I'm an award-winning author with a new book of fiction out last month.
    Ugly To Start With is a series of thirteen interrelated stories about
    adolescence published by West Virginia University Press.

    All the stories in my collection have been previously published in
    well-regarded print and online literary magazines such as The Iowa
    Review, Passager, The Bitter Oleander, Confrontation, Salt River
    Review, The Foliate Oak. and The Cortland Review.

    Can I interest you in reviewing it?

    If you write me back at johnmcummings@aol.com, I can email you a PDF of my book. If you require a bound copy, please ask, and I will forward your reply to my publisher. Or you can write directly to Abby Freeland at:

    Abby.Freeland@mail.wvu.edu

    My publisher, I should add, can also offer your readers a free excerpt of my book through a link from your blog to my publisher's website:
    http://wvupressonline.com/cummings_ugly_to_start_with_9781935978084

    Here’s what Jacob Appel, celebrated author of
    Dyads and The Vermin Episode, says about my new collection: "In Ugly to Start With, set in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia, Cummings tackles the challenges of boyhood adventure and family conflict in a taut, crystalline style that captures the triumphs and tribulations of small-town life. He has a gift for transcending the particular experiences to his characters to capture the universal truths of human affection and suffering--emotional truths that the members of his audience will recognize from their own experiences of childhood and adolescence.”

    My short stories have appeared in more than seventy-five literary journals, including North American Review, The Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. Twice I have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. My short story "The Scratchboard Project" received an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories 2007.

    I am also the author of the nationally acclaimed coming-of-age novel The Night I Freed John Brown (Philomel Books, Penguin Group, 2009), winner of The Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers (Grades 7-12) and one of ten books recommended by USA TODAY.

    For more information about me, please visit:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michael_Cummings

    Thank you very much, and I look forward to hearing back from you.

    Kindly,

    John Michael Cummings

    ReplyDelete