November 2012

Since 1997, photographer Jason Schmidt has been making intimate portraits of artists around the world as part of his ongoing project Artists. Selected from over 500 photographs that currently make up this series, the 23 images on view represent several generations of artists working in an array of disciplines-painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation-all of whom are based in Los Angeles. Schmidt photographs each artist in a context that is significant to his or her work, whether the studio, the gallery, or the wider world.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, presents The Panza Collection and Selections from Major Gifts of Beatrice and Philip Gersh, Rita and Taft Schreiber, and Marcia Simon Weisman, now on view through January 14, 2013 at MOCA Grand Avenue. The exhibition celebrates the core of the museum's internationally renowned collection, which evolved as a result of the acquisition of The Panza Collection in 1984, considered at the time as one of the world's most important acquisitions of contemporary art and a turning point in the museum's early history. This exhibition also marks the first time since 2000 that almost the entire Panza Collection has been presented at MOCA. Installed by MOCA Senior Curator Alma Ruiz, The Panza Collection and Selections from Major Gifts of Beatrice and Philip Gersh, Rita and Taft Schreiber, and Marcia Simon Weisman features 92 works, comprising paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that serve both as evidence of the intellectual and emotional challenge that is involved in collecting and as a testament to exemplary civic patronage and its enduring legacy in the cultural growth of Los Angeles.

Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962 focuses on one of the most significant consequences of the rise of abstraction in 20th-century painting: artists' literal assault on the picture plane. Responding to the social and political climate of the postwar period—especially the crisis of humanity resulting from the atomic bomb—artists in the United States and abroad ripped, cut, burned, or affixed objects to the traditionally two-dimensional canvas. Painting the Void marks the first time that these strategies have been considered together as a coherent mode of artistic production. The exhibition presents an opportunity to reconsider the profound repercussions of this approach in the realm of painting: from artists’ early experiments with the materiality of gesture, to the expansion of the medium to incorporate performance, time-based, and assemblage strategies. The exhibition focuses in particular on many of the earliest experiments of artists who moved the two-dimensional medium of painting towards the three-dimensionality of sculpture.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Blues for Smoke, a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring a wide range of contemporary art, music, literature, and film through the lens of the blues and “blues aesthetics.” Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category, but as a web of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists from the 1950s to the present, including many commissioned specifically for this occasion and others never before shown in Los Angeles, as well as a range of musical, filmic, and cultural materials. Blues for Smoke was developed over several years by MOCA Curator Bennett Simpson, in close consultation with artist Glenn Ligon.

MOCA is the first U.S. museum to present the entirety of Taryn Simon’s photographic project A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. This powerful, elaborately constructed photographic work was produced over a four-year period (2008-11), during which the artist travelled around the world researching and recording "bloodlines" and their related stories. In each of the "chapters" that make up the work, the external forces of territory, power, circumstance, or religion collide with the internal forces of psychological and physical inheritance. The subjects Simon documents include victims of genocide in Bosnia, test rabbits infected with a lethal disease in Australia, the first woman to hijack an aircraft, and the living dead in India.

Ben Jones: The Video is the West Coast solo museum debut of the artist's work. The exhibition features new videos and paintings that build upon the artist's previous work using the extracted and abstracted forms of technology and pop symbols of our time to create irreverent, surrealistic, and introspective narratives and environments, often defined by their kaleidoscopic arrays of day-glo colors. With a fluid sense of material, Jones has worked with traditional art media like painting, drawing and sculpture, but also animated music videos, produced zines and costumes, furniture and web art, cartoons and music.