Natural light streams in, filtered through the electronic colors of TV. The light in the gallery is low to accommodate the nearby projected film, with floor-to-ceiling glass in an adjacent window wall covered in gels in primary colors.
Smith, reversing Bill Ray and Life, grabs the obsolete debate and turns it upside-down and inside-out. As declared by documentary photographer Robert Frank, whose influential picture book “The Americans” was published in 1959, “Black and white are the colors of photography.” Until relatively recently, color camera work was for commerce while black and white was for serious art. It also deftly conjures a once common, now-discredited history of photography as art. LACMA and UCLA’s Fowler Museum ponder repatriation of so-called Benin bronzes stolen during an 1897 slaughter by British colonists. museums hold art looted during an African massacre a century ago Nestled among her organic linear designs of fields and trees are renderings of Noah Purifoy’s rambling desert sculpture garden in Joshua Tree, the peaceful ashram in Agoura built by Alice Coltrane (and consumed by flames in the awful tragedy of 2018 fires), the famous open-framework spires of Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers and other sites of spiritual and creative life, many associated with Black culture.Ĭommentary: Two L.A. Smith, however, assembles views more personal and closer to home.
Toile, produced at a factory just outside the sprawling palace at Versailles, became a staple of escapist aristocratic interiors, flush with romanticized views of happy milkmaids and contented cowherds or fantastic visions of far-off Chinese pagodas. Her design plays on toile de Jouy, the popular 18th century style of French wallpaper and textiles that shows imaginative pastoral scenes. Now, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wallpaper is a linchpin in a marvelously multidimensional installation by Cauleen Smith.Īn L.A.-based filmmaker (she’s on the faculty at CalArts), Smith unsurprisingly brings a cinematic quality to her absorbing wall covering, one that careens through layered time and space.
Later, Jim Isermann affixed abstract vinyl decals to museum walls, transforming a high art institution into a domestic home for acute DIY craft. In the ‘70s, Tina Girouard went around the bend of Conceptual art, replacing rigorously mathematical wall drawings with geometric bits of grandma’s parlor décor. In the 1960s there was Andy Warhol’s frilly pink cows, which queered Picasso’s self-identification as art’s macho bull. Every now and then over the past half-century, wallpaper has stepped forward to play an unexpected leading role in art.