This past weekend my fellow AHRC friend, Rosie, and I decided to have a trip into Downtown LA and see the delights of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Page Museum, at the La Brea Tar Pits; incidentally, they are right next to each other (!). As Rosie has a car, she picked me up early and we drove over to Wilshire Blvd to spend a sunny day looking at other peoples' works and researches. It was a truly enjoyable day with lots to see and learn, so much so that when we returned to the car to set off home we realised we had been walking round for almost 10 hours and we still hadn't seen everything…!
LACMA:
collection of creative, modern and inspiring spaces
Urban Light, Chris Burden 2008
Wilshire Blvd Entrance
My favourite exhibitions:
DVF: Journey of a Dress
Brighter and bolder (the floors, walls and ceilings were decked out in jazzy patterns, colours and mirrors) feel of the V&A Fashion Exhibits. Whilst there wasn't much content to this exhibition, the main room featuring three catwalks of striking Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses was definitely enough to satisfy.
Calder and Abstraction: From Avant-Garde to Iconic
Billed as an exploration of Alexander Calder's 'radical translation of French Surrealist vocabulary into American vernacular', this exhibit showcased his minimalist, kinetic sculptures. They are delicate, yet strong and mesmerisingly beautiful.
It proved to be a truly iconic experience as we star-spotted Jim Carey in this exhibition!
Agnes Varda in Californialand
Contemporary exhibit of the dubbed “grandmother of French New Wave”, featuring photos, film ephemera and a large installation – a house built from actual film objects and materials (My Shack of Cinema, 1968-2013) – from her narrative and documentary films. The artwork depicts how she was inspired by her LA experiences. I loved walking through this lady's colourful life.
Page Museum, La Brea Tar Pits:
engaging histories and interactive sciences
This place is unique. The La Brea Tar Pits are a group of tar pits which frame Hancock Park. It is an open archaeological dig site and presents the visitor with live science and history as it is physically recovered in the heart of LA city. These excavations began in 1913 and are still extremely active today. We took a guided tour of Hancock Park and the tar pits and were enthusiastically informed of how the tar pits formed and how the animals and plants actually got stuck in the asphalt to become preserved. The highlight of this was being introduced to “Project 23″ and seeing this science in action. Here, the volunteers excavate seven days a week and the tour guide recants the crazy story of how this particular site began: LACMA were in the process of expanding their underground car park when they hit upon some fossils, one of which was an almost complete skeleton of an adult mammoth! Boxes were placed around the deposits that had been found (23 wooden boxes, in total) and they were moved away from the construction site to be worked on. We were told they were working as quickly as possible to avoid compounding the damage from their transportation.
The Page Museum is a completely disparate space to the minimalism and openness of LACMA. It is filled with interactive exhibits – my favourite was trying to pull a metal pole out of a vat of tar to indicate how difficult it would be if you accidentally trod in a puddle of asphalt – and animated models of sabre-toothed cats (and kittens!), mammoths and sloths. It was lots of fun to walk around, and they have a great gift shop!
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