| Museum News, Events and Announcements |
Pomona College Celebrates James Turrell's First Public Skyspace in Southern California
Museum Exhibition, Symposium, and Skyspace Opening Highlight the
Arts at Pomona College
The museum will host an exhibition and symposium in conjunction with the
completion of a Skyspace created by Pomona College alumnus (1965) James Turrell.
This will be the first Skyspace in Southern California to be regularly
accessible to the public.
Exhibition: James Turrell at Pomona College
Sept. 4, 2007 through May 17, 2008
Pomona College Museum of Art, (corner of College and Bonita Avenues), Claremont
Gallery Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 12–5 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 1–5 p.m.
Free admission (parking on the street – College and Bonita Aves.)
For information: 909.621.8283 or visit www.pomona.edu/museum
For directions log onto:
http://pomona.edu/Welcome/ExplorePomona/HowToGetHere.shtml
(Metrolink station is just two blocks away).
Symposium – James Turrell: Knowing Light
Saturday, October 13, 2007, 1:30–4 p.m. Reception to follow.
Keynote speaker Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los
Angeles County Museum of Art
Bridges Hall of Music, 150 E. Fourth St., Pomona College, Claremont
For information: 909.621.8283 or visit www.pomona.edu/museum
(Reception to follow the symposium. 4:30—7:00 p.m. at both the Museum and the
Skyspace)
Skyspace
The Skyspace will open for visitors on Saturday, Oct. 13.
Draper Courtyard, Pomona College (corner of 6th Street and College Way),
Claremont
Public Hours: The public is invited to visit the Skyspace on Sundays and
Mondays, 10 a.m.—8 p.m. The lighting program is synchronized to sunset.
Groups of 10 or more must make arrangements with the Museum.
For information: 909.621.8283 or visit www.pomona.edu/museum
On October 13 only, the parking structure at 156 E 7th Street, immediately
adjacent to the Skyspace, will be available for public parking.
Press Release
Pomona College is pleased to announce an exhibition and symposium for a Skyspace created by Pomona College alumnus (1965) James Turrell. This will be the first Skyspace in Southern California to be regularly accessible to the public.
Turrell--an internationally acclaimed light and space artist and the architect of Roden Crater--has completed private commissions for Skyspaces in Southern California in the past, but none of them are available for public viewing. The new Skyspace, located in the Draper Courtyard of the new Lincoln and Edmunds Buildings on the Pomona campus, has been realized in collaboration with consulting architects Marmol Radziner + Associates AIA.
The exhibition and symposium offer audiences an in-depth look at
Turrell’s work—work that was profoundly influenced by his undergraduate studies
at Pomona College in perceptual psychology and mathematics “I value greatly my
time at Pomona College. That kind of education is tailored to people, and was
very responsible to each student. I’m grateful for that,” said James Turrell.
The academic buildings surrounding the Skyspace house the College’s departments
and programs related to the science of mind—such as computer science,
psychology, neuroscience and cognitive science—as well as the earth sciences of
geology and environmental analysis.
“We are very honored that James Turrell has created a work for the courtyard of
the Lincoln and Edmunds buildings,” says Pomona College President David Oxtoby.
“He is a distinguished alumnus, and his intellectual concerns— art grounded in
the psychology of perception—are central to many of the academic disciplines
housed in the new building complex.”
The Skyspace—a precisely designed architectural installation that heightens the
viewer’s awareness of light, sky and the activity of perception—is the form for
which Turrell is renowned. Building on this formal vocabulary, the artist has
created an open, transparent courtyard space in which a floating metal canopy
shades the seating area and provides a frame for the sky. During the transition
from twilight to full night, lighting elements, programmed to change in
intensity and hue as they wash the underside of the canopy, create the changing
perception of sky as space, form, object and void. A shallow pool centered
beneath the opening to the sky mirrors the daytime sky and reflects a dark echo
of the night sky.
In honor of the new Skyspace, the Pomona College Museum of Art will present
James Turrell at Pomona College, an exhibition uniting the various threads of
Turrell’s artistic practice. “My work is about space and the light that inhabits
it. It is about how you confront that space and plumb it with vision. It is
about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into fire,
“said Turrell. The exhibition includes End Around, one of the artist’s Ganzfeld
works; two LED Tall Glass works from 2006, Gathered Light and Silent Leading;
and a selection of models and drawings. The exhibition opens Tuesday, September
4, 2007 and continues through May 17, 2008. The exhibition opening reception
will be held on Saturday, September 8 from 5- 7 p.m. The public is welcome.
The Tall Glass pieces consist of a core of LEDs individually programmed by
Turrell to create a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate
but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night.
However, the careful construction of these works ensures that the viewer sees
only a floating, changing field of light—a subtle revelatory experience of
photons as tangible entities and physical presence.
In a Ganzfeld space, depth, surface and color are replaced by a thick,
all-encompassing mist of light. Upon entering the chamber of End Around, the
visitor instinctively approaches what appears to be a faint wall of light in the
distance. But upon reaching the light source, the viewer’s entire visual field
is consumed by an apparently limitless field of blue light. Turrell engineers
the Ganzfeld works to eliminate all visual cues that the human brain processes
to construct depth and surface. As a result, the viewer is unable to tell
whether the ethereal blue field seen from the platform extends for inches, feet
or into infinity. Here, light is perceived as light, not as illumination on an
object or surface.
“The exhibition and Skyspace define the issues that have animated Mr. Turrell’s
distinguished career—the complex interplay of light, sky, atmosphere and human
perception,” says Kathleen Stewart Howe, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23
Director of the Pomona College Museum of Art. “We are delighted to have this
important and inviting work of art as the centerpiece of a dynamic academic
cluster where it can play a vital role in our intellectual community.”
In conjunction with the exhibition and dedication, Pomona College will host a
program titled James Turrell: Knowing Light on Saturday, October 13,
2007, 1:30–4 p.m. The program includes Michael Govan—CEO and Wallis Annenberg
Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art—as the keynote speaker; William
Banks, Professor of Psychology at Pomona College, on perceptual psychology; and
a conversation with Turrell and Arden Reed, Arthur M. Dole and Fanny M. Dole
Professor of English at Pomona College. The symposium is free and open to the
public.
Turrell is a native of Los Angeles who grew up in Pasadena, California. He
received his undergraduate degree in perceptual psychology from Pomona College
in 1965, and an M.F.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. His work has been
recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and multiple grants through the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2001,
Turrell received an honorary doctorate from Pomona College. His creations have
graced the halls and collections of institutions throughout the world, including
the Whitney Museum of American Art, the DeYoung Museum, the Museum of Modern
Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, P.S.1 and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los
Angeles. Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona where he has worked for
more than 30 years on his largest and most ambitious project—the Roden Crater,
an ancient volcano crater that he is molding into one of the world’s most
unusual and compelling light observatories.
The New Sculpture: Peter Shelton’s gandhiG
Pomona College Museum of Art is pleased to announce a new presence on
College Ave next to the entrance to the Museum. The sculpture, gandhiG (2002),
is the work of Pomona Alumnus Peter Shelton and is on long term loan to the
College as the first in a series of changing sculptural installations.
Peter Shelton will talk about his work on March 28 at 4:15 in Lyman Hall.
There will be a reception for the artist following his talk.
Peter
Shelton (Pomona ’73; UCLA, MFA, ’79) is a distinguished artist with work in a
number of public and private collections in the United States and Europe, as
well as a number of public art commissions. He has received four individual
artist awards from National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and
the Saint-Gaudens Memorial Fellowship. Among his many exhibitions are solo
exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of
American Art, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Tate/Liverpool and Henry Moore
Sculpture Center. He was included in this past summer’s landmark exhibition at
the Pompidou Center, “Los Angeles 1955—1985: Birth of an Artistic Capital.” He
is represented by LA Louver, Venice, California.
Peter Shelton has said that the goal of his work is “to maximize presence in a
presence less space.” gandhiG is an insistent presence. It engages us viscerally
as we respond to the long spindly legs supporting a human torso 30’ above street
level, and intellectually, as we decipher the form wrapped in what looks like a
dhoti and which grows organically from the ground. Engagement with the
sculpture, fostered by its improbable presence in our environment and the beauty
of its forms, moves through the seeming contradictions that lend Peter Shelton’s
work its psychological and formal richness. It is at once a robust physical
presence in our campus landscape, yet one which seems to float above the round
of daily activity. While gandhiG is architectural in scale and in the way in
which it articulates the surrounding space, its reference to the core of the
human body anchors it in the reality of human form.
gandhiG is on long term loan from LA Louver Gallery and the artist. For more
information consult the gallery website
http://www.lalouver.com/html/shelton_bio.html.
Working with museum staff on the installation were Jim Mitchell (Pomona ’80)
President of Amazing Steel, and Pomona students Lily Braverman ’07, Kim Ye ’07,
Josh Clavell ’07, and Hai-Minh Nguyen ’08. Installation was supported by Merrill
Francis Fund for Art in Public Places
AGNES MARTIN: WITH MY BACK TO THE WORLD
The Pomona College Museum of Art announces the presentation on October 25 at 4:15 p.m. of a groundbreaking documentary on the internationally renowned painter Agnes Martin. Filmmaker Mary Lance will answer questions after the screening. This presentation is offered in conjunction with the exhibition, “A Sea of Possibilities: Paintings by Merion Estes 1971 to 2006.”
AGNES MARTIN: WITH MY BACK TO THE WORLD
Produced and directed by Mary Lance
Music by Steve Peters
This documentary was shot over a period of four years, from 1998 through
2002, Agnes Martin’s ninetieth year. Interviews with Martin are inter-cut with
shots at work in her studio in Taos, New Mexico, with photographs and archival
footage, and with images of her work from over five decades. It is a venue for
Martin to speak about her work, her working methods, her life as an artist, and
her views about the creative process. She also discusses her film, Gabriel,
and reads from her poetry and lectures. In keeping with Martin’s chosen life of
solitude, she alone appears in the documentary.
October 25, 2006 4:15 p.m. The film runs 57 minutes. Venue to be
determined.
Museum Receives NEH Grant
We are pleased to announce the receipt of a preservation assistance grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant will support an item by
item survey of the Museum’s superb print collection. Working with paper
conservator Maureen McGee, Museum staff and undergraduate and graduate interns
will examine every print in the Museum’s collection to determine its condition
and treatment needs. The information will become part of a master conservation
plan for the permanent collection. We are delighted to receive this support, not
only for the very real benefit to the collection, but also because it is an
indication of the cultural significance of the Museum’s print collection. In
Fall 2006, the Museum will present an exhibition highlighting the ongoing work
of art conservation at Pomona College.
A Conversation With Raymond Pettibon at The Pomona College Museum of Art
The Pomona College Museum of Art is pleased to announce that Raymond Pettibon
will appear in conversation with Pomona College Professor Arden Reed on
Wednesday, May 3 at 4:15 p.m. in the Smith Campus Center, Room 208. This program is presented in
conjunction with the exhibition “Ed Ruscha/Raymond Pettibon: The Holy Bible and
THE END,” on view through April 9, 2006.
Born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1957, Raymond Pettibon is best known for pen and ink
drawings that blur the distinction between “high” and “low” art. Because he
never attended art school, instead earning a degree in economics, Pettibon
remained a relative outsider in the Los Angeles art scene until the 1990s. After
a brief stint as a high-school math teacher, Petttibon became involved with the
1980s Los Angeles punk scene, designing flyers and album covers for bands such
as Sonic Youth and the Minutemen. Greg Ginn, Pettibon's older brother and a
founding member of the seminal punk band Black Flag, released several of
Pettibon's artist books through his influential SST Records. These books and
album covers established his influential position as a figurative artist dealing
with raw and often deviant combinations of popular culture such as comic books,
film and TV, and sports; sub-cultures such as the punk rock music scene and the
surfing community; and literary sources that include the Bible, Henry James, and
Marcel Proust.
Interest grew in his unusual pairing of cartoon-like images, pop culture
iconography, and literary quotations and, in the early 1990s, Pettibon moved
from cult figure to established artist. In 1991 he received the Louis Comfort
Tiffany Foundation award, and one year later he was included in the “Helter
Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Los Angeles; the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Galleria d'Arte Moderni
di Bologna; and the Muesion-Museo d'Arte Moderno e Contemporanea in Bolzano,
Italy. Pettibon has also been featured in Documenta XI in Kassell, Germany and
in the Whitney Biennial in New York City; in 2004 he won the Whitney Museum of
American Art's 2004 Bucksbaum award.
Pomona College Professor of English Arden Reed will facilitate the conversation
with Pettibon. Reed was recently awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship and will
be the William S. Vaughn Fellow at Vanderbilt's Robert Penn Warren Center for
the Humanities in 2006-07. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled
Slow Art: From Tableaux Vivant to James Turrell. His most recent book was
Manet,
Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He
also writes regularly for Art in America.
Copyright © 2003 Pomona College • Pomona College Museum of Art • 330
North College Way • Claremont, CA 91711