MATTHEW HIGGS
“Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980” (Various Venues) My 2011 ended with a weeklong road trip across Southern California, trying to take in as many as possible of the sixty-plus exhibitions in “Pacific Standard Time,” arguably the most ambitious curatorial initiative of the twenty-first century. Highlights, too many to list here, included the second part of “It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973,” a succinct account of Helene Winer’s prescient two-year tenure as director of the Pomona College Museum of Art, and “Common Ground: Ceramics in Southern California 1945–1975,” an illuminating and often wild survey of both studio and industrial ceramics at Pomona’s American Museum of Ceramic Art. A decade in the making, “Pacific Standard Time,” led and partly underwritten by the Getty Research Institute, is probably unrepeatable—but it’s tempting to imagine what similarly scaled and equally ambitious curatorial surveys might reveal about the art produced in other locales during the same era. Login to