"Pacific Standard Time" covers a period when local galleries played a key role in showcasing contemporary works in Southern California. It was before the existence of major local institutions that specialize in the genre, including the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art.

"It really was the galleries that in so many cases really supported the artists and were the places where people went to see this new art form," said Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute, which has spearheaded the project since planning began in 2002, along with the Getty Foundation.

 - Cyndia Zwahlen. Los Angeles Times, 29 Aug 2011

Overview

 
Pacific Standard Time is the culmination of a long-term Getty Research Institute initiative that focuses on postwar art in Los Angeles. Through archival acquisitions, oral history interviews, public programming, exhibitions, and publications, the Research Institute is responding to the need to locate, collect, document, and preserve the art historical record of this vibrant period. Between October 2011 and February 2012, a major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum will present a survey of postwar painting and sculpture in Los Angeles, accompanied by a book that is at once an exhibition catalog and an overview of postwar art history in Southern California.

As part of this initiative, project organizers are conducting an extensive series of oral histories with many of Los Angeles's key artists, filmmakers, curators, collectors, and critics. A concurrent exhibition at the Research Institute will present rich archival material from this historic period. At the same time, over 30 additional venues citywide will present exhibitions that cover practices as diverse as ceramic sculpture, postwar design, African American art, the Light and Space movement, and the history of the Los Angeles Woman's Building, among others. In collaboration with many of these institutions, the Getty will organize a series of public programs that will include lectures, symposia, performance art, theater, concerts, readings, and film screenings.

Collections

 
Pacific Standard Time has sharpened the focus of the Research Institute's Los Angeles collections. Curators have located and acquired rare and important archives from many individuals and institutions that play a significant role in the history of postwar art in Los Angeles. Among those that will prove invaluable to scholars of the period are the Betty Asher archive; the Jan Baum Gallery records; the Charles Brittin archive; E.A.T.'s (Experiments in Art and Technology) Los Angeles records; the Sam Francis papers; the Hal Glicksman papers; the George Herms archive; the archive of High Performance Magazine; the Henry Hopkins papers; the Robert Irwin papers; the Allan Kaprow papers; the Long Beach Museum of Art video archive; the Julius Shulman photography archive; and the Edmund Teske papers. The historical record that these archives represent is augmented by the oral history project, which generates crucial first-person accounts that become part of the Research Institute's Special Collections.

 
Outcomes

 
The Pacific Standard Time research project has been active since 2002, with plans to continue through 2013. Ultimately, the research team will produce a major exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, two books, journal articles, digitized primary sources, film screenings, a performance art festival, and a major international symposium.

Visit the Pacific Standard Time website at: http://www.pacificstandardtime.org/ 

From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles at the Pomona College Museum of Art. Here, Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator of Light and Space art, and Helene Winer, later the director of Artists Space and Metro Pictures in New York, curated landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between post-Minimalism and Conceptual art and presaged the development of post-Minimalism in the later 1970s. Artists such as Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz, and Allen Ruppersberg formed the educational backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years at Pomona College, including alumni Mowry Baden, Chris Burden, and James Turrell. It Happened at Pomona is a three-part exhibition, with public events and a publication, which documents a transformative moment for art history. .

Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona focuses on the academic year of 1969-1970, when Glicksman was the curator/director. Glicksman established one of the first museum residency programs in which artists used the museum gallery as a studio space and created unique environments directly in the museum. Artists include Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz, Judy Chicago, Ron Cooper, Tom Eatherton, Lloyd Hamrol, and Robert Irwin.

Founded in 1967 by a group of L.A. activist-artists who created an 'alternate everything' printing and publishing business, Peace Press emerged from the tangle of progressive political and alternative groups that flourished during the decades between 1960 and 1990. This survey drawn from the archives of the Peace Press Collective showcases an important chapter of visual and cultural history, with posters addressing feminist causes, workers' rights, civil liberties, environmental concerns, and the anti-nuclear and anti-war movements. The exhibition will also feature a historical timeline, music, poetry and spoken-word performances and film clips interspersed in the galleries, and a separate film screening series.