It’s official: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is launching.
After five years of planning supported by more than $16 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, this third and most ambitious arts initiative since 2011 activates more than 100 exhibitions, programs and events about Latin American and Latino art at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California.
The first Pacific Standard Time began as an effort to rescue the history of L.A.’s art archives that document the beginnings of significant movements, including feminist art, Chicano art and light and space.
“It mushroomed from there,” says Joan Weinstein, deputy director of the Getty Foundation. “As soon as the first Pacific Standard Time closed, everybody wanted to know, ‘What’s the next one?'”
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is driven less by archives and more by original research linked by eight different themes, such as Pre-Hispanic to Colonial or Art and Activism, to help people navigate the immensity of the program. Within each theme are sub-themes, some of which are highlighted here:
Rethinking Latin America’s boundaries
Many people think of Latin America as the region from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego while ignoring the islands of the Caribbean, which includes Spanish-speaking Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
But did you know it also includes French-speaking St. Martinique, English Creole-speaking Saint Lucia, and Dutch-speaking Aruba?
The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach explores the relationship of these islands even though they speak different languages in “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago,” featuring a $15 a ticket opening reception on Saturday, Sept. 16. Artists reveal how their Caribbean roots inform and shape their paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, performances, and installations.
Eighty artists reveal how their Caribbean roots inform and shape their paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, performances, and installations. Highlights include the video “Jet Blast” by Curacao photographer René Emil Bergsma about the popular tourist attraction of watching large commercial planes arriving and departing from Princess Juliana Airport on the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Martin.
“It’s this crazy arrival where the planes kick up this huge sandstorm, and it’s a humorous video. It’s lively and festive, but of course it has a darker message,” says Tatiana Flores, curator of the MOLAA exhibition.
Last week Hurricane Irma destroyed much of St. Martin, including its world-famous airport. In July, a jet blast killed a woman who climbed a fence that separates the airport from the blue-water beach.
Hybrid identities
While MOLAA showcases the different cultures of the Caribbean, downtown L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum offers “Transpacific Borderlands: The Art of Japanese Diaspora in Lima, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and São Paulo,” from Sunday, Sept. 17 through Feb. 25.
The exhibition opens at 11 a.m. with a free panel discussion at 3 p.m. that will simultaneously be translated into Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. It examines the works of artists of Japanese ancestry born, raised, or living in Latin America or predominately Latin American neighborhoods of Southern California and how these immigrant communities mix to create hybrid identities, which inform and shape contemporary art.
Skirball Cultural Center presents “Another Promised Land: Anita Brenner’s Mexico,” which illuminates the life and work of the Jewish-Mexican journalist who chronicled the Mexican Renaissance of the 1920s and played a vital role in introducing the art and culture of her homeland to U.S. audiences.
Included in the exhibition, which runs through Feb. 25, are works by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and Frida Kahlo.
Chicano voices
Chon Noriega, director of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, says Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is filling a void in the world of American art museums. For several years there’s been a noticeable absence of Latino representation even in cities where people of Latin American origin and their U.S.-born children make up the majority population.
The blame, he says, is on the museum’s misperceptions about what the art details as well as the narrow parameters for the kinds of artists they show.
“You take Chicano art as something that names itself as part of a social protest movement, and museums say they only want people who went to art school,” Noriega says. “Well, they went to art school, too. So they say, their work is only illustrating a political point. Well, so did Picasso’s. It’s not that we need to shift our attention from one group to another, it’s that we need to take part in the dialogue that we have come to see as central to what we do when presenting the arts.”
Among the shows engaging L.A.’s Chicano community is the Autry’s “La Raza,” which focuses on the influential bilingual newspaper of the Chicano Rights Movement’s decade-long work, beginning in 1967. It opens Saturday, Sept. 16.
LACMA’s “Playing With Fire: Paintings By Carlos Almaraz,” on view through Dec. 3 as one of five PST-LA/LA exhibitions at the museum, offers the first major survey of paintings by the influential Chicano artist of the 1970s and ’80s.
A legend during his lifetime, the 65 works by Almaraz – a political activist with the United Farm Workers, co-founder of the 70s-era Chicano artist collective Los Four, and a studio artist – reveal his personal and artistic transformation.
The Vincent Price Art Museum at East L.A. College in collaboration with the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center presents “Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell,” a photography exhibit of more than 100 candid portrayals of the San Gabriel Valley artist, her friends and family, and LGBT people among others.
Produced over three decades, her work challenges prevailing notions of beauty, sexuality, and identity. It runs Saturday, Sept. 16 through Feb. 10, with an opening night reception set for 5 to 7 p.m.
Music
While the exhibitions focus on the visual arts, PST: LA/LA programs also touch on film, music and the performing arts.
Highlights include a celebratory concert at the Hollywood Bowl with Mexican alt-rockers Cafe Tacuba, L.A.’s La Santa Cecilia, and Chilean songstress Mon Laferte on Sunday, Sept. 17. And there are more shows on the horizon, including a four-day “Cuba: Antes, Ahora/Cuba: Then, Now” program if music and dance, from Nov. 30 through Dec. 3 and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater’s 11-day “Pacific Standard Time: Live Arts LA/LA Festival,” a dynamic showcase for live art and performance art that launches at multiple locations on Jan. 11.
USC professor Josh Kun, a specialist in popular music,” programs a series of Musical Interventions, including an outdoor sound installation and performance by Guillermo Galindo, on Saturday, Nov. 4 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in conjunction with the exhibition “Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin,” opening Saturday, Sept. 16.
“It’s like having a thoughtful dialogue between the music and the visual arts, which I think will be an enjoyable experience for audiences,” Weinstein says. “We know it will not be comprehensive. But we do think that it’s going to show this incredible breadth and quality and diversity of this art that people are not aware of.”
Extra: Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA is celebrating its official launch with free admission to more than 50 museums Sunday, Sept. 17.
