Esoteric Survey

I came up on some Charles Luedtke this weekend. Luedtke bull Two Joshua Tree landscape painting and some unknown sculptures. It got a little weird

Completed in 2022, Roy McMakin designed Punta Paloma to serve as his home and studio in the Banker's Hill neighborhood of San Diego. He calls it his Postmodern love letter to California. And yes, that face is on purpose.    Although not a native San Diegan, Roy received his B.A. and M.F.A. from UCSD. Also, I learned from Roy that most of his Domestic Furniture was made in San Diego. An ode to Irving Gill. The massing hints to 1950s apartment buildings. The diamond window pane is a reference to 1940s California cottages.  Early Bauer Pottery A cabinet and Heath vase, both designed by Roy. I love this detail. Going along with the California focus, there's a John McLaughlin print. You might recall, his Slatback chairs were used in the galleries at  John McLaughlin (1898-1976) Paintings: Total Abstraction at LACMA in 2016. More about that, here .  A number of years before that, in 2011, Quint Gallery in San Diego mounted an exhibition they called  Roy McMakin ...

June Harwood Paintings at  The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College Although Harwood was a key figure in the West Coast Hard Edge movement, t his is the first museum retrospective of her work . It focuses on various series of her 50 year career. It was  Karl Benjamin, Lorser Feitelson, Frederick Hammersley, and John McLaughlin who received much of the attention in the late 1950s Hard Edge scene. The group became known as The  F our Abstract Classicists, from the 1959 exhibition of the same name. It was Harwood's art critic husband,  Jules Langsner, who not only curated that exhibition but has been credited with the term "Hard Edge." I'm not sure it would be appropriate to call her the fifth Beatle of the Abstract Classicists but she was included in Langsner's  second exhibition,  California Hard-Edge Painting. The show also included  Florence Arnold, John Barbour, Larry Bell, John Coplans, Helen Lundeberg, Dorothy Waldman, and the origina...

Angelo Testa textile for IBM and Eames Computer House of Cards. Part of  Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 at LACMA .  The exhibition looks at the interaction of art/design and computer technology.  This is pretty high up on my want list. It's hard to talk about design and computers and not include Paul Rand. In the last 1960's Frederick Hammersley used an IBM mainframe at the University of New Mexico  to do a number of computer works.    Donald Judd Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 - continually prints the news of the day.   This Lillian Schwartz piece is on loan from The Henry Ford Museum. My buddy  Kristen Gallerneaux, The Henry Ford's curator of communications and information technology, helped bring the Schwartz estate to the Henry Ford.  Speaking of Kristen, here she in front of a Tanya Aguiniga piece recently acquired by LACMA. I was at the border during the making of it. Mostly for the party. More about that, h...