Esoteric Survey

80th Scripps College Ceramic Annual Starting in 1945, Scripps College has been mounting these legendary annual exhibitions. This year, they combined two major California collections for  In the Hands of the Collector: The Fred Marer and Forrest L. Merrill Collections.  Guest curated by Nancy Servis, there are over 100 pieces by more than 60 artists. Fred donated his collection of over 1,500 pieces to Scripps. Forrest has over 4,000 and counting. They both acquired many works directly from the artists and California ceramics are at the core. Since Fred was in southern California, these direct purchases came from people working at Otis and other institutions around LA. Forrest started his collection through direct purchases in the Bay Area, since he's from Berkeley. He's also still at it.   There are some classics. This Laura Andreson teapot is the first piece collected by Fred Marer.  Glen Lukens Antonio Prieto from Forrest James Lovera was so good and is still s...

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...