PROPOSING MONUMENTAL SCULPTURE

Thirteen artists have gone public with proposals for monumental sculpture, designed for the grounds of Cal State Long Beach. Their ideas are on view, through March 31, at the University Art Museum in “Monuments To:,” an exhibition of drawings, photographs, maquettes and sculpture.

Artists invited to develop ideas for sculpture are: Kim Abeles, Slater Baron, Lynda Benglis, Michael Davis, Woods Davy, Patrick Mohr, Rick Oginz, Eric Orr, George Stone, Sarah Tamor, Richard Turner, Robin Vaccarino and Steve Wood.

Two of the 13 proposals will be selected for installation on the Long Beach campus. Jurors are Jay Belloli, director of Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech, and Melinda Wortz, director of the Fine Arts Gallery, UC Irvine.

According to museum curator Lucinda Barnes: “Cal State Long Beach has a long history of commissioning public outdoor sculpture. This tradition dates back to 1965, when the International Sculpture Symposium was held on campus. ‘Monuments To:’ presents another opportunity for the University Art Museum to continue that ongoing dialogue and to specifically address evolving issues--especially those of social and political content--in sculpture.”

The exhibition is presented as part of “ArtEx,” a series of interrelated programs on artists’ expanding audiences, through exhibitions and performances shown concurrently at 10 institutions and museums in Los Angeles County.

“Hot Springs of the Yellowstone” (1872) by Thomas Moran, a leading 19th-Century American landscape painter, was recently acquired by the County Museum of Art as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert M. Gelfand. The work is considered to be extremely rare in Moran’s oeuvre , as it may be the earliest of his oil paintings of Yellowstone.

A new catalogue, “Video: A Retrospective, Long Beach Museum of Art, 1974-1984,” has been published by the museum. It documents a decade of video art programming at the Long Beach institution, with essays by former curators David Ross and Kathy Huffman and artist Bill Viola.

West Coast contributions to the medium are also recognized in an exhibition, “Video From Vancouver to San Diego,” presenting 19 videotapes, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Feb. 26.

Barbara London, director of MOMA’s video program, has chosen tapes that reveal the diversity of work done at six important centers for independent production on the West Coast: Western Front in Vancouver, Focal Point Media in Seattle, Bay Area Video Coalition and the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, UC San Diego in La Jolla and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Among Southern California artists represented in the exhibition are Hildegarde Duane and David Lamelas, Bill Viola, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Branda Miller, Ilene Segalove, Ulysses Jenkins and Nancy Buchanan.

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoon ist Paul Conrad is holding an exhibition of his sculpture and drawings at the Molly Barnes Gallery through Feb. 28.

Chief editorial cartoonist for The Times since 1964, Conrad was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1950. He began his career with a 14-year stint at the Denver Post. His books include “When in the Course of Human Events,” “The King and Us” and “Pro and Conrad,” which features an introduction by Art Buchwald. His work is syndicated to hundreds of newspapers nationwide.

The third Charles Eames memorial lecture takes place Wednesday at 8 p.m. in UCLA’s Dickson Auditorium on the UCLA campus. Antti and Vuokko Nurnesniemi, Finnish design team and personal friends of Charles and Ray Eames, will present their work in a free slide/film lecture titled “Dialog in Design.”

Antti Nurnesniemi, whose accomplishments earned him numerous international awards, currently serves as head of “Ornamo,” the Finnish Designers Organization. He specializes in interior design, architectural restorations and product development in furniture, lighting and public transportation.

Vuokko Erskolin-Nurnesniemi, his wife, heads the “Vuokko Company” (established in 1964) which produces her designs in fashions, textiles and industrial products, 40% of which are earmarked for export.

Seventy-two 19th- and 20th-Century American paintings are on view at the County Museum of Art, through March 15, in the first comprehensive survey of the unique portrait collection of the National Academy of Design. The exhibition offers a spectrum of 160 years of American portraiture since the 1830s.

Drawn from the academy’s collection of more than 1,300 portraits of artists, the exhibit’s highlights include a probing self-portrait by Thomas Eakins and more modern ones by Edwin Dickinson, George Tooker, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright and Jamie Wyeth, one of the youngest painters to be elected as an associate member of the academy.