A GATHERING OF MAYAN TREASURES

“Maya: Treasures of an Ancient Civilization” goes on display at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park, Sept. 7 through Nov. 10.

Described by museum Director Craig Black as “the most spectacular exhibition of Mayan art ever assembled,” the landmark exhibition presents a broad overview with 275 objects including sculptures and figurines of carved jade, wood, shell and ceramic; implements and tools, and metalwork including gold pieces.

Making extensive use of maps and photomurals, the exhibition surveys the cultural context in which Mayan art was created and the successive historical periods during which it flourished. The show presents evidence of the remarkable heritage of the Mayan civilization, its intellectual and scientific achievements, its astonishing aesthetic refinement and technical brilliance. “Maya” was organized by the Albuquerque Museum with loans from 15 museums from the United States and Latin America.

“Collaborations,” third event in the series “Architecture/Art: An Urban Renaissance,” is set for Sept. 17, 6:30 to 9 p.m., in the Los Angeles Design Center, 433 S. Spring St.

The panel will consist of L. C. Pei of I. M. Pei Partners; Richard Kahan, former chairman, Battery Park City Authority in New York City and managing director, Continental Development group, and Siah Armajani and Elyn Zimmerman, artists who work primarily on site-specific projects. Marcy Goodwin will be moderator and keynote speaker.

Under discussion is the collaboration between architects, artists, developers and owners in the process of generating art for public spaces. Participants will stress artists’ involvement at the conceptual stage of any such project, to avoid later aesthetic, structural or engineering problems.

The final program in the series, “Fantasy and Function,” will take place Nov. 11 on the “Cats” set at the Shubert Theatre in Century City. Robert Fitzpatrick, president of CalArts and organizer of the Olympic Arts Festival, will moderate a panel composed of artists Larry Bell, David Hockney and Peter Shire.

The National Museum of American Art has purchased Lorser Feitelson’s painting, “Genesis No. 2,” for $25,000. The painting is in the artist’s “Subjective Classicism” Post-Surrealist style, which adopted the Surrealists’ free association of ideas but rejected their automatism and lack of logic. Typical of Feitelson’s preoccupations of the late ‘30s, the imagery juxtaposes seemingly unrelated objects, each evocative of a single universal theme. In bringing such symbols together, the artist sought to merge clarity with communicative power.

Born in Savannah, Ga., and reared in New York City, Feitelson (1898-1978) frequently traveled to Paris in the 1920s. He settled in Los Angeles in 1927, where he lived and worked until his death.

In the 1930s, he was active as an administrator for the WPA California Federal Arts programs. By the mid-1940s, the artist’s interest in Post-Surrealist ideas waned. All references to reality were totally abstracted in his “Magical Space Forms” series of the 1950s. Later he focused entirely on minimal abstraction, which culminated in a series of linear, sensual paintings.

Beginning Saturday through Oct. 13 at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park is “Master Drawings by Gericault,” the first U.S. exhibition of Theodore Gericault’s works on paper.

About 100 drawings and watercolors selected by Philippe Grunchec, curator of collections, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris, include preparatory studies for the artist’s famous painting, “The Raft of the Medusa.” Regarded as a pivotal figure in 19th-Century French art, Gericault’s works are often regarded as the link between Classical and Romantic concerns.

“The Coronation of the Virgin” a massive painting by Luca Signorelli (ca. 1441-1523) was recently acquired by the San Diego Museum of Art and installed in the second floor Renaissance Gallery. “The Coronation” is a semi-circular lunette capping an altarpiece commissioned in 1508 by patron Giacomo di Simone Filippini. It remained in the Church of San Francesco at Roccacontrada, in northeastern Italy, until its removal in 1811, following the Napoleonic suppression of monastic churches. The Filippini family sold the altarpiece and it landed in a British private collection, where it stayed since 1860.