SIQUEIROS IN EAST L.A.

An exhibition of works by Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros opens next Sunday at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Park. Previously seen on the West Coast at the San Diego Museum of Art, the show had traveled to Moscow, Leningrad, Warsaw and Prague.

In reviewing the exhibition in San Diego, Times art critic William Wilson wrote, “Siqueiros’ art reflects passionate stubborn ideological conviction. His great murals sometimes seem to threaten to burst from the walls engulfing us in a hot ooze of gigantic Aztec heroes breaking chains, brutal cavalrymen trampling peasants and books, all acted amid hell’s own fire and nude torsos of Amazon earth mothers with breasts like gurgling volcanoes. The selection on view proves that Siqueiros needed acres of walls to match his vision but that he was by no means a wash-out easel painter.”

Part of the exhibition will be a photographic section on the artist’s life (1896-1974) and his Los Angeles murals presented by El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park in the Margo Albert Theater Gallery of Plaza de La Raza.

Two films will be screened in conjunction with the exhibition (Call gallery for schedule: (213) 223-2475). An Academy Award-nominated documentary film, “Walls Of Fire” (whose title refers to the works of Mexican muralist masters Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera), is narrated by Ricardo Montalban and directed by Herbert Kline. “America Tropical” documents the mural Siqueiros painted in Olvera Street in 1932. This mural was later whitewashed because of its politically controversial theme.

Selections for the exhibition were made by John Bowles, Plaza de la Raza exhibitions director; Antonio Gonzalez Reynoso, Mexican historian and former editor of the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mexican Painting; and Celina Aguilar de Wiebach, former director of the Siqueiros Cultural Polyforum, Mexico City.

“Prints and Drawings of the American West: 1830-1880,” an exhibition of some 40 works, opens in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery of the Huntington Library on Friday and continues through Dec. 8.

Landscape images by both amateur and academically trained artists depict the grandeur of nature, as well as Native American and white settlements in the Western wilderness.

Among works in the exhibition are prints by Karl Bodmer and John Mix Stanley; drawings by William Hayes Hilton, Joseph Goldsborough Bruff, William Rich Hutton; and watercolors by Samuel Colman, Thomas Moran and Alfred Jacob Miller.

This year’s annual membership exhibition of the Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies was selected by Howard Fox, the new curator of 20th-Century art at the County Museum of Art. It opens Friday and runs through Oct. 11.

Before coming to Los Angeles, Fox served as the curator of contemporary art at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

Architects Michael Graves and Charles W. Moore will be among the panelists participating in a daylong symposium jointly sponsored by the Newport Harbor Art Museum, Arts + Architecture magazine and UC Irvine University Extension Programs.

Presented in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibitions, “The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture” and “Future Furniture,” the symposium consists of two panel discussions: “Controversy in Recent American Architecture,” moderated by John Pastier, senior editor of Arts + Architecture, and “What’s New About Future Furniture?” moderated by Denise Domergue, author of the book “Artists Design Furniture.” A slide presentation by architect Stanley Felderman (who designed the installation of the two exhibitions) is included in the proceedings Saturday, 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m., in Nelson Auditorium on the UC Irvine campus.

Nearly $1.5 million in grants has been awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to museums and historical institutions. The funds were given to 28 projects that address the human condition through the use of art and artifacts.

Brooklyn Museum will use its $92,000 grant for an exhibition titled “From Indian Earth,” consisting of 125 terra-cotta figures ranging in date from 2500 B.C. to the present. Interpretive materials will explore the social, historical, religious and artistic significance of these works. The show is one of the core projects for the 1985-86 “Festival of India.”

A $30,000 grant to the Art Institute of Chicago will go toward the realization of a permanent installation, catalogue, lectures and symposiums on “Fragments of Chicago’s Past,” a four-part history of the city’s architectural and urban development as it relates to the nation’s social and economic conditions.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will produce an exhibition, catalogue and education programs, supported by a $175,000 grant, on “The Art That Is Life: Design Reform in America, 1875-1920.” This project, scheduled to travel to Los Angeles, New York and one other city yet to be named, will examine the Arts and Crafts Movement which responded to America’s growing industrialization by stressing a return to handcrafted works.