TEN ARTISTS NATIONWIDE ARE AWARD RECIPIENTS

The 10 recipients of this year’s Awards in the Visual Arts, chosen to represent 10 different areas of the nation, include Allen Ruppersberg of Santa Monica from the California and Hawaii region.

To be eligible for an award, the artist must be nominated and selected by a network of 100 art professionals. The winners were chosen from 500 candidates. A five-member jury then reviewed about 5,000 slides and 16 videotapes, selecting one winner from each region.

The program is sponsored by the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States and the Rockefeller Foundation with partial funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Ruppersberg’s works will be included in the “AVA 5” traveling exhibition, which features works by all 10 artists and opens in April at the Neuberger Museum, followed by stops at two other museums.

The tax-free award of $15,000 that goes to each artist is augmented by three $10,000 purchase-award funds to be expended by each of the three museums for acquisitions of works from the exhibition for their permanent collections.

Opening Tuesday, 6-9 p.m., at the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, the 1985 “Magical Mystery Tour” offers fantasy installations of works by 15 artists.

Conceived for the holiday season, the exhibition features sculpture by Gwynn Murrill, Rachel Dutton, Felipe Archuleta, Marsha Judd, Sheila Klein, Ed Larson, Mineko Grimmer and Alison Saar and special installations by Christine Oatman, Victoria Rivers, Stuart Arends, Barry Fahr, Bill and Gayle Gale and Richard Godfrey.

Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 12:30-5 p.m. General admission is $1 with children admitted free when accompanied by an adult. The gallery will be closed Dec. 24, 25 and Jan. 1. The show runs through Jan. 12.

Twenty American Indian artists and craftspeople will gather to show their works at the Natural History Museum’s 14th annual American Indian Festival Friday through next Sunday in Exposition Park.

Among the artists are Navajo silversmith Ray Tracey, Lorenzo Baca, president of the Native American Fine Arts Society of Los Angeles who works in a variety of media, and Hopi poet, painter and jeweler Michael Kabotie.

Poetry readings, traditional Indian dances and special activities for children as well as an exhibition of “Traditional Pueblo Clothing” will be part of the festivities. Visitors will be able to sample Native American food and watch “My Hands Are the Tools of My Soul,” an award-winning film that surveys the music, sculpture, poetry, history and philosophy of American Indian culture.

Information: 744-3314.

The first Claes Oldenburg public sculpture permanently installed in Los Angeles will be at Loyola Law School.

Titled “Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint,” and subtitled “Scales of Justice,” the 11-foot 2-inch metal sculpture (which Oldenburg designed in partnership with his wife Coosje van Bruggen) is being fabricated in North Haven, Conn., and was purchased with a grant from the Times Mirror Foundation.

Installation is scheduled for late April.

The law school’s permanent collection includes works by Lita Albuquerque, Carlos Almaraz, Dan Douke, Joe Fay, Walter Gabrielson, Jasper Johns, Karla Klarin, Lisa Manheim, Margaret Nielsen, Barney O’Brien, James Rosenquist, Mark Stock and Robert Walker. A mural by Kent Twitchell and Jim Morphesis is in progress in the atrium atop the Burns Building.

At the Palm Springs Desert Museum, “Works in Bronze: A Modern Survey” (to Dec. 31) presents small-scale bronze sculpture by 35 artists, among them Max Ernst, Barbara Hepworth, Jacques Lipschitz, Henry Moore, Mary Frank, Manuel Neri, George Segal and Anthony Caro.

A retrospective exhibition of the works by Millard Sheets is at the Ontario Museum of History and Art, 225 S. Euclid Ave., Ontario. The show is sponsored by the Chaffey Community Art Assn.

The National Watercolor Society is holding its 65th annual show at the Brea Civic Cultural Center, through Dec. 20. On view are 134 paintings in watercolor and other aquamedia selected from 1,012 submissions by artists from 48 states.

Luis Monreal, director of the Getty Conservation Institute, recently announced the appointment of Marta de la Torre as Training Program director for the Institute.

De la Torre was born in Cuba, and has been a U.S. citizen since 1968. She received a bachelor’s degree in design from George Washington University and did graduate work in art history at Georgia State University in Atlanta. A master’s degree in arts management from the American University in Washington led to a position as project coordinator and later as head of projects and administration for the Paris-based International Council of Museums (ICOM). While with ICOM she was responsible for the organization and implementation of training activities, internationally.

She developed the first museum studies course in Egypt and developed feasibility studies for the creation of regional conservation training centers.

The most complete museum exhibition to date of the work of Bay Area artist Elmer Bischoff opens Friday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The survey covers 40 years in 35 paintings and 15 drawings, selected to represent the artist’s principal stylistic phases.

A native Californian, Bischoff was born in Berkeley in 1916. Following graduation from UC Berkeley, he served in the military and in 1946 joined the faculty of the California School of Fine Arts--the wellspring of the Abstract Expressionist movement on the West Coast. His friendships there with painters Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Lobdell, David Park and Hassel Smith influenced his own attitudes towards art. When, like Diebenkorn, Park and several others, Bischoff adapted Abstract Expressionist painterly attitudes to figurative and landscape subjects, the style came to be known as the Bay Area Figurative school.

The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has a new director and a new chief curator, effective Jan. 1.

Rand Castile, who previously directed Japan House in New York, is the director and Clarence F. Shangraw, who served as senior curator at the Asian Art Museum since 1968, is chief curator.

The museum’s former director, Rene d’Argence, resigned several months ago.