LACMA’S TWO ‘ACQUISITIONS’

The County Museum of Art will reveal the acquisitive habits of its Prints and Drawings Department when two exhibitions go on view, Thursday through June 8.

“Twenty Years of Graphic Arts Council Acquisitions” is a survey of about 100 prints and drawings by such masters as Duerer, Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Picasso, Nolde, Kollwitz and Johns. “Prints and Drawings: Recent Acquisitions” features 27 works on paper acquired in the last three years, including early engravings by Duerer, a watercolor by Delacroix, etchings by Manet and Degas, a watercolor by Ed Moses and works by two of the most recent recipients of the Kay Nielsen Memorial Purchase Awards, Amy Goldman and Carlos Almaraz.

Symposia and lectures: UCLA’s Museum of Cultural History will host the seventh Triennial Symposium on African Art (the first on the West Coast), Wednesday through next Sunday. This major international forum for research on African art began in 1968, when 17 papers were presented to some 50 participants. The 1986 conference features 70 speakers participating in 20 panels and round tables on subjects covering most of the sub-Saharan territory.

For information and a program schedule, call the Museum of Cultural History at (213) 825-4361. Admission is free to the public but parking on campus costs $3.

“Sitings: A Symposium on Public and Sited Art” will be held at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday, 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., in conjunction with the exhibition “Sitings: Aycock, Fleischner, Miss, Trakas.”

Jeff Kelly, an art critic from the University of Texas, San Antonio, will give a slide lecture on site-specific environmental art.

The four sculptors whose drawings are represented in the show--Alice Aycock, Richard Fleischner, Mary Miss and George Trakas--will then join Mary Livingston Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego; Ronald J. Onorato, senior curator at the museum, and Hugh Davies, director of the museum, in a panel discussion.

The panel will examine the role of the artist as social designer, the use of metaphors in public art, audience accessibility and influences other than architecture on contemporary work designed for a specific location.

In connection with the exhibition, Onorato will also conduct a field lecture April 12 at the UCSD Stuart Collection, focusing on ways in which certain spaces have become surrogate museums for outdoor sculpture. Participants will meet at 10 a.m. in front of Nikki de St. Phalle’s “Sun God” on the Muir College campus.

Davies will discuss issues surrounding public art, particularly in the San Diego area, on April 19, 10 to 11:30 a.m., in the museum’s Coast Room. In the final lecture of the series, art historian Sally Yard will talk about works by Aycock, Fleischner, Miss, Takas and others in the Coast Room on April 26, 10 to 11:30 a.m.

Los Angeles artists out of town: “Aspects of California Modernism 1920-1950,” at the Federal Reserve System in Washington, features works by Ben Berlin, Nicholas Brigante, Conrad Buff II, Grace Clements, Boris Deutsch, Lorser Feitelson, Oskar Fischinger, Ejnar Hansen, Charles Howard, Peter Krasnow, Paul Landacre, Helen Lundeberg, Knud Merrild, Palmer Schoppe and Stanton Macdonald Wright. At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, “Directions 1986” includes Alice Fellows’ work (and that of Peter Fleps, Melissa Miller and Yolanda Shashaty) in its “Painting Into Nature” section. The second portion of the show, “Toward the Baroque,” features work by James Turrell (alongside that of Robert Morris, Hope Sandrow and Frank Stella).

Sculptor Mark Lere will participate in “Paintings and Sculpture by Candidates for Art Awards” at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York; his work will also be seen in one-man shows at the Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, May 3 to June 15, and at the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, July through August.

“Alexis Smith: Viewpoints,” a solo show, has just concluded at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; “Alexis Smith: Currents” is at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through April 20.

Allen Ruppersberg is one of 10 artists selected for the fifth annual Award in the Visual Arts. An exhibition of their work opens at the Neuberger Museum of the State University of New York at Purchase on April 13. In addition to participating in the exhibition, which tours three cities, artists selected for this national award receive $15,000 tax-free. Each host museum will receive a $10,000 purchase award for the acquisition of works by any of the exhibiting AVA artists.

“Photographers of the Weimar Republic” opens Saturday at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park with a lecture and a film depicting the Weimar years (between World War I and the rise of Hitler), when Germany enjoyed an unprecedented atmosphere of intellectual and artistic freedom.

The lecture by Stephen Jareckie, curator of photography of the Worcester Museum of Art, and the film, “Memories of Berlin: Twilight of the Weimar Culture,” are open to the public, $5 admission for members and $9 for non-members. Reservations are required: (619) 232-7931.

The exhibition features 119 works by six of the most famous photographers of the period: Hugo Erfurth, August Sander, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Werner Mantz and Erich Salomon. Images are portraits of leaders in the artistic, political and scientific community; views of country, city and industry, and formal compositions.