MUSEUM SEWS UP CENTER FOR AMERICAN QUILTS

The County Museum of Art will establish an American Quilt Study Center, according to Edward Meader, curator of the department of costumes and textiles.

The new facility, to be headed by senior research associate Sandi Fox, is slated to open in 1988. It will produce exhibitions and publications and provide scholarly resources.

The museum’s holdings in textiles are being expanded beyond the current 40,000 objects and 4,000 volumes on textiles and costumes in the department library. Among the first acquisitions for the study center is a rare Baltimore Album child’s quilt.

The center is gathering archives containing diaries, letters, swatch books, paper patterns, photographs, slides and photocopies of resource material.

Storage methods for quilt acquisitions have been worked out in consultation with conservators to determine optimum conditions for preserving those vestiges of a rich tradition.

Community organizations are involved in fund-raising and other support activities to benefit the center. A “Contemporary Folkwear Fashion Show” will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday in the Encino Room of Bullock’s Sherman Oaks, featuring designs inspired by various ethnic costumes including a showing of the fashions of Hiroko Ogawa, designer of contemporary Japanese clothing. Donations of $20 a person go directly to benefit the center. Reservations: (818) 990-9166.

“Alvar Aalto: Furniture and Glass” opens Wednesday at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, to run through Nov. 2.

The exhibition, organized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, presents 35 examples of furniture by the Finnish architect/designer, from his short-lived experiments with tubular steel of the 1920s and the subsequent ground-breaking explorations of bentwood techniques to the designs of the mature Aalto in the 1950s.

The 35 glass pieces on exhibition include examples of Aalto’s free-form vases and bowls as well as the lesser-known mass-produced glass dinner services and kitchenware designed with his wife, Aino.

A short film focusing on the manufacture of Aalto furniture in Finland will also be shown in the gallery.

A symposium, “Alvar Aalto and Beyond,” is set for Oct. 10 and 11, organized by Janey Bennett under the sponsorship of the folk art museum, the UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Pacific Design Center. The Oct. 10 session will take place at the design center while the Oct. 11 proceedings will happen in UCLA’s Dickson Auditorium.

The symposium is to feature an international group of Aalto scholars and historians, including Goran Schildt, Aalto’s principal biographer. Reyner Banham, professor of art history at UC Santa Cruz and author of “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” will act as host and moderator of the symposium.

The folk art museum’s education department has organized a Scandinavian Sunday Family Night on Sept. 21, when storyteller Martha Stevens will tell Hans Christian Andersen stories and other Scandinavian folk tales. Traditional folk crafts of the region will be demonstrated, to inspire members of the audience to try their hand at learning to make them. Reservations requested; call Janet Marcus at (213) 934-3082.

“Chicano Expressions: A New View in American Art,” an exhibition/survey of works by Chicano artists active during the past two decades, opens Sept. 16 at the Otis/Parsons Exhibition Center (through Oct. 25). The four-part presentation will include works by graphic artists, muralists, painters, sculptors and creators of devotional shrines or altars. Organized for INTAR Hispanic-American Arts Center in New York City by curators Inverna Lockpez, Thomas Ibarra Fausto, Judith Baca and Kay Turner, the show consists of posters, photo and video documentation of murals and shrines, paintings, drawings and sculpture by numerous participants including Los Angelenos Robert Gil de Montes, Patssi Valdez, John Valadez, Diane Gamboa and Yreina Cervantes.

“Uncovering the Past: Tribute and Parody,” an exhibition of works that make conscious reference to others in art history, opens next Sunday at the Long Beach Museum of Art (through Nov. 2).

According to the museum, the romantic landscapes of Joel Bass and English artist Susanna Dadd recall images by 19th-Century artists Delacroix and Turner, while Ellen Lampert’s mixed-media installation parodies Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Paintings by Peter Hess and Jiri Anderle incorporate elements of specific masterworks but use them in incongruous situations while portraits by Ron Rizk refer to those painted by masters of the Renaissance, specifically Piero della Francesca. Robert Colescott satirizes art history rather than paying serious tribute to it. Mark Wethli organizes and renders interior spaces much as Vermeer did.

Works by Joseph Cornell, Susan Hall, David Ligare, Peter Saari and David Settino Scott are also included in the exhibition, which runs concurrently with Gary Franklin’s photography show titled “Rust Bowl: A Tragedy of the American Industrial Revolution,” in the Bookshop Gallery through Oct. 12.

San Francisco Art Institute President Stephen Goldstine has resigned effective Sept. 30, 1986. Gardiner Hempel, former board chairman and longtime SFAI trustee, was named to head a search committee to select a new president.

Cecelia Klein, UCLA associate professor of art history, was named an Ailsa Mellon Bruce senior fellow for the 1986-87 fall term at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Klein’s grant project, “Dressed to Kill: Politics of Costume in Aztec Sacrificial Rites,” explores the meaning and symbolism of costumes in ancient Aztec death rituals. She is one of seven fellows selected by a nationwide committee of art historians.

The fellowship is awarded to scholars who have held a Ph.D. for five years or longer and have shown outstanding promise in their field.