MOCA TO HOST EXHIBIT OF MURRAY PAINTINGS

The Museum of Contemporary Art continues its yearlong look at the evolution of contemporary art with a survey exhibit of abstract painting by Elizabeth Murray, opening Tuesday at the Temporary Contemporary.

“Elizabeth Murray,” through Sept. 20, will consist of 45 works from 1976-86 by the Chicago artist.

“Murray is one of the key figures involved in the resurgence of abstract painting in the last decade,” says Kerry Brougher, MOCA’s assistant curator and project director for the exhibit. “She is really one of the foremost abstract painters of our time.

“I think there’s a complex relationship of space in her work that most abstract painting hasn’t demonstrated, at least not for a long time,” Brougher says. “And she seems to be interested in opening abstract painting up to allusion and illusion; to be concerned both with constructing a painting but also with creating a fictional space in which she can create these wonderful fresh-looking images.

“She also has a strong sense of color and that tends to be very contemporary, like Technicolor,” Brougher adds, “so she renders these almost cartoon-ish, biomorphic shapes in splashes of Technicolor.”

Murray had her first major exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. Her work is in MOCA’s permanent collection, and in the collections of such other museums as the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the High Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

“Elizabeth Murray,” a traveling exhibition, was organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

DOUBLE SCOOP: MOCA has recently received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities toward its first exhibition devoted to architecture. “Case Study Houses: History and Legacy,” the exhibit’s tentative title, is scheduled to open in May, 1989.

The Case Study Houses, built in Los Angeles between 1945 and 1966, were a series of 36 experimental prototypes meant to acquaint the public with the modern architectural idiom of the post-World War II housing boom. The houses epitomize the optimistic, progressive spirit of the years immediately following the war. Architects who contributed to Case Study House designs include Richard Neutra, Ralph Rapson, Pierre Koenig, Craig Ellwood, Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen.

The exhibition will include two full-scale, walk-through reconstructions of Case Study Houses built inside MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, as well as scale models, drawings, photographs, artworks and design objects.

In conjunction with the exhibit, MOCA plans to commission six contemporary architects to design new Case Study prototypes.

TRIPLE SCOOP: MOCA’s Architecture and Design Council, a volunteer support group, has named nine new members to its board of directors. The appointees are:

Saul Bass (Bass-Yeager and Associates), Frank O. Gehry (the architect who renovated the Temporary Contemporary), Arata Isozaki (the architect for the permanent MOCA), Jerve Jones (Peck/Jones Construction), Edward Helfeld (San Francisco Redevelopment Agency), Richard Keating (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill), Richard Meier (Richard Meier and Partners), Barton Myers (Barton Myers Associates) and Rob Wellington Quigley (Rob Wellington Quigley Architects).

LEGAL AIDE: Two organizations, one each from Northern and Southern California, have joined to form the first statewide legal arts services organization.

Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Los Angeles will become California Lawyers for the Arts, representing an active membership of 800 artists and attorneys.

The new organization will provide artists and arts groups throughout the state with such services as lawyer referrals, dispute resolution services, educational programs, publications, and a library in the organization’s San Francisco headquarters for artists, performers, writers and arts groups of all disciplines. These programs are designed to help artists make use of legal concepts.

CULTURAL THINK TANK: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities will begin its third Getty Scholar Program this fall and has recently invited 10 scholars from England, America, France and Germany with diverse specializations to pursue individual areas of research as well as a single theme.

This year’s theme will explore the meanings that works of art and other forms of cultural expression acquire when they are viewed, heard or read and interpreted.

The participating scholars and their fields of interest are: Svetlana Alpers, art history; Marcia Ascher, ethnomathematics (the interaction of math and ethnography); Caroline Bynum, Medieval history; Gisele Freund, photography; Wolfgang Kemp, art history; Martin Lowry, history of books and printing; Sheldon Nodelman, art history; Carl Schorske, intellectual and cultural history; Leo Steinberg, art history; Marina Warner, women in history.

These nine scholars form the core of the Getty center’s Visiting Scholars and Conferences Program, designed by the center to bring together art historians and scholars in the social sciences and humanities to foster an interdisciplinary examination of the arts in cultures past and present. The scholars will be in residence at the center in Santa Monica through the 1988 academic year.

SPARKS FLY: The Social and Public Arts Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice has appointed Katya Williamson as its executive director.

Williamson, who founded and directed for five years an arts cooperative in Connecticut, received a degree in arts management from the University of Connecticut.