NEW MAGAZINE FOCUSES ON YOUNG UNKNOWNS

A new art magazine has emerged in Southern California.

Visions, a visual-art quarterly that will print its fourth issue next month, was founded to focus attention on “young talents who do good work but who have had little promotion or publicity,” says publisher Lydia Takeshita.

“It’s a concentration of critical essays on artists (from Santa Barbara to San Diego) and their work,” says Takeshita, a painter, art professor at Cal State Los Angeles and founder of the L.A. Artcore gallery, an association of Cal State Los Angeles art students and graduates. “We also have a section--called Art Beat--that features very short reviews of local shows.”

Visions’ editor, Sandy Ballatore, a Cal State Los Angeles art instructor, adds to that in the magazine’s spring issue: “We intend to reach into little-known areas of the art world and to respond to major events as well. We will bring to a national readership art people as well as art objects, art history as well as art’s cutting edge.”

The well-illustrated magazine’s summer issue includes an analysis of the 1986 Los Angeles International Contemporary Art Fair and articles about artists Carol Schwennesen, Jim Lawrence, Ray Howlett, Michiel Daniel, Kim Abeles, Michael C. McMillen, Mark Lipscomb and Kyung Hwan Oh.

Takeshita says Visions was the brainchild of “an angel” whom she declined to name “because he is a modest man.” However, she says he is co-owner of a 41-year-old downtown printing company and prints the magazine at no cost to L.A. Artcore.

The man “has gotten a good life from being downtown,” Takeshita said, “so a year ago, he asked me to get all the downtown artists together for lunch and announced that he wanted to show his appreciation by founding this magazine.”

While the range of Visions is now limited to Southern California, “we are clear that Los Angeles is becoming an international art center and the time will come when we need to expand,” she said. “We foresee that as our future.”

Visions, which has a circulation of 2,000, Takeshita says, is sold for $5 at newsstands and several shops, schools, galleries and museums.

FILL ‘ER UP: It’s going to take both the Laguna Beach Museum of Art and its annex in Costa Mesa to exhibit all 300 works in “Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical,” running Friday to Oct. 4.

Clay, fiber, glass, wood and metal works made since 1980 will be displayed in the exhibit, which is intended to emphasize that the line between fine art and crafts has been erased by several celebrated contemporary artists, in this case Americans.

For instance, there’s a realistic trio of exquisitely carved wooden bicycles by Fumio Yoshimura and a clay briefcase by Marilyn Levine that looks like it’s made of crumbly leather.

Other artists in the show, organized by the American Craft Museum in New York, include Viola Frey, Paul Seide, Beatrice Wood, Thomas Loeser, Sam Maloof and Robert Arneson.

The exhibit, featuring purely aesthetic sculptural pieces, furniture, vessels, design objects, clothing and jewelry, is divided into four categories: “The Object as Statement,” with works created primarily for their aesthetic value; “The Object Made for Use”; “The Object as Vessel”; and “The Object for Personal Adornment.”

THOUGHTFUL GIFT: B. Gerald Cantor, a collector of works by Auguste Rodin, has donated Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker” to Stanford University. Conceived by Rodin in 1880, the masterful bronze has been on loan to museums and cultural institutions in the United States and Japan for the past two decades. It is the 155th Rodin donated by Cantor to Stanford, now the second largest repository of Rodin works in the world, after the Musee Rodin in Paris.

The sculpture is the 10th cast of about 15 that are scattered around the world.

IN SEARCH OF: The California Afro-American Museum is seeking historical materials to exhibit in its upcoming show “Black Angelenos: The Afro-American in Los Angeles 1850-1950.”

The exhibit, planned for February, 1988, will document and examine the experiences of blacks in the Los Angeles area from 1850 to 1950. It will “explore the lure of the California Dream,” a museum announcement states, “and the impact of subsequent migrations of Afro-Americans to Los Angeles on white and black residents in the city and on the migrants themselves--in the 1880s, the pre-World War I era and the 1940s.”

Donations sought include photographs, furniture, household objects, artifacts, clothing and documents such as programs from churches, literary and social clubs, newspapers, artwork and materials on blacks in Hollywood, including costumes, scripts and trade paper employment advertisements.

All items may be loaned temporarily or donated permanently to the museum. Information: (213) 744-7432.

TEAM EFFORT: Artist Rachael Dutton has been selected to participate in the Feitelson Art Foundation’s second Senior/Junior grants program.

In an apprentice/mentor situation, Dutton, the “junior” or emerging artist, will work and study for one year with Connie Zehr, the “senior” or established artist. Both artists are sculptors and will receive $10,000 for the year.

Zehr, along with trustees of the Feitelson Art Foundation, chose Dutton from among several Southern California artists who applied for the grant. The first grants were awarded to Betye Saar and Sandra Martinez.

NEW POST: Paolo Polledri, an Italian-born architect-turned-architectural historian, will become the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s first curator of architecture and design this October.

Polledri, 41, received his professional training as an architect at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice, Italy. He came to California in 1976 to earn his master of architecture degree from UC Berkeley after practicing architecture for five years in Italy and London. He has also practiced in Boston and the Bay Area, and he worked for three years at the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities in Santa Monica, participating in the planning process for the design of the new Getty Center complex in Brentwood.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s department of architecture and design, the first of its kind on the West Coast, was founded in 1983.