MOCA Serves Up a Mixed-Media Smorgasbord

While the Museum of Contemporary Art’s yearlong inaugural show offered painting and sculpture only, its next effort, beginning Tuesday, serves up a smorgasbord of mixed media.

“In marked contrast to our inaugural exhibition (Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986), we now have six shows characterized by a diversity of media: architecture, drawing, video, video installation and performance art,” said MOCA assistant curator Elizabeth Smith.

“The Architecture of Frank Gehry,” whose designs include MOCA’s Temporary Contemporary, Rebecca’s restaurant and the Santa Monica Place, leads off the roster of new exhibits.

Organized by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, about 250 drawings, photographs and scale models of Gehry’s innovative, unorthodox projects from 1964 to the present will be on view, plus his furniture and domestic objects designs and sculptural installations created for the exhibit. Four full-scale, walk-in architectural constructions will be included.

Other exhibits opening Tuesday include “The Drawings of Jasper Johns from the Collection of Toiny Castelli.” This features 16 works from 1955 to 1986 that have never been publicly exhibited. The late Toiny Castelli was the wife of New York art dealer Leo Castelli.

“Bruce Nauman Drawings 1965-1986” includes about 100 works and will be presented in conjunction with “Bruce Nauman Video 1968-1988.” Nauman, a post-Minimalist artist best-known for his sculptures, is also a progenitor of the video medium.

In “Wilderness,” a video installation, Mary Lucier explores the conflict between nature and progress. The work is a “pictorial adventure into the origins of American landscape painting” of the Hudson River and Luminist schools, says the artist.

Finally, choreographer/writer/artist Remy Charlip, MOCA’s first “artist in residence,” will present the culmination of his month-long residency Thursday to next Sunday. “Amaterasu: Remy Charlip’s First Hollywood Movie, Part I (The Storyboard,”) is a performance art, work-in-progress based on a Japanese folk tale of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

“One of our mandates is to commission new works from artists in a range of media,” Smith said. “One way to do that is to engage performing artists.”

Performances Thursday through Saturday are at 8 p.m.; next Sunday’s performance is at 2 p.m. All new exhibits and the performances will be held at MOCA’s Grand Avenue site. The TC is closed, for installation of new exhibits, through March 21.

BANDING TOGETHER: The recently-formed Santa Monica Art Dealers Assn., founded to “develop, sponsor and promote art activities in the greater Santa Monica area,” has elected officers for 1988.

Officers are president Lee Musgrave, director of the Merging One Gallery, vice president Dorothy Goldeen, owner of the gallery that bears her name, secretary Putter Pence of Pence Gallery, and treasurer Wayne Blank of Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

The association plans to stage an annual art event and many of the 16 galleries that compose it have expanded their operating hours, now remaining open Thursday evenings until 8.

RETURNING: Betye Saar’s first solo Los Angeles exhibition in four years is ongoing at Cal State Fullerton’s art gallery. The show is composed of 10 reconstructions of site-specific installations originally created out-of-state.

“Resurrection: Site Installations, 1977-1987,” through March 6, features such works as “Secrets and Revelations,” from the Studio Museum in Harlem, “Mojotech,” from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and “Sacred Horizons,” from Queen’s Museum, New York.

“I am pleased to be able to share the out-of-state works with the Los Angeles art community,” Saar comments.

NUTS AND BOLTS: Legal, financial and marketing issues for professional artists will be discussed during a two-day seminar presented by L.A. Artcore at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center.

Margaret M. Roberts, a certified public account, will launch “Survival for the Artist III” at 9 a.m. Feb. 27 with a discussion of such topics as tax deductions for donations of artworks, bookkeeping for art sales, and personal tax laws. Attorney Mark MacCarley will speak next on artist-dealer consignment and contract laws, copyright and resale royalty laws and others. A question/answer period will follow each presentation.

This seminar, concluding at 4 p.m., is free. Reservations not required.

On March 5, beginning at 9 a.m., artists, art consultants and representatives from museums and galleries will hold one-on-one consultations with artists to discuss pricing, marketing and critical evaluation of art. Consultants include Sandy Ballatore, editor of Visions magazine, Jacqueline Crist, assistant curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, John Otterbridge, artist and director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, and Sandra Starr, director of the James Corcoran Gallery.

This seminar, concluding at 4 p.m., is free, though space is limited. Reservations are required: (213) 617-3274.