In These United States of California

A couple of years ago during a chance encounter with Howard Fox, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I asked what he was working on at the moment. “ ‘Made in California,’ ‘Made in California,’ ‘Made in California,’ ” came the reply.

Like many of his colleagues at the museum, Fox was so steeped in plans for this fall’s “Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000” that he scarcely had time to think of anything else. The mother of all the museum’s collaborative efforts and its biggest show ever, the project was organized by Stephanie Barron, vice president of education and public programs and senior curator of modern and contemporary art, with 12 other curators, film and music specialists, an educator and a team of designers.

Speaking in terms of “cross-fertilization” and “multidisciplinary teamwork,” Barron says the show is the product of many minds and that it has pushed the museum into new territory. The result is an enormous exhibition that will explore the relationship between the arts in California and the state’s changing image over the past century. Beginning on the plaza level of the Hammer Building, then wending its way upstairs and across the bridge to the Anderson Building, where it will fill all three floors, the show will occupy 47,000 square feet of display space with about 800 artworks and 400 cultural artifacts.

Eight hundred artworks? Think Granville Redmond’s Impressionistic painting of a poppy field, Phil Dike’s sunny rendition of a heroic surfer, Ed Ruscha’s suave take on the Hollywood sign at sunset, Carlos Almaraz’s darkly passionate vision of suburban infernos, David Hockney’s ever-cool love affair with L.A. swimming pools and Roger Minick’s irreverent shot of a woman in a Yosemite head scarf taking in the view at Inspiration Point.

Four hundred cultural artifacts? Think vintage bathing costumes and zoot suits, barbecue equipment and car culture, movie posters and Life magazines, orange crate labels and a 1910 postcard depicting two giant strawberries on a flatbed railroad car, the original Barbie doll and a souvenir can of smog.

Assembling all this art and what the museum calls “material culture” from hundreds of sources and putting it into a cohesive form has been a daunting process. It has also been costly, although the budget of the show has not been disclosed. But after six years of work--from initial brainstorming to installation of the vast array of objects in five, 20-year segments--”Made in California” will go on public view this fall. Not all at once, however. The first four sections, covering 1900 to 1980, will be unveiled Oct. 22; the final section, 1980 to 2000, will open Nov. 12. The closing date is Feb. 25--except for the 1900-1920 section, which will run through March 18.

The museum is hoping for a home-grown blockbuster. But it’s also a risky venture. Everyone has his own image of California, whether it’s the Hollywood film industry or Silicon Valley, trendy restaurants or roadside fruit vendors, a day at the beach or a nightmare on the freeway, a peacefully bubbling melting pot or nasty eruptions of racial tension. While the curators have tried to include all of California’s extreme identities, their choices will surely alienate as well as please the natives.

Another issue--of far more concern to the art crowd--is that “Made in California” is not a traditional art exhibition. Fine art will be in the spotlight, but in the context of California’s image and history. While a few galleries will display artworks alone, each 20-year segment of the show will mix paintings, prints, sculpture, decorative art, costumes and photographs with cultural artifacts.

Adding to the unconventional mix, 24 media stations scattered throughout the show will present archival film footage, clips from Hollywood movies, poetry recordings and popular music. Three “lifestyle environments”--the Arts and Crafts Room, the Early Modernist Room and the Mid-Century Indoor-Outdoor Lifestyle Room--will be stocked with period furniture and decorative arts.

Mixing fine art and popular culture is hardly a revolutionary idea, but it is rarely done in a major art museum, and certainly not on such a grand scale. That the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is taking this approach for its most expansive exhibition to date--indeed, its millennial blowout--has raised questions among critics. Those who would have preferred a more conventional survey of California art are already grumbling that the artworks were selected to illustrate the theme and don’t do justice to the state’s artistic achievements. Others fear that visiting the show will be like walking through a politically correct, revisionist textbook.

These concerns don’t surprise Barron, who has wrestled with the project as it has evolved from a rather vague idea for a millennial celebration to a theme show with a story line. “Much of what we are trying to say is that there isn’t just one image of California, there isn’t just one point of view,” she says. “Throughout the show we are dealing with two important questions: Which California? And whose California? We are opening ourselves up for debate and questions, so we can’t be afraid of the answers.

“There are often competing perspectives based upon who’s making the art, who the audience is and what the interpretation is,” she says. “In the past, much of the interpretation of our exhibitions has been made by an Anglo public; our audiences today look different and we have to be open to them.”

That means addressing the ethnic diversity and political tensions of California’s history. One particularly provocative section will present conflicting images of the Japanese internment camps, contrasting Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake’s stark, documentary images of life at Manzanar with Ansel Adams’ artful views of the same site.

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As for the art purists, Barron repeats a mantra about what the show is not: “It’s not an anthology, it’s not a selection of greatest hits; if you are not in the show, it doesn’t mean you are a bad artist.” Bucking preconceptions about who and what should be included is “the dangerous part of doing this as a thematic show,” she says, but to do what was expected would have been “boring and extremely provincial. I would hope that California art is way beyond the need for that kind of validation. If we want that, we are selling ourselves way short.”

Still, blurring the boundaries between fine art and popular culture is “pretty out there for art museums,” she says. “It’s not meant to debase the fine art, but you can’t debate California’s image without privileging popular culture.”

Finding a way to present the huge, eclectic mix of objects was only one of the challenges that faced exhibition designers Tim Durfee, Iris Regn and Louise Sandhaus. They joined the project in the spring of 1998, when they listened to curators to shape the subject. Those meetings and others with the museum’s curators were immensely helpful, but they also confirmed that “California is many different places to many different people,” Durfee says.

More than simply designing gallery displays, the team was commissioned to create an all-encompassing environment. That meant providing “an orientation to both the conceptual framework of the exhibition and the physical space,” Sandhaus says. The first thing visitors will see is a three-story, translucent enclosure on the plaza, with porous fabric walls bearing printed images that represent various conceptions of California. Inside, in the lobby of the Hammer Building, another set of images will fill out the kaleidoscope.

The entrance to each of the five exhibition sections will contain a “timeline image wall” of pictures, objects and text, Sandhaus says. Those who study the timelines will pick up information about opposing perceptions of the state, she says, “but even if you just glance at them before going into the galleries, you will understand how the works of art displayed there confirm, contradict or complicate these ideas of California.”

The structure is intended to help visitors follow the story line of the show and to provide a context for the plethora of images and objects. But above all, she says, the designers’ job was “to create an art experience” in which the artworks are the central element.

The first section of the exhibition (1900-1920) will consider how California boosters invented a romantic myth of a bountiful paradise, enriched by its Latino heritage and exoticized by its Asian residents but essentially lily white. The picture will become more varied in the second section (1920-1940), which will cover urbanization, the early growth of the Hollywood film industry, the influx of Mexicans and Depression-era migration.

The third section (1940-1960) will present California as a center for war production and a lifestyle trend-setter, then examine subcultures. The fourth section (1960-1980) will focus on the state’s nonconformist, anti-authoritarian image. The fifth section (1980-2000) will not only present a profusion of images, fostered by diversity, but also explore the homogenizing effect of globalization.

That’s a vast agenda, but two threads weave through the show and hold it together, Barron says. “One is the landscape, and that can be everything from booster images promoted by both the railroad companies and the artists they hired to create brochures and posters, to suburbia, ravages of land and ecological issues. The second thread has to do with California’s relationship to the cultures of Latin America and Asia.”

Barron is a veteran curator of complicated, multifaceted exhibitions that require international cooperation, most notably “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” which appeared at the museum in 1991, and the 1997 sequel, “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler.” For this show, she drew on talent closer to home. Early on, she enlisted exhibition associate Sheri Bernstein and American art curator Ilene Susan Fort as project coordinators. Other LACMA curators who deal with 20th century material also have played major roles.

Outsiders--including artists, critics, writers and historians--weighed in at a 1997 colloquium designed to jump-start the show and a subsequent series of meetings. Then there’s the exhibition catalog. Instead of the usual book between two covers, it’s a two-volume publication. The first volume contains essays by LACMA curators Barron, Bernstein and Fox, writer Richard Rodriguez, and USC’s Southern California Studies Center director, Michael Dear. The second volume is an anthology of essays on the exhibition’s theme by California state librarian Kevin Starr, art historians Peter Selz and Paul Karlstrom, and several emerging scholars.

The museum also has invited other Southern California cultural institutions to present related programs during the run of “Made in California.” At this point, about 25 organizations have scheduled lectures, panel discussions, conferences, seminars, film series, exhibitions and concerts.

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Looking back on the making of “Made in California,” Barron says the collaboration produced “a show that is richer than any one person could have imagined,” but the process involved many struggles. “The first challenge was refining the theme,” she says. The curators and consultants discussed focusing strictly on Southern California but decided to cover the entire state, then considered many possible approaches before settling on California’s image. “It took several meetings to accomplish that,” she says. “Then the challenge was making sure that we could expand the horizons of each of the museum specialists to embrace other ways of looking than the ones they knew well. They had to get beyond pure connoisseurship and think in an integrated way.” Deciding what kind of cultural material to show and how to relate it to the fine art was also difficult, but she expects visitors to make personal connections with the show through bits of popular culture that trigger memories.

“I’ve got this theory that people are going to respond most to the section of the show that reflects where they were in their 20s,” Barron says. It also will be interesting for families to visit the show together because individuals can share information about the periods they know best, she adds.

The exhibition will offer “a different view of California than has been presented before, at least by such a monolithic, centrist organization,” she said. While many ethnic, social and political groups have presented shows on their beliefs, experiences and histories, “Made in California” is different not only because of its scope, but also because of its location, she says. “This becomes really interesting when you put it under the umbrella of a mainstream, encyclopedic art museum. I think it’s going to surprise people.”