Critic’s Picks

Now that it’s widely acknowledged that more interesting new art comes from studios scattered across the sprawl of L.A. than just about anywhere else on the planet, the UCLA Hammer Museum had the bright idea of grabbing a quick cross-section of the newest of the new. Thus was born “Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles” (June 3-Sept.2), a freewheeling survey of painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, video and installation by 25 hitherto unknown young artists, most lately disgorged by the region’s notable art schools.

“Winslow Homer and the Critics: Forging a National Art in the 1870s” (June 10-Sept. 9) arrives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art with 80 paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints by the self-taught artist from Boston. In the decade after the Civil War, Homer was the object of a love-hate relationship with contemporaneous critics, who debated the need for painting to embody a national ethos and whether he was achieving it.

An American theme continues in subsequent weeks at the San Diego Museum of Art with “Grandma Moses in the 21st Century” (June 30-Aug. 26), which surveys the work of folk art icon Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961), who took up painting in her 70s when arthritis forced her to give up embroidery. At the J. Paul Getty Museum, two shows--”Walker Evans & Company: Works From the Museum of Modern Art” and “The American Tradition and Walker Evans: Photographs From the Getty Collection” (both opening July 10)--survey arguably the greatest photographer America has yet produced. Finally, back at LACMA, “Color, Myth and Music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Synchromism” (Aug. 5-Oct. 28), looks at the work of the pioneering artist who left Los Angeles for Paris in 1907 and became one of the first American Modernist painters.

Reversing gears, the Museum of Contemporary Art will be the final stop for “David Hockney Photoworks” (July 22-Oct. 21), an international touring exhibition examining the role that photography has played for the British expatriate to L.A.