Smaller, more creative

The Los Angeles commercial gallery universe continued to expand in 2003, as it has for more than a decade.

More worthwhile venues now exist for the introduction of new artists and new art than ever before, from established gallery neighborhoods like Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Chinatown to fledgling areas in North Hollywood, Culver City and elsewhere.

However, a review of the year’s compelling exhibitions in noncommercial spaces demonstrates something unexpected -- and welcome. For modern and contemporary art, most of the satisfying action in 2003 was found in university, college and smaller civic spaces.

The big museums -- notably the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- were disappointingly bland or predictable. Ironically, the most compelling modern shows at the majors were seen at the Huntington (Edward Weston’s Guggenheim Fellowship photographs) and the Getty (Bill Viola’s recent video experiments with plasma screens) -- institutions more commonly aligned with art before the modern era. Once, a rivalry between MOCA and LACMA was expected to push their exhibition programs of 20th and 21st century art to new levels of sophistication and enthusiasm. But that seems to have petered out. Now, a vigorous “second tier” of exhibition spaces has emerged to fill the vacuum.

Steve Roden, an enviable painter of language-based images that belie the narrow confines of their linguistic origin, was the subject of a captivating small survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art. The UCLA Hammer Museum began the year with a big international survey of recent drawings by emerging artists and now is finishing it (through Jan. 11) with the widely acclaimed retrospective of reclusive American sculptor Lee Bontecou. UCLA’s Fowler Museum presented a fascinating survey of modern Sufi arts, produced in urban Senegal.

Patrick Nickell’s low-tech sculptures, made since 1987 from cardboard, plywood, paint and string, were a standout at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery, where a bracing drawing survey by the venerable Charles Garabedian is offering unusual rewards. The new Gallery at REDCAT, operated at Disney Concert Hall by CalArts, recently opened with a revealing historical survey of paintings by the late Emerson Woelffer, a savvy exhibition chosen by artist Edward Ruscha.

At Barnsdall Park, the Municipal Art Gallery returned after several years of renovation with an eye-opening survey of kinetic sculptures by George Stone. A second civic space -- the Santa Monica Museum of Art at Bergamot Station -- made a long-overdue reassessment of Kim MacConnel’s Pattern and Decoration art of the past 30 years.

It’s true that MOCA organized a rigorously beautiful show of 31 paintings by the gifted young L.A. artist, Laura Owens. At 32, Owens has emerged among the most admired painters of her generation, with an international roster of exhibitions that would be the envy of most any artist barely 10 years out of art school. The breadth of that reputation, however, notably distinguishes this show from the others. Most of the risks are being taken at the second-tier institutions, where program schedules display a quirky level of inventiveness and rediscovery -- not to mention commitment to the history of L.A. art. Only sporadically is that found at the majors.

This lively second tier has been important to L.A. since the 1950s. But before the shaky commercial gallery scene reemerged and stabilized in the 1980s, college galleries had been significant mainly as venues introducing new art and new artists, from L.A. and elsewhere. Now that commercial spaces reliably fill much of that role, the second tier has changed focus. With a stream of surveys and solo shows of recent art history, especially L.A.’s, they’re doing the heavy lifting we once hoped MOCA and LACMA might do.

Knight is The Times’ art critic.