Faces to Watch

Robbert Flick

Photographer

A landscape photographer for thinking people, Robbert Flick was born in 1939 in the Netherlands but knows Los Angeles better than many natives. He has documented the city for 25 years, typically combining related images in diptychs, sequences or grids.

Whether producing mosaic-like views of neighborhoods or creating disjunctures in skies and other open spaces, Flick always asks viewers to make connections and fill in missing elements. At the same time, he sends subtle messages about the impact of contemporary culture on the urban landscape and muses on the fleeting nature of physical appearances.

All these ideas and images will come together in “Trajectories: The Photographic Work of Robbert Flick,” a retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sept. 16, 2004, to Jan. 9, 2005. The show will track Flick’s career from the 1970s to the present and honor an artist whose pioneering work is sometimes taken for granted.

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Wendy J. Kaplan

Curator

Curator Wendy J. Kaplan took charge of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s department of decorative arts two years ago, but she makes her public debut with a whopper of a show next year. “The Course of Invention: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America, 1880-1920,” which runs Dec. 12, 2004 to March 20, 2005, is billed as the first exhibition to assess the movement’s international influence.

The former director of Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Foundation, Kaplan has organized exhibitions for many museums and written or edited six books, mostly on the Arts and Crafts movement. But “The Course of Invention” is an enormous project that brings together 260 objects from 10 countries.

More than an artistic style, Arts and Crafts was a worldview, Kaplan says, that raised questions about how the design and production of material goods might benefit society. Exhibition visitors will see the framework of artistic issues that are still subject to debate.

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Ann Goldstein

Curator

A 20-year veteran at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, curator Ann Goldstein has organized one show after another. Periodically, it’s a really big one, such as “1965-1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art,” her 1995 examination of Conceptualism. The coming year is another big one for Goldstein. Her latest project, “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968,” will fill the museum’s entire building at California Plaza.

Goldstein has selected paintings and sculptures by 40 artists, including Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin and Richard Serra for the show, which will be on view March 14 to Aug. 3.

Minimalism is generally known for reducing art to geometric essentials and rejecting emotional content. Goldstein sees it as a range of related strategies that challenged prevailing aesthetic ideas. By exploring Minimalism’s origins, she hopes to stimulate new scholarly debate on this influential force in 20th century art.

-- Suzanne Muchnic