Upcoming Exhibitions
Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976
March 24, 2012 - June 17, 2012
CCP Gallery, Free Admission
This landmark exhibition, curated by Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon, brings the work of Berman and Heinecken ‒ two seminal yet under-studied Los Angeles artists ‒ into close conversation for the very first time. Each was interested in appropriating and repurposing images from mass media, which helped usher in the use of photography as a key element of contemporary avant-garde art. Their works are explored within the unique cultural context of 1960s and 1970s Southern California, as it fueled and amplified their highly original creative approaches.
Click here and here to read recent reviews of this exhibition when it was on view at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California, from October 2, 2011, to January 2, 2012.
Permanent Collection Exhibition
March 24, 2012 – June 17, 2012
CCP Gallery, Free Admission
Curated by Ansel Adams Intern River Bullock, and presented in conjunction with Speaking in Tongues, this group of works from the Center’s collection illustrates Los Angeles photography from 1890s-1990s, including photographs by William Henry Jackson, Margrethe Mather, Garry Winogrand, and Catherine Opie.
Made in Arizona: Photographs from the Collection
August 18, 2012 - November 25, 2012
Curated by Rebecca Senf, Ph.D.
CCP Gallery, Free Admission
To celebrate the Arizona Centennial, the Center for Creative Photography will present a selection created in the state during the twentieth century. Encompassing a range of subjects and genres, the exhibition will highlight the diverse photographs produced in Arizona. Some of these artists spent time in the state because of great Arizona photographic institutions, including higher educational programs, Arizona Highways magazine, and the Center for Creative Photography itself. In addition to iconic views of iconic sites by photographic masters, this presentation will embrace the unexpected, and show the rich breadth and scope of the Center’s fine print collection.
The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965
December 14, 2012 - March 10, 2013 (Dates Tentative)
CCP Gallery, Free Admission
From 1957 to 1965, famed photographer W. Eugene Smith documented the late- night soirees inside a dilapidated New York City loft where some of the jazz world's greatest legends (Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk to name a few) casually performed and mingled with the likes of Norman Mailer, Salvador Dali, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and crowds full of colorful underground characters. Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at the loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career. He photographed the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. Smith also wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians.
Writer Sam Stephenson discovered Smith's jazz loft photographs and tapes 11 years ago, when he was researching another Smith project in the archives at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography, and he has spent seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting and editing these materials for a book and, along with other partners, a radio series, an exhibition, and a website.
The Jazz Loft Project: W. Eugene Smith in New York City, 1957-1965 was organized by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. For more information, please visit http://www.jazzloftproject.org/index.php.
CCP Lecture Series:
Kenneth D. Allan: Radio-Mastery of the Ether - Wallace Berman and Materiality in 1960s Los Angeles
April 12, 2012
5:30 pm
CCP Auditorium, Free Admission
Kenneth D. Allan’s research focuses on the rise of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and has included the work and influence of Wallace Berman. A central figure in development of the postwar Los Angeles art world as the editor of the journal Semina, Berman’s work spanned the media of photography, collage, assemblage sculpture, and film. This talk will consider how his interest in the history of radio technology, Jewish mysticism and ideas of transmission and reception come together in his later work with stones and Hebrew lettering inspired by a prized 1923 book in his library, The Story of Modern Science Vol. IX: Radio-Mastery of the Ether. Kenneth Allan is Assistant Professor of Art History at Seattle University and received his MA and PhD from University of Chicago. His recent publications include essays for the Getty Museum catalog, Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945-1980.
Curators’ Talk: Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon
April 19, 2012
5:30pm
CCP Auditorium, Free Admission
Claudia Bohn-Spector and Sam Mellon will discuss their current CCP exhibition, Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken, 1961-1976. Claudia Bohn-Spector is an independent scholar and curator in Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Munich, Germany. A specialist in American art and culture, she has curated numerous fine art exhibitions, including a critically acclaimed survey of Los Angeles photography at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, entitled This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in L.A. Photographs. With Sam Mellon, she is currently working on a book-length study entitled WRONG: Rules and Irreverence in American Art, 1945 to 1975, for publication in 2013.
Sam Mellon is a musician and curator based in Los Angeles. In 2008 he founded Open Gallery (with Kamil Beski), an exhibition space in Los Angeles devoted to showing emerging conceptual artists and photographers. There, he organized numerous contemporary exhibitions, including works by Veaceslav Druta, Louisa Van Leer, Jed Lind, Jill Newman, Kris Cunz, and Lindsay Foster. He currently serves as the Director of Exhibition Services at Curatorial Assistance, an international traveling exhibition service in Pasadena, after nearly a decade of preparing and installing exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Luke Batten: Robert Heinecken, Object Matter
April 24, 2012
5:30pm
CCP Auditorium, Free Admission
Luke Batten, Director of the Robert Heinecken Trust, will discuss the editing of a new monograph published by Riding House detailing Heinecken's artistic output from 1957-1997. The monograph, Robert Heinecken, expands our knowledge of his artistic practice by including several unpublished works from the 1950's and reassembled magazines created in the 1990's. The focus of the discussion will concentrate on Heinecken's penchant for experimenting with photographic processes and materials. Batten is Associate Professor of Photography at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois. He received his MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.