Kaz Oshiro (Project Series 27)

Pomona College Museum of Art

From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art, in Claremont, California. Here, Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator in Light and Space art and former assistant to Walter Hopps, and Helene Winer, later the director of Artists Space and founder of Metro Pictures gallery in New York, curated landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between postminimalism and Conceptual art and presaged the development of postminimalism in the late 1970s. Among these artists were Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, Mowry Baden, Lewis Baltz, Chris Burden, Judy Chicago, Ger van Elk, Jack Goldstein, Robert Irwin, William Leavitt, John McCracken, Allen Ruppersberg, James Turrell and William Wegman. Providing unprecedented and revelatory insight into the art history of postwar Los Angeles, It Happened at Pomona chronicles the activities of artists, scholars, students and faculty associated with the College during this period. The book provides new insight into the relationship between postminimalism, Light and Space art and various strands of Conceptual art, performance art and photography in California, while contributing substantial new information about interconnections between artistic developments in Los Angeles and New York.

It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

In the Shadow of Numbers accompanies a survey exhibition and collects for the first time new writings and images on the influential Los Angeles-based artist Charles Gaines (born 1944). Gaines investigates the relationships between aesthetic experience, political beliefs and the formation of meaning. His work over the last 40 years has typically employed systems and rule-based procedures to explore how we experience and derive meaning from art. Although Gaines is often linked with Conceptual artists of the 1960s, he identifies more closely with John Cage’s examinations of indeterminacy in both composition and performance. The book includes an extensive selection of images of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video from several bodies of Gaines’s work over the last several decades.

In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines: Selected Works from 1975-2012

Holte, Michael Ned

History & Criticism

On the Verandah accompanies the first solo survey exhibition examining the early performative artwork of influential Los Angeles–based Hirokazu Kosaka (born 1948). Kosaka left Japan in 1966 to study art at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, and participated in the sweeping changes that were re-orienting the art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Conceptual art, performance, Land art and Postminimalism abandoned traditional notions of painting and sculpture in favor of work steeped in new ideas, processes and often fleeting forms. Deeply influenced by Buddhism, Zen archery, the Gutai group, Conceptual art and the art of his peers in Southern California, Kosaka created performances and installations that considered themes of endurance, environment and spirituality. The book includes rarely seen film stills and photographs, plus images from his more recent performances and installations.

Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Verandah: Selected Works 1969-1974 (Project)

Amanat, Shayda

Individual Artists

This publication complements the exhibition Andrea Bowers: #sweetjane at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Galleries and represents an overview of the artist's work since 2006. It highlights Bowers' (born 1965) commitment to merging art and social activism with a focus on political and environmental issues. Grounded in the legacy of feminist art, Bowers' socially engaged work combines a hyper-conceptual and formalist approach with raw and uncompromising content. This publication weaves together multiple strands of the artist's practice to foreground her incisive vision, activism and dedication to social justice. Andrea Bowers: #sweetjane, the exhibition of the Los Angeles-based artist's most recent body of work, examined the 2012 Steubenville, Ohio, high-school rape case, the subsequent trial and media and activist reactions.

Andrea Bowers

Kalb, Peter

Buszek, Maria Elena

Ferns and Palms accompanies Los Angeles–based artist Sam Falls' (born 1984) first solo museum show at the Pomona College Museum of Art. The book includes his signature weather-driven paintings and a new site-specific outdoor sculpture composed on an altered pickup truck filled with succulents.

Sam Falls: Ferns and Palms

PAGEL, David

This book is the first museum publication in English on Italian artist Mirella Bentivoglio (born 1922). It includes critical essays by art historians Frances K. Pohl, Leslie Cozzi and Franca Zoccoli, and interviews with Bentivoglio and John David O'Brien, plus a bibliography. The book highlights work from the recent exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, which surveyed nearly 50 years of the artist's work as an internationally renowned member of the Concrete and visual poetry movements. Including works in paper, stone, metal, wood, cloth, plastic and Plexiglass and with numerous previously unpublished images, it reveals the ways in which Bentivoglio engaged with many of the most significant formal and theoretical issues of postwar art--for example, the relationship between image and text, the impact of mass media and consumer culture, feminist critiques of patriarchy and artistic interventions in public spaces.

Mirella Bentivoglio: Pages: Selected Works 1966-2012

R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona celebrates the 50th Project Series at Pomona College with a milestone exhibition connecting the extraordinary artists who have participated in the Project Series to a new generation of artists working in Southern California. The accompanying catalogue features seven artists―Justin Cole, Michael Decker, Naotaka Hiro, Wakana Kimura, Aydinaneth Ortiz, Michael Parker and Nikki Pressley―and is unified by a unique curatorial process. R.S.V.P. Los Angeles contextualizes the art of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in Los Angeles through the lens of the Project Series. This volume includes essays on the history of the series, the artists, the themes connecting them and an annotated chronology of the Project Series exhibitions 1 through 50.

R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona

Incendiary Traces complements the first museum exhibition of Los Angeles–based artist Hillary Mushkin―a unique collective project that interrogates landscape through drawing. This experimental initiative was generated through on-site public “draw-in” events, ongoing research and publication of related materials. Incendiary Traces contextualizes the work done by this project at six different local militarized zones over the past five years. The book includes an introductory text by Rebecca McGrew, an essay by Susanna Newbury discussing the effect of military technology on visualizing conflict, an essay by Sarah Seekatz on the history of Southern California’s date industry and the orientalist fantasies associated with the Coachella Valley desert, and narrative captions by Hillary Mushkin.

Hillary Mushkin: Incendiary Traces (Project, 51)

Photographic critiques of colonialism's legacies, from a leading interrogator of cultural iconography This is the most comprehensive publication to date of the multimedia works of American artist Todd Gray (born 1954). Superbly produced, with a two-piece foil-stamped cover, beautiful endpapers and an insert documenting a yearlong series of events inspired by Gray's work, Euclidean Gris Grisfeatures a selection of recent photographic works derived from his exploration of the legacies of colonialism in Africa and several other seminal works. Based in Los Angeles and Ghana, Gray is best known for photography, performance and sculpture that address histories of power in relationship to the African Diaspora. In the new works featured in the catalog, Gray combines photographs from his archive, which he has assembled over decades, including his pictures of individuals and rural scenes in South Africa and Ghana, formal gardens of imperial Europe, constellations and galaxies, and images of musicians, such as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. The volume also includes a conversation between Gray and the artist Carrie Mae Weems.

Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris

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Books by Pomona College Museum of Art