GETTY FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES GRANTS; CURATOR TO BE KNIGHTED BY SPAIN
The Getty Foundation announced yesterday a series of fifteen grants totaling nearly $2.8 million that will launch an unprecedented series of concurrent exhibitions at museums throughout Southern California highlighting the post–World War II Los Angeles art scene. Exhibitions will begin in 2011 as part of the initiative titled “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945–1980.” This new round of grants brings to $5.5 million the total awarded by the Getty Foundation for the largest collaborative project undertaken by museums in the region. Institutions that received research and planning grants include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum; the Chicano Studies Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles; the California African American Museum; the Orange County Museum of Art; Pomona College Museum of Art; the University Art Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the American Museum of Ceramic Art; Scripps College’s Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; Otis College of Art and Design; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Los Angeles Filmforum. Each institution will have a distinctive exhibition, but all will focus on postwar art from 1945 to 1980 as part of the joint initiative. “The exhibitions, and the events that will accompany them . . . will demonstrate the pivotal role played by Southern California in national and international artistic movements since the middle of the twentieth century,” said Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation. More can be found in the Los Angeles Times.
In unrelated news, the Spanish ambassador to the United States will bestow knighthood on Sarah Schroth, senior curator of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, for her work on an exhibition of Spanish art, “El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III.” Ambassador Jorge Dezcallar plans to present the insignia and entitlement of Knight-Commander of the Royal Order of Isabella the Catholic during a fund-raising gala at the Nasher. The award is one of Spain’s highest civil honors. “Don Juan Carlos I, king of Spain, is pleased to honor Sarah Schroth for her outstanding contributions to the dissemination of Spanish culture in the United States,” Dezcallar said. “She has helped to introduce to the world great Spanish masters of painting and sculpture who lived and worked with the famous El Greco and Velázquez but who have until now been relatively unknown.”
