JOSINE IANCO-STARRELS (1926–2019)
The Romanian-born curator Josine Ianco-Starrels, who became an influential figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a champion of underrepresented artists beginning in the 1960s, died at her home in Rogue River, Oregon, on April 8, the Los Angeles Times reports. Her daughter, Elissa Kline, said she passed away of natural causes.
“Ianco-Starrels is a progressive, energetic curator with an international perspective and a great depth of knowledge of contemporary California art,” Long Beach Museum of Art director Stephen Garrett said in 1986.
The daughter of the Israeli Romanian artist and architect Marcel Janco—one of the forces behind Dadaism—Ianco-Starrels was born in Bucharest on October 17, 1926. During World War II, she relocated with her family to Palestine. She eventually enrolled at the University of Tel Aviv, but she left for Paris before she graduated. In 1950, she crossed the Atlantic and settled in New York, where she joined the Art Students League.
Ianco-Starrels’s marriage to her first husband, journalist Harold Manson, fell apart, and in 1956, she married the documentary filmmaker Herbert Kline. The pair moved to Los Angeles, where Ianco-Starrels began her professional career as curator of the Lytton Center of the Visual Arts, which was founded by financier and philanthropist Bart Lytton, in 1965. In 1968, she organized the groundbreaking show “Twenty-Five California Women of Art.” Featuring work by Betye Saar, Helen Lundeberg, Joyce Treiman, and Vija Celmins, among others, the exhibition was one of the first shows dedicated to women artists to be staged in California.
Following her stint at the Lytton Center, Ianco-Starrels worked as an associate professor at the Art Gallery Division at California State University, Los Angeles, from 1969 to 1975 and as the director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park from 1976 to 1985. During her tenure at the organization, she organized a forward-thinking program dedicated to women artists and artists of color who were based in the city.
Ianco-Starrels also compiled the Los Angeles Times’ “Art News” column every Sunday between the 1970s and ’80s, and she was named senior curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1987. In 1990, she resigned in order to pursue other projects and work as an independent curator. Ianco-Starrels retired in 2000 and later moved to Oregon, where she occassionlly worked as a volunteer guest curator for the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.
