Gala Porras-Kim Reimagines Museums to Rethink Traditional Cataloging Systems in her LACMA Art + Technology Lab Project

Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields is the third and final film from Hyundai Artlab centered around the LACMA Art + Technology Lab—one of the museum’s unique programs that was revitalized through a long-term partnership between Hyundai Motor and LACMA beginning in 2015. This series showcases bold experimentation and cross-disciplinary innovation fostered by the lab through the eyes of three artists.

This film focuses on Expansive Data Fields, the 2023 LACMA Art + Technology Lab project developed by Los Angeles-London-based artist Gala Porras-Kim. In this project, Porras-Kim worked closely with the museum to address gaps in its cataloging systems, proposing new database fields that expand how cultural artifacts are registered, conserved, and displayed. By introducing methods that go beyond traditional frameworks, her intervention allows for a richer and more multifaceted understanding of these objects, opening up possibilities for alternative narratives about their historical significance and ongoing functions.

Porras-Kim’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates meticulous research, drawing, and collaboration with museum professionals to question how institutions shape the stories of the objects they preserve. The film delves into her creative process, highlighting her ability to bridge art, history, and technology to rethink how museums define and display cultural heritage. Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields explores the evolving roles of objects within collections ultimately demonstrating how cultural artifacts can be understood in more inclusive and dynamic ways.

Watch the full film on Hyundai Artlab

Eleanor Antin Presents "Time's Arrow" @ LACMA In Los Angeles

Eleanor Antin (b. 1935) is one of the most important artists of her generation and a pioneer of performance and conceptual art in Southern California. In 1972, she challenged definitions of sculpture, self-portraiture, photographic documentation, and performance with CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture. Consisting of 148 black-and-white photographs, CARVING shows the transformation of Antin’s body as she lost 10 pounds over 37 days. Eleanor Antin: Time's Arrow brings together both CARVING series, a new self-portrait, and a related serial work from the 1970s, provoking reflection on discipline, vulnerability, and the passage of time. Time's Arrow is on view through July 28 at Los Angeles County Museum of Art 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 @ LACMA

The late 20th century was a transformational period for graphic design. Questioning the increasingly rigid rules of modernism, designers pressed for greater autonomy in their work. At the same time, dizzying advances in technology upended existing design and production processes. Far from the established New York design world, California became a haven for avant-garde designers, a hub of innovation in both discourse and practice.

This installation explores how the intense ideological debates and technological changes were manifest in posters and publications. It features the work of many influential designers including Emigre, Inc., Ed Fella, April Greiman, Rebeca Méndez, Deborah Sussman, and Lorraine Wild. West Of Modernism: California Graphic Design 1975-1995 is on view through April 21, 2019 at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Stanley Kubrick Retrospective at the LACMA

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On view now at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an exhibition featuring legendary film auteur Stanley Kubrick and his oeuvre as the focus of his first retrospective in the context of an art museum, which reevaluates how we define the artist in the 21st century, and simultaneously expands upon LACMA’s commitment to exploring the intersection of art and film. On view until June 30, 2013 at LACMA. photograph by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

Rodarte: Fra Angelico Collection

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RODARTE: Fra Angelico Collection, on view starting tomorrow at the LACMA's Italian Renaissance gallery, features a group of extraordinary gowns by Kate and Laura Mulleavy. The collection is inspired by Italian art, specifically the Renaissance frescoes in the monastery of San Marco by Fra Angelico in Florence, Italy, as well as the Baroque sculpture, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) in Rome. Rodarte’s signature dressmaking techniques and sculptural details can be seen in each of the gowns. Silk fabrics (including chiffon, georgette, lamé, organza, satin, taffeta, and tulle) are draped and manipulated to give form, texture, and tonal variety to the color palette inspired by the frescoes. The gowns are customized utilizing a variety of materials such as feathers, swarovski elements, sequins, and custom-made silk flowers. Hand-forged gold metallic accessories such as a headpiece, breastplate, and belts dramatically complete the look of several key gowns. The Fra Angelico collection will enter LACMA’s Costume and Textiles Department, which houses over twenty-five thousand objects, representing more than one hundred cultures and two thousand years of human creativity in the textile arts.

Elite of the Obscure

Harry Gamboa, Jr, Cruel, 1975. Super-8 film. Showing Willie Herrón III

This September, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, the first retrospective to present the wide-ranging work of the Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco. Geographically and culturally segregated from the still-nascent Los Angeles contemporary art scene and aesthetically at odds with the emerging Chicano art movement, Asco members united to explore and exploit the unlimited media of the conceptual. Creating art by any means necessary — often using their bodies and guerilla tactics—Asco merged activism and performance and, in doing so, pushed the boundaries of what Chicano art might encompass. Asco: Elite of the Obscure includes nearly 150 artworks, featuring video, sculpture, painting, performance ephemera and documentation, collage, correspondence art, photography (including their signature No Movies, or invented film stills), and a series of works commissioned on occasion of the exhibition. Asco: Elite of the Obscure  is on view at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art September 4 to December 4.