Summer in Full Swing! August Newsletter

Summer in Full Swing! August Newsletter Greetings! Summer in Southern California is finally in full swing; school is out, the kids are home, families are planning vacations and art and fun and color abound! Regardless of which new memories your family is making right now, they are all precious. Preserve and display them with care and great design by using the most trusted experts in the LA Metro area. Stop by one of our stores this week to have one of our Art and Design experts help you to turn those precious memories that will only come once into lasting and lovely art that will bring joy for decades. Visit our website at www.customframestore.com for locations and contact information! Comic-Con 2010 Preserve Your Collectibles Did you attend this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego? What are you waiting for then? Bring that signed lithograph, that special sketch and all the rest of your memorabilia, mementos and collectibles in to your local FrameStore and preserve and protect them while also getting SoCal's best designs. Your memories and art deserve nothing less than the best, so don't trust anyone to frame or shadowbox your Comic-Con treasures except the experts! With over 35 years of museum-quality experience, we are the place to go for art people in the know. SoCal Art Happenings - LA Louver: Tony Berlant July 7 - August 28, 2010 About L.A. Louver is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the Los Angeles-based artist, Tony Berlant. In this new series, Berlant uses a broad spectrum of materials to create complex, richly colored works inspired by the vineyards and gardens of Château La Coste, located outside Aix-en-Provence, France. My new work is about pacing and focused selection, both visually and psychologically. - Tony Berlant In Fall 2009, Berlant visited Château La Coste to assist in siting three large-scale architectural sculptures that he created in the mid-1960s, and which will be permanently exhibited in individual glass structures designed by Frank O. Gehry. The sculptures will be part of an open-air installation on the château's grounds, and joined by sculpture from internationally renowned artists, including Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra and James Turrell. The sculpture installation is just one element of an expansive new development project that includes an art center and music pavilion, and is overseen by architect Tadao Ando, with new buildings by Sir Norman Foster, Jean Nouvel and Renzo Piano, in addition to Gehry. Berlant did not visit Provence with the intention of creating work based on the landscape. However, he has held a long fascination for this area, where Neanderthals once lived, and which was the home and source of inspiration of Paul Cézanne. Following a visit to Cézanne's studio, Berlant and his wife, Helen Mendez Berlant, spent several hours exploring the vineyards and forest surrounding the château. During this time, they shot many photographs that Berlant hoped would assist in determining, with Gehry, a site for his sculptures. It was only after his return to Los Angeles that Berlant fully understood the richness of the photographic material, and its potential to help him convey worlds that existed beyond outward appearances. In the course of developing this new series, Berlant also chose to evolve his technique: combining altered photographs, which he prints onto wood panel, with metal collage and painting. Berlant has used photography since the early 1960s, and has employed it in several ways: either as dominant printed imagery (such as in the series of works created in the early 1990s, including New York, No, 89, 1992 and L.A.X. No. 59, 1992), or in the manner of a drawing, to provide a framework over which he applies tin. In these new works, Berlant gives increased attention to his original photography and its manipulation. Recent printing techniques have also allowed him to apply the photographic images directly onto sanded and gessoed to cover with found and fabricated tin that itself bears preexisting images. Attached to the surface with steel brads, the metal collage has the effect of either bringing background passages. Berlant paints the sides of the panel to mirror the landscape image, and its effect is to extend the picture plane. He also creates this Rorschach effect within the "body" of the work, which serves to free the viewer's mind to conjure deep-seated imagery. In concert, these materials generate dimension and drama: the panels become three-dimensional, both visually and physically, and all elements merge into one animated vision. Out of the landscapes Berlant conjures psychological territories, which he has described as "mindscapes." As such, Berlant acknowledges landscape as a metaphor for the unconscious, and with that, follows in the tradition of artists such as Courbet and Monet, as well as Cézanne. Tony Berlant was born in New York in 1941, and moved to Los Angeles when he was a young boy. He remained in Los Angeles to study at the University of California Los Angeles, where he earned both a MA and MFA, and went on to teach in the university's art department. In 1964, LACMA awarded Berlant the New Talent Purchase Grant. From this time onwards, he has exhibited widely throughout the United States. The Getty: Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since the Sixties June 29 - Novemver 14, 2010 About In the decades following World War II, an independently minded and critically engaged form of photography began to gather momentum. Its practitioners have combined their skills as artists and reporters, creating extended photographic essays that delve deeply into topics of social concern and present distinct personal visions of the world. Engaged Observers looks in depth at projects by a selection of the most vital photographers who have contributed to the development of this approach. Passionately committed to their subjects, they have authored evocative bodies of work that are often published extensively as books and transcend the realm of traditional photojournalism. Vietnam, Philip Jones Griffiths, 1967 © The Philip Jones Griffiths Foundation / Magnum Photos Philip Jones Griffiths Philip Jones Griffiths described the scene he photographed in this image: "Limits of friendship. A Marine introduces a peasant girl to king-sized filter-tips. Of all the U.S. forces in Vietnam, it was the Marines that approached 'Civic Action' with gusto. From their barrage of handouts, one discovers that, in the month of January 1967 alone, they gave away to the Vietnamese 101,535 pounds of food, 4,810 pounds of soap, 14,662 books and magazines, 106 pounds of candy, 1,215 toys, and 1 midwifery kit. In the same month they gave the Vietnamese 530 free haircuts." Vietnam Inc., Philip Jones Griffiths' 1971 critical account of America's armed intervention in Southeast Asia, is one of the most detailed photographic stories of a war published by a single photographer. The project's exploration of the war's failures and its focus on civilians made it a particularly engaging and ambitious work of advocacy journalism. Griffiths put the conflict in the context of Vietnam's history and culture, showing how Capitalist values that America promoted in its efforts to contain the spread of Communism were out of sync with Vietnam's communal and agrarian way of life. New Orleans, Leonard Freed, 1965 © Leonard Freed / Magnum Photos Leonard Freed While in Germany in 1962, Leonard Freed saw a black American soldier guarding the divide between East and West as the Berlin Wall was being erected. He was haunted by the idea of a man standing in defense of a country in which his own rights were in question. The experience ignited Freed's interest in the American civil rights movement. In June 1963 he embarked on a multiyear documentary project, published in about 1968 as Black in White America, which would become the signature work of his career. The series is a visual diary with a moralizing purpose. Freed quickly found that his interests lay in exploring the diverse, everyday lives of a community that had been marginalized for so long. Penetrating the fabric of daily existence, his work portrays the common humanity of a people persevering in unjust circumstances. This empathetic approach sought not to stimulate outrage but to foster understanding and bridge cultural divides as a way of transcending racial antipathy. Industrial Waste from the Chisso Chemical Company, W. Eugene Smith, 1972 Collection of H. Christopher Luce. Courtesy of Robert Mann Gallery. Minamata photographs by W. Eugene Smith & Aileen M. Smith - © Aileen Smith W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith In 1971 W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith were told of a controversy over industrial pollution in the Japanese fishing village of Minamata. Beginning in the 1950s, thousands of people were severely affected by mercury poisoning, brought about by eating fish contaminated with chemical waste dumped in the bay by the Chisso Corporation. The ailment, which became known as Minamata Disease, caused irreversible brain damage, paralysis, and convulsions. The couple set out to document the progress of a lawsuit against the company, recording the course of the trial through the court's ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in 1973. Their essay relates the importance of the sea and fishing to the town's culture, reports on the company's drainage pipes into the sea, chronicles lives transformed by the disease, and depicts the demonstrations that took place in opposition to Chisso. The work resulted in numerous magazine publications, exhibitions, and a book, Minamata, published in 1975. The project gained traction within the political atmosphere of the 1970s, when the environmental movement was taking off. First day of popular insurrection, August 26, 1978, Matagalpa, Nicaragua, Susan Meiselas, negative, August 26, 1978; print, 1980s © Susan Meiselas / Magnum Photos Susan Meiselas In 1978 Susan Meiselas traveled to Nicaragua where she witnessed the eruption of a full-scale revolution against the country's repressive, hard-line government.

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