Tag Archives: Los Angeles Times

The overpowering and humbling beauty of UH-OH Frances Stark at the Hammer Museum

Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011. Digital video, color, sound. 100:00 min. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Image courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

Frances Stark, My Best Thing, 2011. Digital video, color, sound. 100:00 min. Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Purchase. Image courtesy of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

“’UH-OH’ is among the finest solo museum shows this year.” Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, November 12, 2015.

It is not often that an artist has both intrigued and intimidated me as much as Frances Stark (MFA 93). So it was with some trepidation that I set out to the Hammer Museum to see Stark’s mid-career retrospective, UH-OH: Frances Stark, 1991-2015, on view until January 24, 2016.  The exhibition brings together more than two decades of Stark’s poetic compositions and autobiographical reflections, featuring 125 works, including the artist’s early carbon drawings, intricate collages, and mixed-media paintings as well as her more recent videos.

Continue reading →

Art Center Alumni Reminisce About Mike Kelley in the “L.A. Times”

Last month, the Art Center community was stunned at the news that legendary artist Mike Kelley, who had taught in Art Center’s Graduate Art program from 1992—2007, had died.

At the time, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Chair of the Grad Art program at Art Center, said, “Recognized as an important artist almost from the very beginning of his career, Mike kept teaching as long as he could before the pressures of being very famous indeed made it simply impossible for him to come to school with any regularity at all. He was, both in general and as a colleague, a brilliant combination of passion regarding art and a sense of humor… He has left us devastated.”

While much of the news following Kelley’s death focused on his cultural impact on the international art world, Sunday’s L.A. Times featured Art Center alumni reminiscing about their former teacher, who was “generous, patient, sometimes harsh but above all, eager to engage and share with fellow creators.”

Art Center would like to acknowledge our alumni–all celebrated artists themselves–and thank them for taking the time to share their thoughts with the L.A. Times.

To read the article in its entirety, please click here.

From the Art Center Archives: Faculty critique work by Steve Roden GART '89. Pictured (L to R) circa 1989: Laurence Dreiband, Richard Hertz, Sabina Ott, Stephen Prina, Mike Kelley and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Image (c) Art Center College of Design/Steven A. Heller

UPDATE (3/15/12): Steve Roden, the student whose work was being critiqued in the above picture, recently blogged about seeing this photograph in the Los Angeles Times.