at the Long Beach Museum of Art‘Art After Dark’ Opening Reception: Friday, June 29, 2018
2300 East Ocean Boulevard
Long Beach, CA. 90803Friday, June 29 opening night gala tickets available soon:
www.lbma.orgClick HERE to join the Facebook event.
Featuring ephemeral murals and installations from:
Bordalo II, CASE, Evoca1, Sergio Garcia, Herakut, Hush,
Jaune, Leon Keer, Koz Dos, Spenser Little, Fintan Magee,
Dennis McNett, Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, RISK, SEEN,
Amy Sol, Super A, Juan Travieso, Dan Witz and Lauren YS
The Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA) presents Vitality and Verve III, an exhibition dedicated to showcasing new works by artists of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Presented in curatorial collaboration with Los Angeles’ Thinkspace Projects and the support of POW! WOW! Long Beach, the exhibition is the third iteration in the collaborative series which has secured record-breaking public attendance since 2015.
Vitality and Verve III will present a relevant cross-section of some of the most exciting artists working under the New Contemporary handle today and will feature site-specific works by these 21 individuals brought together in the same space for the first time. Their impermanent installations are tangentially activated, transforming the ground floor and Ocean View gallery of the LBMA into an immersive ephemeral playground for the senses.
The exhibition will feature new, site-specific works by internationally renowned artists, Bordalo II, CASE, Evoca1, Sergio Garcia, Herakut, Hush, Jaune, Leon Keer, Koz Dos, Spenser Little, Fintan Magee, Dennis McNett, Drew Merritt, Michael Reeder, RISK, SEEN, Amy Sol, Super A, Juan Travieso, Dan Witz and Lauren YS. Each will contribute a unique piece and vantage point, working across a variety of media.
The New Contemporary Art Movement is known for its diversity; several styles, media, contexts, and exhibition platforms fall within its expansive cast, including public art interventions and site-specific urban murals. This breadth has long been embraced as a subversive impulse vis-a-vis the more exclusionary and contained tenets of contemporary art production, particularly those minted in academe and aspiring to the vetted legitimacy of the ‘white cube.’ The movement’s vested interest in incorporating the social and representational, counter to its often systemic disavowal, has allowed it to thrive outside of institutional support, though this exclusionary paradigm is rapidly shifting.
Largely self-supported and community-driven since the 90’s, many of the movement’s artists are self-taught or have come into their own through multi-disciplinary backgrounds. Gaining international recognition over the past decade, the movement is now widely recognized as both the largest and longest running organized art movement in history, boasting veterans and established artists as well as emergent ones. The evocative potential of representation inspires these artists to draw from popular and countercultural sources like music, illustration, comics, graffiti, design, punk, tattoo culture, hip-hop, skate culture, etc., looking to the outside world rather than to the self-referential gestures that have typified the traditional exclusions of contemporary art.
Long Beach Museum of Art hours and admission:
Thursday: 11AM to 8PM
Friday – Sunday: 11AM to 5PM
$7 adult admission / $6 seniors (over age 62) and students with Valid I.D.
Free for museum members and children under 12
**FREE ADMISSION after 3PM on Thursdays and ALL DAY on Fridays**
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About the LBMA:
The Long Beach Museum of Art (LBMA) was founded in 1950 as a municipal art center for the city of Long Beach. Since its inception, the Museum has been housed in the historic 1911 Elizabeth Milbank Anderson House. In 1957, the Anderson House was designated as the Long Beach Museum of Art, at which time the Museum began acquiring a permanent collection.
In 1977, the Museum was honored with accreditation by the American Association of Museums, which it has since maintained. Since 1986, the Long Beach Museum of Art Foundation has managed the Museum, governed by a Board of Trustees. In 2000, the Museum completed a restoration of the historic residence and constructed a new two-story exhibition pavilion (in 2015 the pavilion was renamed the Hartman Pavilion). Since then, the Museum has offered diverse and compelling exhibitions, which has resulted in increased visitors and program attendance.
The Museum’s permanent collection is diverse with more than 3,200 works encompassing 300 years of American and European art in all media. Highlights from the collection include furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, ceramics by Beatrice Wood, and sculptures by Claire Falkenstein, George Rickney and Peter Voulokos; Early 20th Century European Modernist paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, Alexej Jawlensky and others from the Milton Wichner Collection; and contemporary artists such as James Jean, Sherrie Wolf, and Sandow Birk whose paintings have recently been added to the collection.
About POW! WOW! Long Beach:
POW! – It’s the impact that art has on a person.
WOW! – It’s the reaction that art has on a viewer.
Together they form POW! WOW!, which is a Native American term that describes a gathering that celebrates culture, music and art.
Centered around a week-long event in Hawaii, POW! WOW! has grown into a global network of artists and organizes gallery shows, lecture series, schools for art and music, creative community spaces, concerts, and live art installations across the globe. The central event takes place during Valentine’s Day week in February in the Kaka’ako district of Honolulu, and brings over a hundred international and local artist together to create murals and other forms of art. The festival is expanding to cities and countries such as Long Beach, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, Jamaica, Washington D.C., Guam, New Zealand, Germany and many more.
About Thinkspace:
Thinkspace was founded in 2005; now in LA’s Culver City Arts District, the gallery has garnered an international reputation as one of the most active and productive exponents of the New Contemporary Art Movement. Maintaining its founding commitment to the promotion and support of its artists, Thinkspace has steadily expanded its roster and diversified its projects, creating collaborative and institutional opportunities all over the world. Founded in the spirit of forging recognition for young, emerging, and lesser-known talents, the gallery is now home to artists from all over the world, ranging from the emerging, mid-career, and established.
The New Contemporary Art Movement, not unlike its earlier 20th Century counterparts like Surrealism, Dada, or Fauvism, ultimately materialized in search of new forms, content, and expressions that cited rather than disavowed the individual and the social. The earliest incarnations of the Movement, refusing the paradigmatic disinterest of “Art” as an inaccessible garrison of ‘high culture’, championed figuration, surrealism, representation, pop culture, and the subcultural. By incorporating the ‘lowbrow,’ accessible, and even profane, an exciting and irreverent art movement grew in defiance of the mandated renunciations of “high” art. Emerging on the West Coast in the 90’s partly as a response to the rabid ‘conceptual-turn’ then championed on the East Coasts, the Movement steadily created its own platforms, publications, and spaces for the dissemination of its imagery and ideas.
Though the New Contemporary Art Movement has remained largely unacknowledged by the vetted institutions of the fine art world and its arbiters of ‘high culture,’ the future promises a shift. The Movement’s formative aversion to the establishment is also waning in the wake of its increased visibility, institutional presence, and widespread popularity.
Thinkspace has sought to champion and promote the unique breadth of the Movement, creating new opportunities for the presentation of its artists and work. Though still very much invested in the elevation and exposure of its emerging talents, the gallery, now in its 13th year, has come into its own with a roster that reflects this maturity. An active advocate for what is now one of the longest extant organized art movement’s in history, Thinkspace is an established voice for its continued growth and evolution.
The gallery has in recent years expanded its projects beyond Los Angeles, exhibiting with partner galleries and organizations in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Honolulu among many others, participating in International Art Fairs, and curating New Contemporary content for Museums. Committed to the vision, risk, and exceptional gifts of its artists, the gallery is first and foremost a family. From the streets to the museums, and from the “margins” to the white cube, Thinkspace is re-envisioning what it means to be “institutional.”
