‘VITALITY AND VERVE III’ ON VIEW NOW AT THE LONG BEACH MUSEUM OF ART

Curated by Thinkspace as part of POW! WOW! Long Beach

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 presents 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.

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.