Les and Karen Weinstein of Los Angeles have recently given a gift of 11 mostly large-scale drawings and paintings to the Long Beach Museum of Art. This significant gift includes works by nationally recognized contemporary artists Jeanette Pasin Sloan, Kent Twitchell, Alison Saar and D. J. Hall. The donated works complement the Museum’s permanent collection of works by women artists, emerging artists, artists of color, and Southern California artists.
Jeannette Pasin Sloan is well regarded for her still-life canvases. Her work is a tour de force of complex surfaces reflected off many ordinary objects. While often referred to as a photo-realist, the subjects of her high-style material fetishes are not merely exercises in virtuosity, but serious considerations of the beauty around us. Her Self Portrait from 1989, which the Weinsteins gave to LBMA includes a view of the artist reflected in a highly polished silver pitcher and cup.
Kent Twitchell is perhaps most widely known for his photo-realist, large-scale portrait murals long admired and enjoyed in the Los Angeles cityscape. The Weinsteins have given the museum a group of four large-scale drawings of artists Emerson Woelffer, Betye Saar, Matsumi Kanemitsu, and Gary Lloyd that was initially exhibited in 1980 as part of the City of Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery exhibition In a Major and a Minor Scale. In addition to the four drawings, the Weinsteins also contributed a small Twitchell drawing, Artist Bound (Linda), 1980, and two larger-than-life paintings from 1982 of the two donors themselves.
Alison Saar is well known for her mixed-media assemblage sculpture that eloquently transforms found objects into moving testaments of multi-cultural perspectives. The Weinsteins’ donation of Contra La Puerta embodies Saar’s signature use of old ceiling tin. Saar made the work while living in New York, where she often worked with castoffs. For Saar, old materials are important because they have “memory” and a life history.
The Weinsteins’ gift included two rare, early D.J. Hall double portraits that include self-portraits. Both paintings include Hall’s signature lush, bright, Southern California landscapes, and both paintings will be included in the 35-year retrospective of Hall’s work at the Palm Springs Art Museum in mid-2008.
Several of the donated works are on view now at the Long Beach Museum of Art as part of the current exhibition, Picturing Identity; Selections from the Permanent Collection and the Gail Oxford Collection through February 10, 2008: Alison Saar’s Contra la Puerta, a drawing of Alison’s mother, Betye Saar by Kent Twitchell, along with Twitchell’s two portraits of Les and Karen Weinstein and Like Mother, Like Daughter by DJ Hall.
For more information, call (562) 439-2119 or visit www.lbma.org.
