CAA News Today

Pacific Standard Time, the massive project on art in southern California that concluded in June, is the topic of a special issue of Art Journal that has just been published. An unprecedented collaboration of some sixty southern Californian cultural institutions brought together by the Getty, the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions and events offered a near-encyclopedic view of the work artists created in the region from 1945 to 1980.

At the center of the journal’s coverage is a conversation with Andrew Perchuk, deputy director of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), and Thomas Crow, former director of the GRI and now a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University; they speak with the art historian Howard Singerman, reviews editor of Art Journal.

The issue features a commissioned artist’s project by Allen Ruppersberg, PST: Before and After, which appears on the covers of the issue and every interior page. In her introduction to the issue, the editor-in-chief Katy Siegel notes that Ruppersberg “is often seen as the classic Los Angeles artist.” His project draws on press treatment of art in southern California during the years covered by Pacific Standard Time.

In addition, many of the Pacific Standard Time exhibitions are reviewed or discussed in extended essays by historians, curators, and artists: Connie Butler, Jan Tumlir, Lucia Sanromán, Malik Gaines, Michael Ned Holte, and Ken Gonzales-Day. An essay by Lucy Bradnock considers the Angeleno curator Walter Hopps, and Maria Elena Buszek interviews the artists Suzanne Lacy and Andrea Bowers about their joint projects.

This special issue of Art Journal is the leading edge of the flood of scholarship on postwar art in southern California that Pacific Standard Time is expected to engender.