First thing’s first: Happy Art Museum Day! LACMA, along with 100 other museums around the country, is offering free admission all day today. Come down and check out Chris Burden’s Metropolis II, or see exhibitions such as Robert Adams, Daido Moriyama, or Children of the Plumed Serpent.
This weekend is also your last chance to see Maria Nordman FILMROOM: SMOKE, 1967–Present, on view in the Art of the Americas Building. FILMROOM: SMOKE is one of Nordman’s earliest pieces; the single-room, two-channel video documents the same scene from two positions—a fixed tripod and a hand-held camera, moving in concert with the breath of the actors and the ocean behind them. Outisde of the exhibition you’ll find a new sculpture Nordman created just for this exhibition, YANG-NA 2011–Present—a frame scaled to the same size as the Filmroom, through which you can become the actor yourself.
Maria Nordman, Filmroom: Smoke, 1967–Present. Photo: Courtesy of the Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal
Stay at LACMA into the evening and catch bassist Henry “Skipper” Franklin performing for Jazz at LACMA, right in front of Chris Burden’s Urban Light. Over in the Bing Theater, tonight is the start of our latest film series, The Sun Sets in the West: Mid-Century California Noir. Get here early to see the sunny objects in our California Design exhibition, then see the shadows fall in ten noir thrillers set in the Golden State, presented this weekend and next. Friday night we present two from the 1950s: Kiss Me Deadly and The Crimson Kimono (the latter directed by the legendary Samuel Fuller). On Saturday night we screen three in a row: Blake Edwards’s Experiment in Terror, the Burt Lancaster vehicle Criss Cross, and the 1951 remake of Fritz Lang’s M.
We’ve got two great talks happening this weekend too. On Saturday afternoon, LACMA curators Austen Bailly and Franklin Sirmans introduce a talk about African American art between collectors Aryn Drake-Lee and Jesse Williams and scholar Dr. Halima Taha, author of Collecting African American Art.
On Sunday, artist Lawrence Weiner will join LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan and assistant curator Jarrett Gregory in conversation about contemporary aesthetics. Stick around to tour the bevy of new installations on view now, and then head to the Bing Theater for our free Sundays Live concert featuring Young Musicians Foundation Chamber Ensembles.
Textile Panel (Mola), Panama, San Blas, Kuna people, last quarter of 20th century, gift of Lindy and Ellen Narver in memory of Grace Narver, from the installation Stitching Worlds: Mola Art of the Kuna
Finally, to cap off a busy weekend, we're screening Wes Anderson's latest, Moonrise Kingdom, Sunday night at 8:30 pm in the Bing Theater. Though the film is sold out, there will be a standby line forming at the Hammer Building Ticket Office at 6 pm.
Scott Tennent