The Collectible Moment: Photographs In The Norton Simon Museum

The Norton Simon Museum presents The Collectible Moment, a first-ever survey of the Museum's photography collection, which was assembled by its predecessor institution the Pasadena Art Museum.

Featuring 161 photographs by 102 artists along with ephemera from the Museum's archives, The Collectible Moment is the largest and most extensive photography exhibition in the Museum's history. The exhibition remains on view through February 26, 2007. A major publication and a series of public programs will accompany the exhibition.

The Collection

During the 1960s and early 1970s the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM) earned an international reputation for organizing and presenting critically acclaimed exhibitions featuring the work of established and emerging artists. Landmark exhibitions included the first retrospectives of Robert Motherwell (1961), Marcel Duchamp (1963), and Andy Warhol (1971). In 1969, with the opening of its new building on Colorado Boulevard at Orange Grove, PAM distinguished itself again by establishing a photography department that advocated the collecting and exhibiting of contemporary work rather than an exclusively historical or encyclopedic collection. In so doing, PAM stood in the vanguard of a small but determined movement to validate photography as a major art form, a medium engaged with issues that were central to contemporary art.

To oversee this effort, PAM hired Fred R. Parker as coordinator of exhibitions and acting curator of prints, drawings, and photography. Over the next five years (1969-1974), PAM became the institutional venue for photography in Los Angeles. Audiences were exposed to dozens of photography exhibitions, divided between shows organized by the Museum and traveling exhibitions from institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and the Friends of Photography in Carmel, California.

Parker worked aggressively to increase the Museum's photography holdings, which comprised only forty-eight works in 1969. From Parker's arrival in the summer of that year until 1974, when Norton Simon and a reorganized Board of Trustees assumed stewardship of the institution, the collection grew to more than 500 prints. Rather than defining the medium of photography narrowly or limiting his acquisitions to canonical works by established photographers, Parker built a collection that reflects how artists were changing and expanding the medium in the late 1960s and early 1970s: by incorporating techniques such as silkscreen, collage, and hand-painting into their work; appropriating unconventional papers or printing on fabric and other materials; and experimenting with size.

Most of the prints in the collection were donated by the artists themselves, or were gifts made by a great patron and advocate of the medium, Shirley C. Burden. Such support was timely given the museum's embrace of this medium at the beginning of the "collectible moment" for photography.

The Exhibition

Organized by Norton Simon Museum Curator Gloria Williams Sander, The Collectible Moment presents 161 prints culled from the Museum's collection. Among those whose work is featured in the exhibition are Ansel Adams, Lewis Baltz, Thomas Barrow, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Imogen Cunningham, Darryl Curran, Judy Dater, Robert Fichter, Robbert Flick, Oliver Gagliani, Betty Hahn, Robert Heinecken, Anthony Hernandez, Kenneth Josephson, Nathan Lyons, Jerry McMillan, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Duane Michals, Barbara Morgan, Leland Rice, Arthur Siegel, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Edmund Teske, Jerry Uelsmann, Todd Walker, Edward Weston, Minor White, and Don Worth.

The installation will occupy 5,000 square-feet and follow a loose chronological flow with sections that explore non-silver and mixed media processes and monographic concentrations. In addition, the installation includes three complete photography portfolios and a selection of ephemera from the Museum's archives (letters, brochures, informal photographs) intended to introduce audiences to the photography exhibitions organized by PAM.

Catalogue

Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated, 344-page catalogue of the collection. An essay by Therese Mulligan, Director, School of Photographic Arts and Sciences Gallery, Rochester Institute of Technology, examines the scope and significance of this little-known collection made up of modernist and nascent post-modernist holdings. Gloria Williams Sander, Curator of the Norton Simon Museum, examines the history of the department in the context of photography's breakthrough into the contemporary art world and with attention to the activities of artists in Los Angeles in particular.

First person recollections by major participants in the world of photography include William Wilson, former Los Angeles Times art critic, Peter Bunnell, Curator Emeritus of Photography at MOMA and Emeritus Chair of the Art History Department, Princeton University, the late Robert Sobieszek, Curator of Photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Fred Parker, former Curator of Photography, Pasadena Art Museum, and artists including Thomas Barrow, Darryl Curran, Judy Dater, Robert Fichter, Leland Rice, and Charles Traub. The book is published and distributed by Yale University Press and will be available for sale in the Norton Simon Museum Store.

Public Programs

As a complement to the exhibition and publication, the Museum is organizing a series of free public programs, including lectures, exhibition walkthroughs, adult education courses, and activities for children and their families.

Related Exhibitions

Concurrent to The Collectible Moment, the Pasadena Museum of California Art presents Advancing The Moment, an exhibition featuring current works by 12 of the artists in the Norton Simon Museum photography collection. Artists in that show include Donald Blumberg, Darryl Curran, Judy Dater, Robbert Flick, Ingeborg Gerdes, Anthony Hernandez, Ellen Land-Weber, Gregory Allen MacGregor, Jerry McMillan, John Spence Weir and Henry Wessel, Jr. Advancing The Moment runs October 14, 2006, through January 21, 2007.

Also, the Hammer Museum presents A Fine Experiment: A Tribute to Robert Heinecken (September 12 - December 31, 2006). Heinecken (1931-2006), who is a featured artist in The Collectible Moment, formed the department of photography at UCLA, where he had the foresight to build a resourceful photography collection for his students at the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts. The Hammer's exhibition celebrates Heinecken and his collection of works by such artist as Walker Evans, Imogen Cunningham, Gary Winogrand, and Heinecken himself, and many of his students.

By www.nortonsimon.org