L.A. Rising: SoCal Artists Before 1980
The California/International Arts Foundation’s New Encyclopedia
Written and edited by Lyn Kienholz
Overseen by Joan Weinstein, Associate Director, Getty Foundation
ISBN-10: 0917571134
ISBN-13: 978-0917571138
Los Angeles, CA
January 1, 2010
Excerpts taken from an article written by J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times:
In Los Angeles, Lyn Kienholz is known within the art world as a hostess extraordinaire. Since 1974, the year after her divorce from the Pop sculptor Ed Kienholz, she has entertained and connected countless California painters, sculptors, writers, politicians, and museum curators at her home in the Hollywood Hills. Yet her target audience is often the world beyond Los Angeles, where she felt the work of California artists was underappreciated. Working through the California/ International Arts Foundation, which she set up in 1981, she has originated 13 shows of California artists and architects that have toured internationally, compiled dozens of artist interviews at her two Web sites, and helped organize and finance dozens of films, books, and shows.
Now, in her latest and perhaps most ambitious project, The California / International Arts Foundation’s New Encyclopedia L.A. Rising: So Cal Artists Before 1980 she has written Southern California into international art history. This publication documents more than 600 artists who lived, worked and showed there between 1940 and 1980 as well as the salient galleries, art schools, exhibitions and art-related events of the period. “There’s so much written about L.A. and art, but it doesn’t give the full story,” Ms. Kienholz said in a telephone interview from her home office. “You need a place where you can go to one document and find everything.”
The book will include virtually every artist who ever exhibited professionally in a museum, gallery or public space in Southern California, from San Diego to Santa Barbara and as far east as Claremont, between Jan. 1, 1940, and Dec. 31, 1979. Along with the usual suspects — John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, Sam Francis and Robert Irwin — there are also figures one might not typically associate with the area, like the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was active in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1953, and the sculptor David Hammons, who lived there between 1963 and 1974.
Southern California Art? Look It Up, The New York Times, by Carol Kino, December 16, 2007