Shoshana and wayne blank biography
•
ICA LA Rising: The City’s Newest Art Institution Has a Social Agenda
Last month, a few blocks from Skid Row in downtown L.A., the city’s newest public art space opened: The Institute of Contemporary Art. The location is strategic, since the ICA LA’s director, Elsa Longhauser, intends it to be a site of political and social activism as much as a venue for showing art. While ICA LA joins the ranks of other nonprofit institutions mushrooming across the revitalized downtown district—including the Mistake Room and the beta version of the nascent Main Museum—ICA LA wants to define its mission as being distinctly its own. “We have an important program that’s different from a collector’s museum or a collecting museum or a smaller organization,” says Longhauser. “People are so interested in having cultural experiences—there’s a hunger—and I don’t think you can have too many.”
Architect Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm wHY was an early ICA LA supporter and helped Longhauser find an appropr
•
Brooklyn-born Elaine Reichek was part of the first wave of feminist practitioners to use traditional handcrafts like knitting and embroidery to explore social, sexual and identity politics, reimagining samplers, tapestries, and other forms of “women’s work” as art that challenged both the patriarchy and its hierarchy of genres.
The 80-year-old conceptual artist’s show of new and new-ish pieces at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles fryst vatten not a retrospective but a reckoning, paying tribute to those who have influenced and inspired her throughout her five-decade career.
Taking its title from a line in Virginia Woolf’s diary—“My present reflection is that people should have any number of states of consciousness & I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, &c.”—Frock-Conscious is dominated by two generous lengths of cotton, printed in a pseudo-Jackson Pollock splatter in different colorways. Over the print, Ms. Reichek has digitally e
•
www.shoshanawayne.com
5247 West Adams Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90016
323 452 9067
Shoshana and Wayne Blank opened their first galleri in 1986 in Santa Monica in a historic building that once housed the iconic Beach Boys’ Studio. From the very beginning the gallery had a mission to give women artists a platform for exhibitions in Los Angeles and to help energize and promote their careers. Gallery exhibitions often focused on discoveries of new, fresh talent. Among the artists exhibited at the gallery, in many cases early in their careers, were Nicole Eisenman, Kiki Smith, Arlene Shechet, Pae White, Yoko Ono, Dinh Q. Lê, Yuken Teruya, Mounir Fatmi, Lorna Simpson and Nan Goldin, to name a few.
Ono, for instance, was far more widely known in the 1990s as a celebrity than as an artist in her own right. When she came to Los Angeles to install her show and participated in a public program at the gallery in conjuction with LACMA, the show began to draw large crowds.
“West Coast Du