FROM THE VALLEY TO VESUVIUS

Tuesday afternoon I headed over the hill to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) with Jonathan to check out Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples. As a member of LACMA, I was able to get a free pair of tickets to the exhibition.

After seeing the exhibit I gotta say those Romans were a very sexy bunch. There's a lot of flesh on exhibit, albeit in marble and bronze. One very intriguing sculpture even includes a representation of a hermaphrodite! Very little is locked away behind glass, so you get a very up close look at most of the exquisite artifacts.

Jon and I have a LONG history of going to LACMA together since high school!!! So it's always really nice to return there together to check out art and stroll familiar grounds. But this time I was able to actually introduce Jon to the new BCAM side, including Urban Light which he's never seen.

Here are some shots from the day:

Me & Jon in front of a LACMA building decorated in conjunction with the exhibit "Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea" at BCAM.

I thought the colorful ribbons looked like Thera-Bands gone wild and it really spruced up an otherwise drab building. Too bad it's just a temporary installation.

Me pole hugging Chris Burden's Urban Light sculptural installation featuring 202 restored cast iron antique street lamps dating from Los Angeles in the 1920's and 1930's.


Jon's always been a great model!


Jon enjoying HappyHappy

HappyHappy is Korean artist Choi Jeong-Hwa’s installation created for Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea (June 28–September 20, 2009) at LACMA. It's made up of floor-to-ceiling strands of thousands of household containers bought from local 99¢ stores. Walking through this installation, I felt like a big kid romping in one of those inflatable bounce houses. It's a lot of fun, very tactile, very colorful, and the way the outside natural light plays against and through the plastic is visually dynamic.

Jon having fun in the sculpture garden


More of the "Thera-Bands"




Info about Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples from LACMA's website:

"Pompeii and the Roman Villa focuses on the breadth and richness of cultural and artistic life in this region. The exhibition, organized by the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., includes works of art from the imperial villa at Oplontis and from aristocratic villas such as the Villa San Marco at Stabiae and the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum, as well as works from the opulent houses of the urban elite in Pompeii, whose very name conjures up ancient Rome and other towns along the bay of Naples. The objects proposed for this exhibition are a carefully selected group of approximately one hundred-twenty works of sculpture, painting, mosaic, and luxury arts, some of them long-familiar works, others generally unknown to the public. Recent discoveries from around the Bay of Naples that have never before been exhibited in the United States will complement more familiar finds from earlier excavations. In particular, the exhibition focuses on the influence of Classical Greek culture around the Bay of Naples, where wealthy Romans displayed impressive art collections in sumptuous homes."

Incidentally, LACMA has a very nice blog called UNFRAMED.