LACMA's new Resnick Exhibition Pavilion
On Oct. 2, 2010, the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) gave art lovers four new reasons to visit its evolving campus. First, you can marvel at the spectacular new Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano. Once inside, you’ll find three new exhibitions displaying European sculpture, paintings and textiles, as well as monumental ancient Mexican figureheads.
In a little more than 10 years, LA has cut the red ribbon on a collection of impressive buildings by Piano and other Pritzker Prize-winning architects, including Richard Meier (The Getty Center), Rafael Moneo (Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angles), Thom Mayne (Caltrans District 7 Headquarters) and Frank Gehry (Walt Disney Concert Hall).
All of these buildings are known for groundbreaking design, majestic functionality, and above all, being beautiful and interesting to look at. These qualities are definitely true of the Resnick Exhibition Pavilion, which is bright, open and airy — banishing the notion that art museums must be dark and staid institutions. Piano also designed LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in 2008. Architecturally, the pavilion is the sibling of BCAM, with the same travertine-marble exterior and red accents, as well as a saw-tooth roof designed to let in a flood of northern light. The newer building also has two full walls of windows, which make its exhibition space even more luminous.
Both buildings are part of LACMA’s initiative to upgrade its massive 20-acre LA campus. It’s the Western U.S.’s largest art museum, and the pavilion will allow it to display more of its 100,000-object collection and host more traveling exhibitions. The space’s inaugural exhibitions are designed to show the breadth of the museum’s geographically and historically diverse holdings.
“Eye for the Sensual: Selections from the Resnick Collection” focuses on works by renowned European painters and sculptors of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including Rubens, Boucher, Guardi and Lehman. The pieces are pulled from the collection of the building’s namesakes, philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick.
Fashion lovers and history buffs will delight in the details of “Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700–1915.” LACMA’s collection of men’s, women’s and children’s clothing offers a peek at the textiles, construction techniques and decorative embellishments of outfits worn by European courtiers, French Revolution sympathizers and more.
Finally, “Olmec: Masterworks of Ancient Mexico” shows off the sheer scale of the pavilion by displaying monumental, 20-ton basalt likenesses of ancient Olmec rulers, accompanied by small-scale intricate jadeite sculptures produced by Mexico’s earliest civilization. This will be the first West Coast exhibition of these artworks.
Photos: (top): Photo by Alex Vertikoff ©2010 Museum Associates/LACMA; (left inset): Walter De Maria, The 2000 Sculpture, 1992, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; photo by Alex Vertikoff ©2010 Museum Associates/LACMA
