How Curators Used LinkedIn, Ebay, and Moxie to Get Forgotten Treasures Into Pacific Standard Time: L
Art specialists went to great lengths to track down works that had never before been shown
Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (PST) is a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles. Led by the Getty, this initiative is a collaborative effort from arts institutions across Southern California. The Hammer Museum's PST exhibition, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, gives visibility to the artistic practices of women artists working in Latin America and US-born women artists of Latino heritage between 1960 and 1985.
"A significant portion of the works on view at more than 70 participating cultural institutions across Southern California have never been published or shown in museums before—which means curators had to go to great lengths to find them. Call it extreme research.
Curators say that PST: LA/LA’s hefty grants and extended five-year planning process made it easier for them to pursue unlikely paths.
“It’s really about having a hunch, looking at something, and saying, ‘We need to follow this lead,’” says Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who co-organized “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985” at the Hammer, one of the initiative’s most ambitious exhibitions.
Every curator has his or her own stories of the winding roads they traveled to track down material. At LACMA, in addition to trawling eBay, scholars took to Facebook and LinkedIn. Social media allowed them to find relatives of artists and designers who had been lost to history.
For some curators, the research process involved taking a fine-tooth comb through art history to find worthy artists who had been overlooked, pushed to the margins, or not properly put into context by an earlier generation of historians.
“We were told so many times that these people were nobodies,” Farjado-Hill says of the more than 100 artists in the Hammer’s “Radical Women” exhibition."— Julia Halperin, Sep. 15, 2017
Read the full article at the Artnet website.