October 8, 2022, 5pm
Opening October 8 with free admission, the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA)’s inaugural programming includes reviving the California Biennial, a Fred Eversley survey, a project on landscape architect Peter Walker, a newly commissioned outdoor sculpture by Sanford Biggers, and an exhibition curated from OCMA’s Permanent Collection to honor the 13 Women who founded the museum 60 Years Ago.
“We can’t wait to welcome people into our new home, and our five exhibitions are the perfect way to introduce people to OCMA...” says Heidi Zuckerman, CEO and Director of OCMA, “They not only look back at our first 60 years and the incredible legacy of working with living artists at pivotal times in their careers, but also look forward as we reimagine what a 21st Century museum can be.”
Opening exhibitions
A wellspring of innovation, the California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold (October 8, 2022–February 26, 2023) explores the richness of the state’s expansive and diverse creative communities. OCMA’s biennial first began in 1984 and defined the spirit of the institution for decades, exemplifying the museum’s history of presenting new developments in contemporary art while identifying emerging artists on the verge of national and international acclaim. At its inception, the California Biennial was the only regular survey of contemporary art in California, and since then has presented the work of more than 300 contemporary artists.
This year’s biennial is organized by former OCMA curator Elizabeth Armstrong—who led the 2002, 2004, and 2006 iterations—with Essence Harden, Visual Arts Curator at the California African American Museum, and Gilbert Vicario, Chief Curator at the Phoenix Art Museum. The exhibition features 19 artists from across the state. From the high desert to the oceanside of Bolinas and Monterey through the dense metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco, the collection of artists reflects on California and its unique place in the American imagination. Revisiting mythical stories and reimagining California as a changing land, California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold presents a set of distinctive voices, which question, challenge, and animate the past while looking to the future.
13 Women (October 8, 2022–August 20, 2023) marks the museum’s 60th anniversary, paying homage to the 13 women who founded the Balboa Pavilion Gallery, the earliest iteration of OCMA, which opened in 1962. On view in The Muzzy Family Special Exhibitions Pavilion, 13 Women is curated by Heidi Zuckerman and presented with two rotations over the course of almost a full year. The exhibition presents work from the 1960s to the present by artists central to the museum’s collection. Each rotation is centered on the work of thirteen pioneering female artists, each of whom share the visionary qualities of the museum’s founders. The thirteen women included in the first rotation, on view October 8, are Alice Aycock, Joan Brown, Lee Bul, Lucy Bull, Sarah Cain, Vija Celmins, Mary Corse, Mary Heilmann, Barbara Kruger, Cady Noland, Catherine Opie, Hilary Pecis and Agnes Pelton. The work of these pioneering artists is complemented by selected works from OCMA’s collection, including Charles Ray’s work Ink Box(1986) and Self Portrait (1990), both acquired from OCMA’s presentation of Ray’s first solo museum exhibition, alongside important works by John Altoon, Chris Burden, and Richard Diebenkorn. The exhibition is punctuated by a new site-specific painting by Sarah Cain in the Avenue of the Arts Gallery.
Commissioned for the opening of OCMA’s new building, Of many waters... (2022) by Sanford Biggers, which will be on view from October 8, 2022 through August 13, 2023, is a 24-foot-wide by 16-foot-tall multimedia outdoor sculpture that operates as a combination and continuation of Biggers’s Chimera, Shimmer, and Codex series. A hybridized figure, the sculpture combines an archetype of a European reclining male figure with a 19th-century Baule double-face mask assembled from metal sequins. For more than two decades, Los Angeles native and New York-based artist Sanford Biggers has been working across media to weave our understanding of narrative, perspective, and history into broader contexts. The new commission is Biggers’s first Chimera-Shimmer hybrid—a new form that the artist considers “an object for future ethnography”—and the largest sequined work he has made to date. In addition to the complex networks of historical references that course through this work, the sculpture traces connections to antiquity, non-Western cultures, and traditions, including Buddhism’s sacred geometry.
Fred Eversley: Reflecting Back (the World) (October 8, 2022–January 15, 2023) expands on the groundbreaking 1976-1977 exhibition of the artist’s work at OCMA (then known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum). This was a pivotal period for Eversley, who hit his stride with his primary mode of working at the same time as the Light and Space movement gained momentum in Southern California. Yet unlike his Light and Space peers, who often collaborated with scientists and outsourced fabrication of their work, Eversley was a scientist himself, who had come to Southern California in the 1960s to work as a consulting engineer for NASA, and his early career was spent with Wyle Labs in Los Angeles, at the time the United States’ largest aerospace company.
Installed within the curved architecture of OCMA’s mezzanine, the exhibition embodies complex optical properties in an intimate space scaled to the human body, bridging the material and the immaterial, the finite and the infinite, and the visible and the invisible. Moving from dark to light, and through the entire color spectrum, the constellation of works makes connections across 30 years of Eversley’s practice, creating a heightened experience of seeing and being in space. Organized by OCMA’s new Chief Curator, Courtenay Finn, and conceived by OCMA’s former Senior Curator, Cassandra Coblentz, the exhibition exemplifies Eversley’s interest in challenging notions of perception to offer new perspectives on our world.
Peter Walker: Minimalist Landscape (October 8, 2022–January 15, 2023) is curated by Ziying Duan. It pays homage to the history of landscape design at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts from the 1980s to the 2000s, focusing on the work of Peter Walker. One of the leading landscape architects in the Modernist movement, Walker is most recognized for co-designing the National 9/11 Memorial. His collaboration with the Segerstrom Family dates to the 1970s, when he and his colleagues transformed a lima bean field into a park. Beginning in the 1980s, Walker was commissioned to design the landscape for the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, South Coast Repertory Theater, Town Center Park, and the Imperial Bank. Through photographs and newly commissioned historical recreation of models, Peter Walker: Minimalist Landscape highlights two iconic projects at the Segerstrom Center campus: Fountains and Plantings—the entry court for Cesar Pelli’s Plaza Tower—and Arrival Gardens—the ramped entrance to the Performing Arts Center. The exhibition is complemented by works from OCMA’s collection by Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt, artists who influenced Walker’s approach to landscape design.
