Four Rooms and a View: USC’s Collection Highlights

From January 27 to April 17, 2010;
CLOSED March 12-March 26, 2010

Four Rooms and a View: USC’s Collection Highlights showcases several exceptional areas of the museum’s collection. On view will be our well-known old master and contemporary landscape paintings and lesser-known works by contemporary Mexican masters, Marta Palau and Demián Flores. This showcase illustrates the museum’s ongoing commitment to displaying its permanent collection, its partnering with the USC Libraries, and its strategic expansion of the collection.

MEXICAN MASTERS – In celebration of the centennial anniversary of the Mexican Revolution and to celebrate newly acquired art, the Fisher Museum will present a selection of works of Artists Marta Palau and Demián Flores.

On loan from the Boeckmann Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies at USC Doheny Memorial Library will be Palau’s Un homenaje artístico a Lázaro Cárdenas, which honors Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas. Palau views Cárdenas as a personal savior as he granted her family refuge in Mexico after escaping from fascist Spain. Cárdenas was able to bring to Mexico tens of thousands of refugees after World War II, among them distinguished intellectuals who left a lasting imprint in Mexican cultural life.

Flores’s work is similarly concerned with exploring themes of Mexican and Mexican American identity, both contemporary and ancestral. His series of illustrative aquatints for a text called Aztlán by Guillermo Gómez-Peña will be displayed alongside the newly acquired painting Lagunillas.

THE JINKS ROOM – The USC Fisher Museum is pleased to display one of its masterpieces, Maynard Dixon’s Jinks Room. The relatively unknown murals mark a critical point in the career of Dixon–his transition from illustrator to painter. The panels were removed from their original setting, and six out of the original nine panels were donated to the museum and have undergone considerable conservation treatment.

LANDSCAPES – The USC Fisher Museum of Art will present a selection from its impressive holding of landscape painting from the 19th century onwards. Paintings from the Hudson River School will reveal the subtle evolution and development of the first truly American style of painting. These works will be exhibited with works from the Barbizon School, revealing how the American school drew from European sources but also created a new visual mode of representation. Early 20th century California Impressionist landscapes will be installed in contrast to contemporary California and Los Angeles landscapes.

Admission to the exhibition and all related events are free.

For more information, please call us at (213) 740-4561