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Olympic Art

A tidal wave of art brings a score of exhibitions to Los Angeles this summer.

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Left: An illustration from a Scribners magazine poster, part of "Olympic Rowing: Integrity and Tradition."

Opposite: "Ranryo-O," a solo dance to be performed in conjunction with "Bugaku: Treasures from the Kasuga Shrine," is based on the legend of a young prince with a boyish face who hides behind a fierce mask to do battle with his enemies.

Los Angeles-area museums and galleries will overflow with art during the ten-week Olympic Arts Festival. There will be art in the streets, art on the freeways, art in the parks - even in the Los Angeles River Basin. From Santa Barbara in the north, south to Newport Beach, this festival's impressive itinerary of over twenty quality exhibitions deals with subject matter as diverse as Olympic rowing, masks from around the world, man-made barriers, Japanese bugaku dance, postage stamps, and palm trees. In addition, there will be film, video, and animation festivals, as well as art festivals highlighting international cultures. Here's a guide to the art treasures that await you this summer in Los Angeles.

Art in Clay: 1950s-1980s in Southern California. The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Park, has amassed 200 works by thirty-one southern-California ceramic artists which cover three decades of that area's important contribution of works in clay. "Art in Clay," on view July 24 through August 26, traces the burgeoning interest in ceramic arts from the fifties, when the universities around Los Angeles began to develop strong ceramic programs. Students and faculty initiated important technical changes in tools, wheels, kilns, clays, and glazes. The exhibition, which shows the evolution, revolution, and continuation of expressions in clay, contains works both traditional and innovative - everything from teapots to huge sculptural vessels.

Los Angeles and the Palm Tree: Image of a City. This exhibition, at the ARCO Center for Visual Arts, July 31 through September 22, will document the city's longtime infatuation with the palm tree, which is an integral part of the Los Angeles skyline. A sixty-foot-high copper palm tree, created by Jeff Sanders, will be erected on the outdoor plaza next to the ARCO tower as part of the show. In addition to a selection of Los Angeles artists whose works give prominence to the palm, there will be period advertisements, toys, orange-crate labels, clothing, movie stills, and vintage photographs, all of which utilize the palm-tree motif.

Bugaku: Treasures from the Kasuga Shrine. Ferocious-looking masks, exquisite ceremonial robes, and other ritual objects from the ancient Kasuga Shrine of Japan will be shown in the United States for the first time in Bugaku, from July 19 through August 26 at the George J. Doizaki Gallery of the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center. Performances of intriguing court dances, at one time staged as entertainment for the Shinto gods, will accompany the exhibition.

Art of the States: American Works after the 60's. From June 22 through August 26, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art will highlight a large private collection focusing on American art after the 1960s. Max Cole, Craig Kauffman, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol are among the creative artists who have shaped that body of work we call "recent contemporary art." Sculptures and paintings by these and other artists will provide the visitor with an overview of American art from 1970 to the present. Talks by artists, curators, and critics will accompany the exhibition.

Action/Precision: The New Direction in New York, 1955-1960 and The Figurative Mode: Bay Area Painting, 1955-65. This complementary pair of exhibitions, on view at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, June 30 to September 9, showcases artworks created in the 1950s and 1960s in cities a continent apart. "Action/Precision" is the first comprehensive look at six members of the younger generation of abstract expressionists -including Norman Bluhm and Alfred Leslie - since they initially showed their work. Fueling the explosive art scene of late-1950s New York, the artists created a highly charged, electrically colored form of gestural abstraction that extended abstract expressionism and invigorated it with precision, structure, and technical bravura. The San Francisco artists represented in "The Figurative Mode" - Elmer Bischoff and David Parks among them - exhibit a definite independence from their colleagues on the East

[[right margin]] Japanese American Cultural and Community Center [[/right margin]]