February 26, 2022 - April 16, 2022
Dan Flavin
Untitled (For Mary Ann and Hal with fondest regards) 1976
Florescent light, one of two components,
96” x 96” each
as-is.la presents an exhibition of artworks, documents and artifacts drawn from the collection of the Los Angeles curator Hal Glicksman. Glicksman was most active in the decade of the 1970’s when he directed galleries at Pomona College, UC Irvine and Otis Art Institute. At Pomona he commissioned what is surely Michael Asher’s most important early room environment. At Irvine he continued this ambitious agenda presenting large-scale artwork / environments by Maria Nordman, Bruce Nauman, Eric Orr, Tom Eatherton and Larry Bell. At Otis, Glicksman would chronicle the development of conceptual art in Europe and America with early and important shows by Daniel Buren, On Kawara, Dan Graham and John Knight. To be sure, this project had it’s blind spots, as every “inclusion” necessarily entails an “exclusion.” But at a moment when Los Angeles was widely seen as indifferent to contemporary art, when the storied Pasadena Museum of Art was fighting a losing battle with insolvency and Los Angeles MOCA not yet imagined, the weight of responsibility for supporting new and adventurous art would be shouldered by Glicksman and just a handful of others. This exhibition — a wall of historic artifacts illuminated by a pair of Dan Flavin sculptures — testifies eloquently to the spirit of that moment and the enduring contribution that one curator made to it.
installation view