Pacific Standard Time
By KUSC
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Podcast Description
Classical KUSC is proud to participate in Pacific Standard Time, a citywide Getty Research Institute initiative that focuses on postwar art in Southern California. These in-depth interviews with iconic arts figures in Los Angeles originally aired on KUSC in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. They’re now part of the Sheila Tepper Archive at the University of Southern California.
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Henry Hopkins in conversation with Hilton Kramer | Museum director and educator Henry Hopkins in conversation with art critic and essayist Hilton Kramer. Interview originally aired April 18, 1987 on KUSC | 4/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Dorothy Crawford in conversation with Franz van Ossum | Dorothy Crawford speaks with John Cage biographer Franz van Ossum about the composer's life in Los Angeles in the 1930s. Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912. | 3/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Melinda Wortz in conversation with Rachel Rosenthal and Elyse Grinstein | Rachel Rosenthal (b. 1926) is an interdisciplinary performer who developed a revolutionary performance technique that integrates text, movement, voice, choreography, improvisation, inventive costuming, dramatic lighting and wildly imaginative sets into an unforgettable total theater experience. In the last twenty-five years of her performing career she presented over 40 full-scale pieces nationally & internationally. Born in Paris of Russian parents, Rosenthal studied art, theatre and dance in Paris and N.Y. after the war with such teachers as Hans Hoffmann, Merce Cunningham, Erwin Piscator and Jean-Louis Barrault. She moved to California in 1955 where she created the experimental Instant Theatre, performing in and guiding it for ten years. She was a leading figure in the L.A. Women's Art Movement in the 1970's, co-founding WomanSpace, among other projects. During that period, her focus split between the performing and visual art world, she created and exhibited her ceramic sculptures. In 1989, she founded The Rachel Rosenthal Company, a non-profit organization, to work collaboratively with artists from other disciplines and pass on the legacy of her pioneering form of spontaneous collaboration (the DbD Doing by Doing technique) through her Companys theatrical productions and performance workshops. She has toured extensively in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia. Rosenthal has taught classes and workshops in performance since 1979, in her LA studio as well as around North America and Europe. In 2000 she was honored by the City of Los Angeles as a Living Cultural Treasure of Los Angeles and, in 2001, was the recipient of the Award of Merit for Achievement in the Performing Arts from the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP). Retired from the stage in 2000, Rosenthal resumed a long dormant career in visual art and is currently working in oil and watercolor. In addition to her work in the visual arts, Rosenthal is Artistic Director of a new ensemble of performers who present evenings of Total Improvisation one weekend a month in her studio space, along with guest artists from the world of visual art and music. Elyse Grinstein is an architect and owner of Gemini GEL, a publisher of limited edition art prints based in Los Angeles. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Alan Rich in conversation with Mel Powell | Mel Powell (1923 - 1988) began his musical life as a prodigious jazz artist, working as pianist and arranger with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and later, the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band. Soon, however, a strong compositional instinct prompted his matriculation at Yale University, where he studied with Paul Hindemith. Under Hindemith, and throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Powell composed primarily in a neoclassic style producing such works as the Cantilena Concertante for English horn and orchestra, Divertimento for violin and harp, and Trio for piano, violin and cello. In 1959, Powell's musical personality blossomed and the influence of Webern was manifested in a brevity of forms and transparency of textures. An innovative and consistently adventurous musical style embraced experimentation with extended string techniques and invented notations (as in the Filigree Setting for string quartet), musical blocks of chords, pitch sequences, rhythms, and colors (represented in Modules: An Intermezzo for chamber orchestra), and tape and electronics (such as in the song cycle Strand Settings: Darker). Duplicates: A Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and illustrates Powell's meticulous craftsmanship and singular skill at assembling richly expressive yet intricately complex musical structures. Powell was one of the instrumental founders of the California Institute of the Arts. He served as dean of the music school from 1969 to 1978, and, at the time of his death on 24 April 1998, he held the Roy E. Disney endowed chair in music composition. Powell received awards and commissions from Sigma Alpha Iota, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the NEA. Among his final works were: the Piano Trio '94; the Sonatina (for solo flute) and the Sextet, premiered in 1996 by the California EAR Unit; the song cycle, Levertov Breviary, premiered in 1997 by soprano Judith Bettina and pianist James Goldsworthy for Harvard University's Fromm Foundation; and Seven Miniatures -- Women Poets of China, a work for harp and voice premiered at New York's Merkin Concert Hall in October 1998 by Susan Allen and Anne-Lise Berntsen. (from G. Schirmer) | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Irene Borger in conversation with Bella Lewitzsky | Bella Lewitzsky (1916 - 2004) was a modern dancer, choreographer and noted teacher. Lewitzky was born to Russian immigrant parents in Llano del Rio, California. Her family later moved to San Bernardino, where Lewitzsky studied ballet. In 1934, she joined Lester Hortons company, later becoming its lead dancer, and where she was instrumental in the development of the Horton Technique. In 1946, Lewitzky founded Dance Theater of Los Angeles with Horton. Dance Theater of Los Angeles was one of the few institutions in the United States to house both a dance school and theater under the same roof. She left the company in 1950 to pursue an independent career. She choreographed several films, and in 1966, founded the Lewitzky Dance Company (later renamed Bella Lewitzky Dance Theatre). Under her artistic guidance, the company became one of the leading international modern dance companies. She received many awards including honorary doctorates from the California Institute of Arts (1981), Occidental College (1984), Otis Parsons College (1989), and the Juilliard School (1993). Ms. Lewitzky served on the dance panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and on the California Arts Council and was the recipient of the Dance Magazine Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Tiffany Award, the National Medal of Arts, the Capezio Award and, in 1989, the first California Governor's Award for Lifetime Achievement. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in conversation with Peter Shire | Peter Shire (born 1947) is an artist. He was born in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. His sculpture, furniture and ceramics have been exhibited in the United States, Italy, France, Japan and Poland; Shire has been associated with the Memphis Group of designers, has worked on the Design Team for the XXIII Olympiad with the American Institute of Architects, and has designed public sculptures in Los Angeles and other California cities. Shire has been honored by awards for his contribution to the cultural life of the City of Los Angeles. Hunter Drohojowska-Philp writes about art, architecture, and design. Her book Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s was published by Henry Holt in July 2011. Interview originally aired August 6, 1988 on KUSC | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ruth Weisberg in conversation with Terry Wolverton, Betty Anne Brown and Cheri Gaulke | Woman's Building - 15th Anniversary Celebration In conversation with Ruth Weisberg, artist and professor at USC. Terry Wolverton is a literary artist and author. In 1976, she moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building. Terry spent the next thirteen years working and creating at the Woman's Building where, in addition to producing performance and literary art, she was also instrumental in the Lesbian Art Project, the Incest Awareness Project, the Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS), and a White Women's Anti-Racism Consciousness-Raising Group. At the time of this interview, she served as the nonprofit organization's Executive Director. She is currently adjunct faculty in the M.A. in Arts Management program at Claremont Graduate University. Betty Ann Brown is an art historian, critic and curator. After moving to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, her interest shifted from ancient Latin American art to Chicano art and, ultimately, to contemporary art in general. She was president of the board of the Los Angeles Woman's Building in 1985-86. Brown has curated several major exhibitions, including “Fierce Beauty: The Art of Linda Vallejo,” Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles, Summer 2010; “Brilliant Paintings & Amazing Ceramics,” Sylvia White Gallery, Ventura, Spring 2010; “Hans Burkhardt,” Cal State Northridge in Fall 2008; “Echoes,” an exhibition of twelve women artists who address environmental issues. She is currently working on a retrospective exhibition for performance artist and painter John White (Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, Spring 2011.) Brown is a Professor of Art History at California State University, Northridge. Cheri Gaulke is an artist who works in a variety of media. In 1975, she moved to Los Angeles to be involved with the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building. There she embraced the notion that feminist art could raise consciousness, invite dialogue, and transform culture. She worked primarily in performance art from 1974-1992, addressing themes such as religion, sexual identity, and the environment. In addition to her solo work, she cofounded collaborative performance groups Feminist Art Workers (1976-81), which merged feminist art and education techniques into interactive performances; and Sisters Of Survival (1981-85), who wore nun’s habits in the spectrum of the rainbow and presented their anti-nuclear performances in Europe and the U.S. Though Gaulke has moved away from performance, the feminist art strategies that she helped to innovate in the 1970s in Southern California continue in her work. Her art continues to be a vehicle for social commentary and as a way to tell the stories of individuals and groups under-represented in society. Interview recorded on 3/4/1989 | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Henry Hopkins in conversation with Robert Hughes | ROBERT HUGHES (b. 1938) Robert Hughes was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938, where he studied arts and architecture at Sydney University. In 1964, he left for Britain, writing for such publications as the Spectator, the Telegraph, the Times and the Observer, before landing the position of art critic for Time Magazine in 1970. Some of his notable books include The Shock of the New (1981), The Fatal Shore (1987), Culture of Complaint (1993) and American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997), the subject of this interview. He has also made dozens of TV documentaries since the mid-1960s. He first became known to a large television audience in 1981 as the creator and host of the much-acclaimed history series on modern art: “The Art of the New.” His 1997 series on American art and architecture, “American Visions,” received equal attention and acclaim. In recognition of his services to Australian culture, he was elected an Officer in the Order of Australia (his country's highest civilian honor) in 1994. In 2000, Mr. Hughes was honored by the London Sunday Times as Writer of the Year. His work as a cultural historian has been honored by the Archives of American Art, and by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which elected him to membership in 1996. He is the only art critic to have twice won America's most coveted award for art criticism, the Frank Jewett Mather Award, given by the College Art Association. Interview recorded on 5/18/1997 | 12/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Carl Stone in conversation with Betty Freeman | Betty Freeman (1921-2009) Composer John Adams called her a “modern-day Medici” and dedicated “Nixon in China” to her. Born Betty Wishnick in Chicago on June 2, 1921, Freeman moved with her family to Brooklyn and then to New Rochelle, N.Y., where she grew up. She learned the art of philanthropy from her father, Robert I. Wishnick, who was a successful chemical engineer and often donated to hospitals and educational institutions. At Wellesley College, she studied English and music and became a capable pianist. Upon graduation, she married Stanley Freeman, who ran an electronics company and was later an investor. They moved to Los Angeles in 1950, where she raised their four children. During the 1950s she became a collector of Abstract Expressionist art and became close to painters Sam Francis and Clyfford Still, eventually writing books about them. She would later divorce Stanley Freeman and marry Italian sculptor and painter Franco Assetto. Her association with the art world eventually led her to music, and she became an avid commissioner of new works from such major composers as Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Harrison Birtwistle, and Steve Reich, to name a few. In 1964 she met Harry Partch, the eclectic American composer and inventor of unconventional instruments, who, at the time, was nearly destitute. Freeman housed him and provided support for his work until his death in 1974. It was through her financing of a 1973 film about Partch, “The Dreamer That Remains,” that Ms. Freeman started her career as a photographer. When no one from the film crew was available to take still shots, Freeman was enlisted. Beginning in 1981, she gave renowned musical salons at her home. Composers would discuss and perform their works, either live or from recordings, for an invited audience of about 100, among them conductors, managers, impresarios and artists. Freeman said, “I’ve always been interested in the new, and don’t understand why everybody isn’t. Old music is fine. But I like complexity, challenge, ambiguity, abstraction.” Interview Recorded on 3/5/1988 | 12/6/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Henry Hopkins in conversation with Betty Asher and Irving Blum | Betty Asher (1914-1994) Betty Asher was a contemporary art collector and dealer in Los Angeles for thirty years. After working as a registered nurse at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, she moved to LA with her former husband, Dr. Leonard Asher, during WWII. She was known for her extensive collection of cups by artists, most of which can now be found at LACMA. From 1966-1979, she was the curatorial assistant in the 20th-Century Art department at the museum, and was one of the founders of the Modern and Contemporary Art Council. Along with art dealer Patricia Faure, she opened the Asher/Faure Gallery in West Hollywood after resigning from the museum. Her son, Michael Asher, is a conceptual artist. Irving Blum (born 1930) Irving Blum studied English and Drama at the University of Arizona before dropping out and enlisting in the Air Force in 1951, becoming a DJ for the Armed Forces Radio Service. After his discharge, he went to New York to work for Hans Knoll, the founder of famed furniture company, Knoll Associates. Three years later, Blum moved to LA to become an art dealer. From 1958-1966, Blum ran Walter Hopps’ Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Blvd, which had the distinction of presenting Andy Warhol’s first show in 1962. Once the gallery closed, he opened his own space, the Irving Blum Gallery, which he ran until moving to New York in 1972. Interview Recorded on 9/12/1987 | 11/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Carl Stone in conversation with William Winant and Gordon Mumma | William Winant (born 1953) Composer and percussionist William Winant is closely associated with composers Lou Harrison and John Zorn, and was a member of the eclectic bands Mr. Bungle and Oingo Boingo. In 2003, Winant created music for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s 50th anniversary at the Tate Modern in London. His music can also be heard in Werner Herzog’s documentary, Encounters at the End of the World. Winant has been a guest artist with the LA Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, and Berkeley Symphony. He is currently the Principal Percussionist of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and a noted teacher, on faculty at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley and Mills College. He formed the Abel-Steinberg-Winant (ASW) Trio in 1984; a group dedicated to the performances of Music from the Americas, Pacific Rim, and Northwest Asia Gordon Mumma (born 1935) Avant-garde composer Gordon Mumma studied at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he was a research associate in acoustics and seismics. He co-founded the Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music and the ONCE Festival with Robert Ashley, providing a showcase for original electro-acoustic music. Mumma helped invent the Space Theater, a theater designed specifically for multimedia light shows. He regularly performed with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1966-74 and with the Sonic Arts Union. He was on the faculty of UC Santa Cruz from 1975-94. He has collaborated with many contemporary composers and artists including Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Marcel Duchamp, and Jasper Johns. Interview Recorded on 11/8/1986 | 11/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Dorothy Crawford in conversation with Nicolas Slonimsky and William Kraft | Nicolas Slonimsky (1894-1995) Russian-born Nicolas Slonimsky moved to the United Stated in 1923 to work as accompanist. He continued his composition and conducting studies in the US while also teaching music theory and writing about music for publications like the Boston Evening Transcript and the Christian Science Monitor. Slonimsky championed contemporary classical music by soliciting music from contemporary composer for the Boston Chamber Orchestra which he formed in 1927. In 1958, Slonimsky took over the supervision of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and worked as head editor until 1992. Slonimsky shared stories about classical music as a regular guest on KUSC in the 1970's. Late in his life, he became close friends with Frank Zappa and performed his own compositions at one of Zappa’s concerts in Santa Monica in 1981. Slonimsky died at the age of 101 in 1995. His legacy includes scholarly writing in Russian and English, the coining of the term 'pandiatonicism' (also known as “white note music”) and creating the “Grandmother chord.” William Kraft (born 1923) William Kraft is a composer, conductor, percussionist, and teacher. He studied composition at Columbia University, where his instructors included Henry Cowell, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. Shortly after moving to Los Angeles, he created the Los Angeles Percussion Ensemble, which premiered works by prominent composers. Kraft was a percussionist with the LA Phil for 26 years, and later became the orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence, during which time he developed the Philharmonic New Music Group. He currently holds the Corwin Chair at UC Santa Barbara, and is also the Chairman of the ASCAP Board of Review. Interview Recorded on 7/18/1987 | 11/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Christopher Knight in conversation with Clement Greenberg | Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) Before becoming a prominent art critic, Clement Greenberg briefly studied art at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1930, at the height of the Depression, he graduated from Syracuse University with a BA in Literature. In the latter half of the 1930’s, Greenberg contributed to the Partisan Review; later becoming the publication’s editor. During WWII, he was regarded as the leading proponent on Modernism. He was an anti-Surrealist on the basis that it was the antithesis of abstraction, and disproved of any art with a subject matter. Greenberg is best known for his writing on Jackson Pollack, to whom he was introduced in 1942. His style of writing, now referred to as “Greenbergian Formalism,” blended the theories of Kant, Hans Hofmann, Walter Pater, and Roger Fry. Interview Recorded on 5/9/1987 | 11/2/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Henry Hopkins in conversation with Ray Eames | Ray Eames (1912-1988) Bernice Alexandra "Ray" Eames was born in Sacramento in 1912. In 1933 she graduated from Bennett Women's College in Millbrook, New York, and moved to New York City, where she studied abstract expressionist painting with Hans Hofmann. She was a founder of the American Abstract Artists group in 1936 and displayed paintings in their first show a year later at Riverside Museum in Manhattan. Eames met her future husband Charles Eames at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 1940 and they married the next year. Ray and Charles settled in Los Angeles, opened a design office where they worked designing furniture, houses, monuments, exhibitions, textiles and toys. The couple took advantage of the newest materials and technology to create cost-effective production. In Ray’s words, “what works is better than what looks good. The looks good can change, but what works, works.” Ray Eames died in Los Angeles in 1988. Interview Recorded on 8/27/1988 | 10/10/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Henry Hopkins in conversation with Walter Hopps | Walter Hopps (1932-2005) A native of Eagle Rock, California, maverick gallery owner, curator, and museum director Walter Hopps founded the groundbreaking Ferus Gallery in West Hollywood in 1957, creating a vibrant hub for those who made and collected modern art. They included Hopps’s business partner, Ed Kienholz, whose “assemblage art” used pieces of used cars and even garbage. Also Ed Ruscha, who created a stir by painting words and signs on canvas. Hopps went on to become the first director of the Pasadena Museum of Art, now the Norton Simon, where he mounted the first overview of American Pop Art. He later helmed Washington’s Corcoran Gallery and served as curator of the Smithsonian National Collection of 20th Century American Art. But he disdained the federal bureaucracy and returned to Los Angeles, telling a friend that working at the Smithsonian “was like moving through an atmosphere of Seconal.” Interview Recorded on 12/26/1987 | 9/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Barbara Kraft in conversation with Beatrice Wood | [Beatrice Wood (1893-1998)] Beatrice Wood was not only a prominent, studio potter, artist, and writer, but also a key figure in the modernist movement, whose nickname was the “Mama of Dada”. Her rich and colorful life spanned the course of the 20th century, and included many of its most innovative figures: Edgar Varese, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp were all close friends during her years in Paris and New York, when she did some professional acting. She moved to Ojai in 1948 to be near the Indian philosopher, Krishnamurti, and was a member of the Theosophical Society for the rest of her life. Not long before her death in 1998, nine days after her 105th birthday, Beatrice Wood liked to say that she owed her longevity to "chocolate and young men." This KUSC interview, a part of USC’s Sheila Tepper Archive, was recorded in 1993, in honor of her centenary. An exhibit entitled “Beatrice Wood: Career Woman—Drawings, Paintings, Vessels and Objects” is running at the Santa Monica Museum of Heart through March 12, as part of Pacific Standard Time. Interview Recorded on 3/7/1993 | 9/30/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 16 Episodes |
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