Expanded Craft, Folk Museum to Open

On Wednesday, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, which has been closed since June 30, will open its new, expanded space--10,000 square feet on the fourth floor of the May Co. store on Wilshire Blvd. and Fairfax Ave. The first exhibition in the new space (which will be the museum’s home until it moves into a planned 55,000-square-foot site on Wilshire Boulevard and Curson Avenue in 1992) is “Hands On! Objects Created in Our Time,” an exhibition of about 60 pieces drawn from the 1,800 objects in the museum’s permanent collection.

Planned as an interactive exhibition, “Hands On! Objects Created in Our Time” will display objects that demonstrate links between craft, folk art and design. The pieces displayed will range from a carved maple rocker by internationally known woodworker Sam Maloof, to papier-mache Mariachi figures by renowned Mexican folk artist Pedro Linares, to a production metal and Astroturf “House Chair” by Katharyn Loye.

Patrick H. Ela, the museum’s executive director, said that the museum’s new space (its former home was only 2,000 square feet) and the site planned for 1992 will provide room for an even greater expansion of the museum’s collection.

“One of the main reasons we are expanding is so that we can put more emphasis on collecting,” Ela said. “Our institutional credibility has been hampered by that perception (that we don’t have much of a permanent collection), so now we will have the room to expand our collection.”

Noting that the museum’s attendance figures have remained “stable” at 100,000 a year for the last few years, Ela said that another reason for the expansion is that “we feel there’s a much larger audience out there and that our old facility inhibited people because it was too small.”

MOCA: The Museum of Contemporary Art is also opening an exhibition this week focusing on its permanent collection. “Constructing a History: A Focus on MOCA’s Permanent Collection,” which opens today, is the museum’s first major exhibition to examine in depth the museum’s own body of works, which total more than 1000 pieces.

On view will be about 150 paintings, photographs, works on paper, sculptures and installations from 1930 to the present. Reflecting upon how history is constructed, the exhibition examines MOCA’s collection in relationship to the established narrative of postwar art.

Artists in the show include Richard Artschwager, Larry Bell, Jonathan Borofsky, Vija Celmins, Alberto Giacometti, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Mullican, Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexis Smith and Andy Warhol.

SEMINARS: The Smithsonian Institution has scheduled four multiday seminars to be held this winter and spring in Washington. “African Art,” featuring lectures by top art historians and anthropologists and tours of the Smithsonian’s exhibition, “Icons: Ideals and Power in African Art,” will be held Jan. 17-19; “150 Years of American Art,” including on-site discussions of renowned American works at the National Gallery of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the National Museum of American Art, will be held April 24-27; “20th Century Furniture,” including lectures on major design trends and visits to working studios and world famous collections, will be held April 30-May 4; and “French Impressionism,” a seminar coinciding with three major exhibitions of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works at the National Gallery of Art, will be held May 18-20. For brochures, call (202) 357-4700 or write to the Smithsonian National Associates Travel Program, 1100 Jefferson Drive, S.W., Washington, D.C.

NOTES: Acclaimed painter Robert Rauschenberg has received the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts from Southern Methodist University. Rauschenberg was recognized for his work toward world peace through his organization, Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange. . . . A computerized video program that leads users through the world of Tibet and the ancient art of Tibetan painting, known as thangka, has been installed at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. The program, called “The Electronic Thangka: An Interactive Exploration of Tibetan Painting,” explains the artistic, religious, social and cultural contexts of Tibetan painting.

FOR THE RECORD: The phone number for the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts was incorrectly listed in the Nov. 12 Art News column. The correct number is (213) 413-4042.