Wight Art Gallery Pays Tribute to Its Founding Director

OPENING

“Besides being an excellent curator, author, professor and museum director, I think, really, it was Fred Wight’s painting that was most important to him,” says Elizabeth Shepherd, curator of UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery.

Consequently, Shepherd said, the gallery has mounted a memorial tribute to its founding director. “Sudden Nature: The Art of Frederick S. Wight,” featuring more than 50 paintings from the 1930s to the 1980s, opens Tuesday and runs through March 3.

“We’ve been working on the idea of this show since his death in 1986,” Shepherd said. “We wanted to provide a tribute to him because he was such an important figure in the history of the gallery, and really, in cultivating an art audience for all of Southern California.”

Wight, born in New York City in 1902, was influenced by his painter mother, Alice Stallknecht, and in the early years, often painted side-by-side with her. In the ‘20s, he studied art at Paris’ Academie Julien, was employed during World War II as a Navy illustrator, and later attended the renowned museum program at Harvard University. In 1953, he was appointed director of UCLA’s art gallery and assumed a teaching position in the university’s art department.

During his tenure at UCLA, Wight mounted several landmark exhibitions including retrospectives of Charles Sheeler (1954), Morris Graves (1956) and Henri Matisse (1966). According to Shepherd, his work--which included mounting important traveling exhibitions so that other museums’ fees would help balance his “minuscule budget”--was “very prophetic and innovative” and still influences the gallery, which was named after Wight in 1974.

Rather than concentrate on his academic and museum achievements, however, Shepherd has focused the exhibition on Wight’s major accomplishments after his 1973 retirement--his art. The majority of the show’s paintings are landscapes from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Several were completed after his last museum show in 1981 at Barnsdall Art Park and have not previously been exhibited, Shepherd said.

“These are important works,” Shepherd said. “They’re among the strongest examples of Southern California landscape painting of the last several decades.”

In conjunction with the UCLA show, Newspace, the Melrose Avenue gallery which showed Wight’s art yearly from 1980 until his death, will show “Alice Stallknecht and Frederick Wight, Mother and Son,” featuring early paintings from 1929-1955, from Feb. 5 to March 2.

CURRENTS

Grants and fellowships totaling $150,000 have been awarded to five local individual artists and four arts organizations by the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for the Visual Arts.

Receiving 1991 fellowships of $15,000 each are painters Alvaro Asturias, F. Scott Hess and Franceska Schifrin; mixed-media artist Mel Rubin and animation artist Carlos Spivey.

Awarded organizational grants are the Santa Monica Museum of Art (a two-year grant of $30,000 to increase salaries, retain guest curators and interns, and establish a more comprehensive screening system for artists’ proposals), Social and Public Art Resource Center ($25,000 to provide services to under-represented artists and help with long-range planning and management), Pasadena’s Armory Center for the Arts ($7,500 to initiate an exhibition of books created by Southern California artists) and Plaza de la Raza ($12,500 for the Second Nuevo L.A. Chicano Visual Arts Exhibition).

Beverly Hills’ Benedicte Saxe Gallery has extended its show of works by Spanish modern master Joan Miro through Feb. 16, due to the late arrival of three original ink drawings and one bronze sculpture which were held by French customs in Paris for more than a month.

According to a spokeswoman, customs officials held the 1966 drawings and the sculpture, dated 1968, because of their rarity; the sculpture, titled “Tete,” is one of only two existing Miro sculptures from the period.

HAPPENING

Noted video artist Patti Podesta on Wednesday will screen her new 20-minute work, “A Short Conversation From the Grave With Joan Burroughs” at the American Film Institute, 2021 Western Ave., at 7 and 8 p.m. Admission and parking are free.

The video focuses on Joan Vollmer, the common-law wife of writer William Burroughs, whom Burroughs shot and killed in 1951 during a game of “William Tell” while the two were living in Mexico City.

Podesta’s work was featured at the 1990 AFI National Video Festival, and has previously been shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum and Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art. Information: (213) 856-7600.