From an early stage in planning our intervention, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966) was identified as a potential work to add to the exhibition’s landscape painting galleries. Every Building, a small object in book form, unfolds into a 25 foot long accordion with two continuous horizontal bands of photographs depicting both sides of the Sunset Strip. Every Building is one of many artist books Ruscha created during the 1960s and early 70s that have subsequently been identified as significant across multiple historical categories: pop art, conceptual art, artist books, post-war photography and theories of postmodernism being a few. The USC Architecture and Fine Arts Library has many of Ruscha’s books in its collection (including two copies of Every Building), but (of course?) they are now held in the libraries rare books section.
While doing research on Every Building and other books by Ruscha I noticed that A Few Palm Trees (1971), the last book Ruscha published in this period, was listed as “missing” at the AFA library (concerning), however another copy was available at Leavey, a general reference library at the university. I thought this seemed peculiar and possibly just a typo on the library’s website, but to be thorough I decided to investigate.
The USC Fisher Museum of Art has in its collection a mural cycle painted by the Californian artist Maynard Dixon, called the Jinks Room. The Fisher Museum has six of the original nine segments; the other three segments have remained with the donor family.
For the portion of the intervention re:View called reconstruct, all nine mural segments needed to be studied. Reconstruct aims to recreate the original architectural space of the Jinks Room. The permanent collection exhibition happening right now at Fisher is Four Rooms and a View, which presents the Jinks Room murals with only the six mural segments in the Fisher Collection.
Below is a video of the installation of the Jinks Room murals in Four Rooms and A View.
The mural segments in the Fisher’s collection (the ones in the video) were:
Procession with Couples
Feast with a Friar
Dance with the Fairy Queen
Monk with a Leprechaun and a Jester
Procession with Reluctant Monk
Reluctant Cat
This means I need to track down the three unknown segments.
It is not everyday that two professors of art history have the opportunity to work together on a dream project. This year, however, we were granted just such an opportunity by the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences and the Provost’s Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Teaching. The result—a new, undergraduate course titled “Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating”— combines the study of contemporary art with the realities of making a museum exhibition.
Given a modest budget, a year to work with our students, and complete access to the Fisher Museum staff and permanent collection, we sought to bridge the gap between academic art history and hands-on curatorial practice. Our course was conceived neither as a vocational exercise nor as a curricular requirement for art history majors.
Rather, it was designed as an experiment in critical and creative thinking. Educated citizens need to be able to dig beneath the surface of what is presented to them as authoritative—in museums, on the internet, and in every aspect of their daily lives.
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