6 to 7 pm Members’ and Press Preview
7 to 9 pm Public Opening

Joyce Pensato: I Killed Kenny

Project Room 1: Park Studio: Skaters and Makers

Project Room 2: Marco Rios: Anatomy of an Absent Artist

Walkthrough Joyce Pensato: I KILLED KENNY with acclaimed Los Angeles painter Laura Owens and Pensato herself. This auspicious exhibition tour will offer new insights about painting and an intimate look at Pensato’s singular lifework. Limited space available, RSVP to secure your place.

About the artists:

Laura Owens was born in Euclid, Ohio in 1970 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her B.F.A. at the Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A at the California Institute of Arts. She has had major solo exhibitions at such international venues as the Kunstmuseum Bonn; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; Kunsthalle Zürich; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work is in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

Joyce Pensato was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, where she continues to live and work. Her work has recently been shown at Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Capitain Petzel Gallery, Berlin; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; and Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. She has also been included in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France.

Acclaimed journalist Kristine McKenna leads a discussion around Hayward’s poignant memoir, which chronicles the author’s experiences growing up on hippie communes in the 1960s, and connects it to the works on view. Both Pensato’s painting and Hayward’s prose peel back the colorful veneer of childhood, memory, and pop culture, to reveal the dark undercurrents roiling beneath the surface.

For SMMoA members only. Not a SMMoA member? Join today!

About the author:
Clane Hayward was born in 1967 in California. By the age of thirteen, she had left the communes and her family. At eighteen, she enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where she served for five years. She now lives in San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where she teaches middle school.

About the leader:
Kristine McKenna is a widely published critic and journalist who wrote for the Los Angeles Times from 1977 through 1998. Her profiles and criticism have appeared in Artforum, The New York Times, Artnews, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone Magazine, and in 2001, a collection of her interviews, Book of Changes, was published by Fantagraphics. A second volume of interviews, Talk To Her, came out in 2004. She was co-curator of Semina Culture: Wallace Berman & His Circle, a group exhibition that opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 2005, and traveled to five U.S. museums, and she co-edited the monograph, Wallace Berman Photographs, which was selected as one of the 50 best art books of 2007 by the A.I.G.A. In 2009 she launched the publishing imprint, Foggy Notion Books, in partnership with designer Lorraine Wild, and editor Donna Wingate, and that same year her book, The Ferus Gallery: A Place to Begin, was published by Steidl. She edited a monograph on work by Ann Summa, The Beautiful & the Damned: Punk Photographs by Ann Summa, that was published in fall of 2010 by Foggy Notion Books. She produced and co-wrote The Cool School, a documentary about L.A.’s first avant-garde gallery that was released in 2009, and that year she organized She: Work by Wallace Berman & Richard Prince, an exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery, and edited the exhibition catalog, published by D.A.P. Her 2011 survey exhibition of photographer Charles Brittin, at Michael Kohn Gallery, was accompanied by the monograph, Charles Brittin: West & South, published by Hatje Canz. In 2011, she edited The Collected Writing of Richard Prince, for Foggy Notion Books, and in 2012 co-edited Notes From a Revolution: Comco, the Diggers & the Haight, published by Foggy Notion/Fulton Ryder, Inc. She is presently working on Tripping: Clothing & Costume in the American ’60s, Panic in Detroit: Leni Sinclair’s Photographs of the Michigan Underground, 1963-1973, Los Angeles in the ‘60s: Images from the LAPD Photo Archive, a monograph on artist Joe Goode, and a collection of writings by David Salle.

Join executive director Elsa Longhauser for breakfast and an exclusive tour of all three exhibitions.

Joyce Pensato: I Killed Kenny

Project Room 1: Park Studio: Skaters and Makers

Project Room 2: Marco Rios: Anatomy of an Absent Artist

For SMMoA members only. Not a SMMoA member? Join today!

Artist Bettina Hubby will host a candle-lit and disco-ball activated Dig the Dig Dinner, bringing together construction workers, local business owners, and neighbors for a festive meal, music, and performances by local artists.

Dig the Dig is a series of programs inspired by the first stage of a dramatic evolution: the construction of the Olympic/26^th Street Expo Metro station at the Museum’s doorstep. The new light rail station, which links SMMoA and the Bergamot Station Arts Center district with both downtown Los Angeles and downtown Santa Monica, is scheduled to open in 2016. Work on the site has begun, inaugurating an era of transformation that will include the redevelopment of the arts district and, eventually, a new home for the Museum. Read more

Stay tuned for registration information…