LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced the date and honorees of its 2018 Art+Film Gala. On Saturday, November 3, LACMA will honor influential American photographer Catherine Opie and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. LACMA trustee Eva Chow and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have championed the museum’s film initiatives since 2011, and they continue their efforts as the 2018 Art+Film Gala Co-Chairs. Gucci continues its invaluable support to the museum as the presenting sponsor of the annual event.
“Catherine Opie is one of the most important artists working today,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Through her photographs, Cathy captures aspects of American culture, identity, and politics that speak to audiences of all backgrounds. In Los Angeles, she is also recognized for her work as a teacher. In that role, she shares her knowledge and passion with future generations of artists who will continue her legacy of documentation.” He continued, “In 2016, audiences entered the vibrant world of Guillermo del Toro at his first solo retrospective at LACMA, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters. As a filmmaker, Guillermo’s work challenges us to ignore traditional art-historical narratives and hierarchies of high and low culture. His ability to collapse time and space, history and fiction, and nature and fantasy makes him an exceptional filmmaker.”
“The eighth annual Art+Film Gala celebrates the work of two incredible artists, Catherine Opie and Guillermo del Toro,” said Gala Co-Chair Eva Chow. “Both artists share an exceptional ability to tell human stories that are relevant and important to our time. It is with great pleasure that we honor their work and legacy at this year’s event. Gucci’s commitment to art and film at LACMA and beyond is invaluable and we are grateful to be partnering with them once again.”
Proceeds from the annual Art+Film Gala go toward underwriting LACMA’s initiative to make film more central to the museum’s curatorial programming, while also funding LACMA’s broader mission. This includes exhibitions, acquisitions, and educational programming, in addition to screenings that explore the intersection of art and film. LACMA Productions is an extension of the museum’s film initiative and filmmaker Sini Anderson has been commissioned to make a short film about Catherine Opie.
Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio and received her MFA from CalArts in 1988. Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, including a mid-career survey at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008. Opie was a recipient of The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal in 2016, The Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. A large survey of Opie’s work opened at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Norway in 2017, with an accompanying catalog. She recently debuted her first film, The Modernist, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles and it will be shown at Lehmann Maupin, New York in November 2018. Opie lives and works in Los Angeles and is a Professor of Photography at UCLA. LACMA owns more than 50 of Opie’s iconic works in it collection, including Self Portrait/Cutting (1993) and The Inauguration Portfolio (2009), which was a gift by the artist to the museum. Catherine Opie’s works have also been presented in several solo and group exhibitions at LACMA, such as Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscapes (July 25– October 17, 2010), Catherine Opie: O (February 13, 2016–October 2, 2016), Little Boxes: Photography and the Suburbs (August 24, 2013–December 1, 2013), and LA Exuberance: New Gifts by Artists (October 30, 2016–April 2, 2017).
Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964) is one of the most inventive filmmakers of his generation. Beginning with Cronos (1993) and continuing through The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Hellboy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Pacific Rim (2013), and Crimson Peak (2015), among many other film, television, and book projects, del Toro has reinvented the genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Working with a team of craftsmen, artists, and actors—and referencing a wide range of cinematic, pop-culture, and art-historical sources—del Toro recreates the lucid dreams he experienced as a child in Guadalajara, Mexico. He now works internationally with a cherished home base he calls Bleak House in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
Del Toro was the subject of a major retrospective at LACMA, Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters (August 1–November 27, 2016). In 2018, del Toro’s film Shape of Water received fourteen Oscar nominations and won four, including Best Picture and Best Director.
