LAGUNA BEACH, CA.- Laguna Art Museum is presenting three exhibitions to the public; Miss Hills of Laguna Beach, Anna Althea Hills: Art, Education, Community; Phillip K. Smith III: Bent Parallel; and Kristin Leachman: Xylem Rays. The exhibitions will close January 15, 2017.
Miss Hills of Laguna Beach, Anna Althea Hills: Art, Education, Community
Laguna Art Museum is presenting the work of landscape painter Anna Althea Hills (1882–1930). Hills was one of the highly talented artists whose presence in the community helped put Laguna Beach on the map as a premier art colony during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Born in Ravenna, Ohio, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cooper Union Art School in New York City. In New York she also studied under Arthur Wesley Dow, one of the most influential art teachers of the period, who played a prominent role in the American Arts & Crafts Movement. Like many art students during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hills continued her studies in Europe, attending the Académie Julian in Paris and traveling in Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, and the British Isles. In England she studied with John Noble Barlow in the art colony at St. Ives, Cornwall. Returning to the United States, she moved to Los Angeles in 1912 and by 1914 had established her home and studio in Laguna Beach.
At the time she was working in an impressionistic technique, but her palette was muted, dominated by low-key tones that reflected the northern light and atmosphere of England and Holland. Once in California, like other artists, she responded to the bright light and rich, colorful landscape. She remarked that she had to modify her palette by adding brighter colors. She traveled throughout Southern California and Arizona, and became particularly attracted to the desert landscape. She worked primarily in oil, using both a brush and a palette knife. Her palette knife work is highly distinctive, setting her paintings apart from those of her contemporaries. She was fond of portraying dramatic cloud effects, often setting a low horizon line in order to give the sky dominance in the composition.
Hills felt that Laguna Beach was the place where she could not only paint but also teach and build an art school. She welcomed many students to her studio. Many were no longer novices but professional art teachers from other parts of the country, who would travel to California each summer for the privilege of studying with her. As a teacher, she felt strongly about the importance of arts education for children. She organized art exhibits that circulated among Orange County schools and sent out fellow artists to give direct instruction to the children. She herself lectured at schools and clubs in Los Angeles and Orange County.
A founding member of the Laguna Beach Art Association (LBAA) in 1918, Hills was one of its most dynamic and progressive members, showing remarkable leadership skills. Between 1922 and 1930, she served as the LBAA’s president for a total of six years (1922–25 and 1927–30). These were the important, formative years, and also the time during which funds were raised to build the LBAA’s permanent gallery on Cliff Drive—the present museum building. She was to see the dream of the new gallery realized—in February 1929—but died the following year.
The exhibition showcases over sixty of Hills’s paintings along with documentary materials relating to her life and work in Laguna Beach. It is curated by Janet Blake, the museum’s curator of historical art, and accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Phillip K. Smith III: Bent Parallel
As this year’s featured commissioned artist for the museum’s Art & Nature festival, Phillip K. Smith III’s monumental installation Bent Parallel envelopes viewers in light, continuing the artist’s ongoing dialogue with color theory, optics, scale, and technology. Appearing as two intersecting color-field walls, the hinge-like structure merges surfaces to engender a perception of shifting and blending. It creates a third, material-less, zero-thickness plane that mixes the adjacent colors and seems to extend the physical bounds of the space. The resulting environment appears simultaneously infinite and finite.
Born in Los Angeles in 1972, Phillip K. Smith III received his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design before returning to the Southern California desert where he was raised. Building upon explorations in the perception of light, color, and space, he creates intensely physical and seemingly ephemeral sculptures. His large-scale, temporary installations include the internationally renowned Lucid Stead (2013) in Joshua Tree, California, and Reflection Field (2014) and Portals (2016), both of which debuted at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
Smith has been featured in major solo and group exhibitions. His monumental works are sited throughout California and at venues beyond, including Boston, Kansas City, Nashville, and Oklahoma City. Recently he has been commissioned to create permanent, light-based works for the City of West Hollywood and the City of Bellevue, Washington. Next year, he will participate in Desert X 2017, an international contemporary art exhibition that focuses on environmental, social, and cultural conditions of the 21st century. The artist and his works have been featured in numerous online and print publications, including Art in America, Architectural Digest, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Chris Van Ueffelen’s book 500 x Art in Public, and Henry M. Sayre’s textbook A World of Art.
Kristin Leachman: Xylem Rays
Kristin Leachman: Xylem Rays is a key element in the museum’s annual Art & Nature festival. The exhibition is accompanied by a film about the artist and her work, and a booklet that includes an interview with Professor Derrick Cartwright.
Fascinated by patterns, textures, and the seemingly chance imagery that can emerge from them, Kristin Leachman bases her latest series of paintings on the tissue that transports water from the roots of trees up to the leaves:
“Conceived as mystical messages and artifacts, they are an exploration of the sinews that bind us together, both physically and metaphysically. Nature is my guide as it was for the first Angeleno artists, Native American women. I consider them landscape paintings because they incorporate the landscape into their making. I allow the xylem to communicate information from the California forests through naturally occurring symbols, celestial bodies, natural phenomena, and animal imagery. Each painting describes for me the mythic history and essence of the landscape.”
A native of Virginia, Leachman studied Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and Production Design at the American Film Institute, working for several years as a production designer in Hollywood before returning to full-time painting. Examples of her work are in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the San Diego Museum of Art, among others. She currently lives and works in Pasadena.
