Photo by South OC Beaches
The Laguna Art Museum Presents Laguna Beach: The Art Colony and It’s History tonight, Thursday June 25 2015.
The Laguna Art Museum is located at 307 Cliff Drive.
The event is free and begins at 6:00pm.
Janet Blake, curator of historical art, will give a presentation on the history of the Laguna Beach art colony from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s.
The lecture will tell the story of how the little seaside community became a mecca for American artists.
Those artists joined to form an art association for the purpose of exhibiting and selling their work.
The Art Association also served as promoting the community as a champion of the arts.
That organization—the Laguna Beach Art Association—was founded in August 1918 and was the forerunner of today’s Laguna Art Museum.
The Laguna Art Museum occupies the building that the LBAA opened on Cliff Drive in February 1929.
Janet Blake holds a BA in art and art history from California State University, Long Beach.
Her field as a scholar is the history of California art from 1900 to 1950.
Her focus is on American impressionists in California and the regional or American Scene artists of the 1930s and 1940s.
Her exhibition Early Artists in Laguna Beach: The Impressionists was shown at Laguna Art Museum in 1986.
In 1991 she co-edited the book American Scene Painting: California, 1930s and 1940s with Ruth Westphal.
In 2007, Blake curated a major retrospective of the work of Millard Sheets at the Millard Sheets Center for the Arts at Fairplex in Pomona.
Since joining Laguna Art Museum in 1998, she has worked on several of the museum’s outstanding exhibitions.
In 2008 she assisted Will South with the major retrospective on William Wendt
and she wrote the chronology of the artist’s life for the accompanying book.
In 2009 she was one of the curators of Collecting California: Selections from Laguna Art Museum.
In 2010 she curated E. Roscoe Shrader, accompanied by a book on the artist for which she wrote the main essay.
Her major retrospective exhibition on Clarence Hinkle was shown at the museum in 2012, accompanied by a comprehensive book on the artist.
Her most recent retrospective exhibition was 2014’s Rex Brandt: In Praise of Sunshine.
For more information contact our Development and Membership offices at (949) 494-8971 x203
