Los Angeles Times: Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announces new fellows

Excerpt:

As the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has supported California artists, so too has it supported work about California. Last year, the foundation supported a project about murals by Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzales-Day that was displayed at the Skirball Cultural Center as part of “Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA.”

The artist’s “Surface Tension” was a record of murals throughout Los Angeles — an attempt to examine the broad gamut of image-making on the city’s walls.

“One of the things that we hear a lot is the relationship between Mexican muralism and the murals of Los Angeles,” Gonzales-Day says. “The part we are less familiar with are the celebrity murals and the murals that are part of advertising and murals that are part of vernacular culture. I was trying to look at those overlaps.”

In the process, he began to consider “the city as an outdoor museum maintained by communities for communities” — one that occurs on an unprecedented scale. Says the artist: “I didn’t realize how vast it was.”