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L.A. Collects L.A. – Latin America in Southern California Collections
TALK + BOOK SIGNING

Saturday, April 7, 2018
7 – 9 PM

Wacko / Soap Plant
La Luz de Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd,
Los Angeles, CA 90027

Saturday, April 7, Soap Plant Wacko: Purveyor of Post-Pop Culture hosts the editor (Jesse Lerner) & photographer (Rubén Ortiz Torres) of ‘L.A. Collects L.A. – Latin America in Southern California Collections’ (Vincent Price Art Museum, 2018) for a night of engaging discussion with some of the book’s featured collectors (Billy Shire, Carl Baldwin, Tom Patchett).

About the book:

Photographs by Rubén Ortiz Torres document the wide range of Latin American art in the collections of Carl Baldwin’s Velvetería, April and Ron Dammann, E. Michael ‘Baltazar’ Díaz, Betty Duker, Armando and María Durón, Alonso Elías and Patricia Fontes Rosas de Elias, Lêda Leitão Martins, Nicholas Pardon, Tom Patchett, Sammy Sayago, Dan Segal, Enrique Serrato, Billy Shire, Esperanza Valverde, Elisabeth Waldo, Richard and Rebecca Zapanta, the Stendahl Gallery, and Bill London’s Pedorrero Muffler repair shop. Six essays explore the cultural, political, and social histories of Latin American art and artifacts in Southern California collections, including Matthew H. Robb’s sleuthing on the pre-Columbian as MacGuffin in mid-century Los Angeles, Ana Elena Mallet on Taxco Silver in California, Jesse Lerner on the meeting of ancient and modern in the Arensberg collection, Selene Preciado on Chicano art collections and collectors, Rubén Ortiz Torres on the Pedorrero, and Amy Sánchez-Arteaga and Misael Díaz on the Elías Fontes collection.

The catalog is accompanying the exhibition L.A. collects L.A., Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park (CA) in the frame of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA (September 2017-January 2018) led by The Getty.

Featured Bios:

JESSE LERNER is a documentary filmmaker, curator, and writer based in Los Angeles. His short films Natives (1991, with Scott Sterling), Magnavoz (2006), and T.S.H. (2004), and the feature-length experimental documentaries Frontierland(1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres), Ruins (1999), The American Egypt (2001), Atomic Sublime (2010), and The Absent Stone (2013, with Sandra Rozental) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America, and Japan, and have has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles Film Festivals. His books include The Maya of Modernism, F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (with Alex Juhasz), The Shock of Modernity, Ism IsmIsm (with Luciano Piazza), and The Catherwood Project (with Leandro Katz).

RUBEN ORTIZ TORRES was born in Mexico City in 1964. Educated within the utopian models of republican Spanish anarchism soon confronted the tragedies and cultural clashes of post colonial third world. Being the son of a couple of Latin American folklore musicians he soon identified more with the noises of urban punk music. After giving up the dream of playing baseball in the major leagues, and some architecture training (Harvard Graduate School of Design) he decided to study art. He went first to the oldest and one of the most academic art schools of the Americas (the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City) and later to one of the newest and more experimental (Calarts in Valencia CA). After enduring Mexico City’s earthquake and pollution he moved to Los Angeles with a Fullbright grant to survive riots, fires, floods, more earthquakes, and proposition 187. During all this he has been able to produce artwork in the form of paintings, photographs, objects, installations, videos, films, customized machines, curatorial projects and even an opera. He is part of the permanent Faculty of the University of California in San Diego. He has participated in several international exhibitions and film festivals. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Artpace in San Antonio, the California Museum of Photography in Riverside CA, the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid Spain among others.

After showing his work and teaching art around the world, he now realizes that his dad’s music was in fact better than most rock ‘n’ roll.

For press inquiries, please contact Lee Joseph at Reverberations Media.
For book purchase inquiries, please contact Tricia Fetters at tricia at soapplant.com