Recent Acquisitions

Capri Theater, San Diego

Julius Shulman, Capri Theater, San Diego, 1954, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 in. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Gift of Craig Krull

Capri Theater, San Diego

Julius Shulman

Capri Theater, San Diego (1954)
Gift of Craig Krull

Julius Shulman’s (b. 1910, Brooklyn, NY – d. 2009, Los Angeles, CA) iconic photographs have become some of the most widely known and published images of the midcentury architecture of Los Angeles and Southern California. Soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1936, the architect Richard Neutra hired Shulman to photograph his Kun Residence, launching Shulman’s career. Shulman would go on to document many of Neutra’s other buildings as well as the work of architects Frank Lloyd Wright, Pierre Koenig, Charles Eames, and Raphael Soriano among many others. Capri Theater, San Diego (1954) depicts a movie theater in San Diego that was extensively remodeled in 1954 in a modernist design whose lobby became an improvised art exhibition space. Like many of the buildings Shulman photographed, the Capri Theater depicted here no longer exists, having been demolished in 2003. Capri Theater, San Diego marks the first work by Shulman to enter Langson IMCA’s collection, an important expansion of our photography holdings that reflects the history of midcentury modernism in California.

Year acquired: 2022

THEY: A Temple of Black Possibility [Allensworth Pt. 1-3]

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, THEY: A Temple of Black Possibility [Allensworth Pt. 1-3], 2022, Arches cover, acrylic paint, magazine, glitter, watercolor paper, cotton paper on inkjet print, Dimensions variable, Commissioned by UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art on occasion of the Dissolve exhibition (2022), museum purchase with additional support by Janet Mohle-Boetani, MD, © 2022 Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

THEY: A Temple of Black Possibility [Allensworth Pt. 1-3]

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle

THEY: A Temple of Black Possibility [Allensworth Pt. 1-3] (2022)
Museum purchase with additional support by Janet Mohle-Boetani, MD

In THEY: A Temple of Black Possibility [Allensworth Pt. 1-3] (2022), commissioned by Langson IMCA for the 2022 exhibition Dissolve, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (b. 1987, Louisville, KY) conjures dream-like images by collaging reproductions of archival photographs and postcards layered against blue and yellow backgrounds. The work emerges from Hinkle’s continued research into her own family’s presence in Allensworth, which in 1908 became the first Black-founded city in California. Intended as a self-sufficient sanctuary for Black people with its own government, schools, and farms, the town ultimately fell prey to water contamination. Hinkle resurrects its memory to suggest the continued possibility of Black utopias.

This commission demonstrates Langson IMCA’s commitment to supporting the work of Black women artists as well as artworks based on historical research into California’s communities of color.

Year acquired: 2023

Untitled 19

Erica Deeman, Untitled 19, 2014, Digital chromogenic print, 45 x 45 in. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, museum purchase, © Erica Deeman 2023, courtesy of Anthony Meier, Mill Valley

Untitled 19

Erica Deeman

Untitled 19 (2014)

Museum purchase

Untitled 19 (2014) exemplifies Erica Deeman’s (b. 1977, Nottingham, UK) Silhouettes series, in which she photographed Black women against stark white backgrounds. Deeman found each sitter through street casting in San Francisco, where the artist lives and continues to work. The contrast between the brightly illuminated backgrounds and the subjects’ dark skin tones, rendered nearly pitch black in her pictures, provokes an awareness of the relationship between the conventions of studio photography and the visual production of race. By foregrounding each subject’s serenity, the Silhouettes series subverts the complex historical legacy of silhouettes and their use in the racist pseudoscience of physiognomy. Untitled 19 adds a contemporary perspective on the representation of the African Diaspora to the broad collection of political art in Langson IMCA’s collection.

Year acquired: 2023

Hitting the Wall

Judy Baca, Hitting the Wall, 1986, Giclée print, 20 x 26 in. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Gift in memory of UCI Professor Emeritus Michael D. Butler

Hitting the Wall

Judy Baca

Hitting the Wall (1986)
Gift in memory of UCI Professor Emeritus Michael D. Butler

Judy Baca (b. 1946, Los Angeles, CA) established her presence in Los Angeles through political activism and large-scale murals, participating in the Chicano Art Movement. Baca also nurtured generations of students as a professor teaching in the Department of Art at UC Irvine from 1986 – 1995 and in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA starting in 1996. She founded the Los Angeles Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in 1974, an organization that supports and preserves public art. Through SPARC, Baca created her first mural in 1978, a monumental collectively painted artwork along the Tujunga Wash known as The Great Wall of Los Angeles; the mural now stretches over 2,750 feet long.

Hitting the Wall (1986) repeats an image from the artist’s 1984 mural of the same name under the Harbor Freeway in Los Angeles (Interstate 110). The city commissioned this mural to commemorate the 1984 Summer Olympics, the first Olympic Games to include a women’s marathon. Unfortunately, in 2019 the mural was whitewashed. Yet, Baca continues to advocate for its restoration. The Hitting the Wall print entering Langson IMCA’s collection now exists as an important historical record of the artist’s lost mural. It is the first work by Baca acquired by Langson IMCA, adding an important artist to our deep holdings of work associated with the Chicano Art Movement in Southern California from the 1960s to the present.

Year acquired: 2023

Untitled (Elements, Nature)

Matt Mullican, Untitled (Elements, Nature), circa 1987, Oilstick on canvas, 120 x 180 x 3 in. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Gift of Adam J. Liff and Ann Marie Plane

Untitled (Elements, Nature)

Matt Mullican

Untitled (Elements, Nature) (circa 1987)
Gift of Adam J. Liff and Ann Marie Plane

Matt Mullican (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA), son of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, rose to prominence as a member of the loose knit “CalArts Mafia,” an assortment of artists who graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and moved to New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. At CalArts, Mullican studied in the legendary post-studio course taught by John Baldessari, alongside fellow students Jack Goldstein, David Salle, James Welling, and Troy Brauntuch. After relocating to New York, Mullican’s practice examined the signs, images, and conventions of visual representation leading him to be associated with the rise of postmodernism with a group now identified as the “Pictures Generation.”

Since the mid-1970s, Mullican has focused on the invention and exploration of a cosmological vision that collapses the distinction between matter and language. Untitled (Elements, Nature) (circa 1987) exemplifies this universe through monochrome landscapes full of symbols. Mullican divides his cosmology into categories organized by color. Dominant in this work is green, which represents the material world and nature, used to depict symbolic representations of mountains, rocks, trees, fire, and sky.

Untitled (Elements, Nature) demonstrates Mullican’s interest in the landscape tradition, reflecting Langson IMCA’s collection of California Impressionism, while also departing from a focus on representation to explore symbols and signs. This marks the first work by Matt Mullican to enter Langson IMCA’s collection, expanding our holdings of an important generation of artists who attended CalArts and joining works by his father Lee Mullican and his teacher John Baldessari.

Year acquired: 2022

Snow in the High Sierras

painting with rocks and a river in the foreground and snowy mountain range in the background

Edgar Payne, Snow in the High Sierras, Early 20th century, Oil on canvas, 31 x 39 in. UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art, Donated in Memory of Christian A. Gerola

Snow in the High Sierras

Edgar Payne

Snow in the High Sierras (Early 20th century)
Donated in Memory of Christian A. Gerola

Edgar Payne (1883 – 1947)
Primarily self-taught, Edgar Payne is widely recognized as one of the most prominent California Impressionist painters of the early to mid-20th century. An avid plein air artist, he produced dramatic coastal views and mountainous scenes of which the Sierra Nevada mountain range was a favorite. Snow in the High Sierras showcases Payne’s modulation of color to produce atmospheric depth. Payne was a founding member and first president of the Laguna Beach Art Association, an organization that would eventually become the Laguna Art Museum, and wrote in 1941 the influential instructional manual Composition of Outdoor Painting, a book that remains in print. Langson IMCA’s collection includes eight other paintings by Payne.

Year acquired: 2021