Local museums and arts organizations have created online, home-based experiences for art lovers.
By Justine Amodeo, Special to the Independent
While life as we know it has changed, at least temporarily, being confined to your home does not mean you have to give up arts and culture. If you’re not a student taking online classes and you’ve already binged “Tiger King” and “Ozark” on Netflix, check out some of these virtual art experiences, both local and international.
#TourDePageant
Laguna Beach’s Festival of Arts is encouraging fans to visit its website or follow @FestivalPageant on Instagram to virtually experience art from museums around the globe through the magic of tableaux vivants, or living pictures. The Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach has launched #TourDePageant, a bi-weekly social media series showcasing past Pageant re-creations, with people posing as classical and contemporary works of art.
Highlights from the #TourDePageant series include a virtual trip to Musée d’Orsay in Paris, France to see Monet’s “Women in the Garden,” a journey to Mexico City to the Museo Mural Diego Rivera, a peek at Édouard Manet’s “Music in the Tuileries Gardens” from the Hugh Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, as well as Pageant re-creations from Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and more. Visit foapom.com for more details.
LAM+LAB at Home
Believing art has the power to connect us, the Laguna Art Museum is offering innovative arts activities for all ages with at-home projects that can be shared and featured in the museum’s Instastories.
Among them: Create a collaborative sculpture inspired by Gilbert “Magu” Luján’s 1986 screen print, Cruising Turtle Island. Luján, a well-known and influential Chicano sculptor, muralist and painter, is associated with Self-Help Graphics, the East Los Angeles printmaking workshop and arts center that emerged from the Chicano movement of the 1960s.
Find inspiration in the art and from your own neighborhood to create a fictional “Magu” map with a recycled cardboard box as a base. Experiment with paper and tape to add sculptural elements. Collaborate with your family to make your map transform and grow. If you don’t have these materials, create a drawing of a fictional map using pencils, colored pencils, pastels, markers, or anything you have at home. Share your art at @lagunaartmuseum on Instagram by posting a photo of your creations and tag #LAMLabAtHome. See your work featured in LAM’s Instastories. Visit lagunaartmuseum.org for more details.
Cinema Orange Virtual Screenings and Studio Demonstrations
Orange County Museum of Art is also helping establish a home base of creativity and inspiration every Thursday with original virtual programs sent directly to followers’ inboxes. In partnership with the Newport Beach Film Festival, OCMA is screening independent films from around the globe beginning April 2 and continuing through the month.
Thursday between 5 and 11 p.m. watch Ursula Von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own, a documentary exploring the life and work of artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose family was detained in Germany for five years in a post-WWII refugee camp before moving to America. Von Rydingsvard’s monumental cedar sculptures have been featured in the Venice Biennale, and are held in museum collections around the United States.
A number of other interactive experiences are available as well, including:
Social Distance, Haiku, and You: Sound Collage Public Collaboration with Los Angeles-based sound artist Alan Nakagawa. By April 16 at midnight, write and record a haiku about your experience (to write your haiku, compose a three-line poem with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the last line) and send it to OCMA. Nakagawa will compose a sound collage comprised of the collective haikus, to be released on Thursday, April 23. Email [email protected] no later than April 16, 11:59 pm with your typed poem and an .mp3 recording of you reciting your composition. (ocmaexpand.org/programs).
