Video Showcase Opens in Long Beach

Long Beach Museum of Art’s acclaimed Open Channels Television Production Grant Program, in place since 1985, has been instrumental in the completion of two dozen new video works. Among those works, two--Sherry Millner’s “Scenes from the Micro War” and John Arvanites’ “Blues for Piggy”--were selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial Film/Video Exhibition, and another--Donna Matorin’s “Quickening”--was honored as a Work of Excellence at the 10th Tokyo Video Festival.

These and other works supported by the program are showcased in “Open Channels Five-Year Survey, Featuring Open Channels V,” which opens at the museum today.

Included are the most recent works, which constitute Open Channels V--video and performance artist Nancy Buchanan’s “Mouth(piece),” architect and film/video artist Fu-Ding Cheng’s “The Winged Cage,” Paul Tassie’s “Remember Flavor” and Lawrence Andrews’ “Strategies for the Development of/Redefining the Purpose Served, Art in the Age of . . . a.k.a. The Making of the Towering Inferno.” Also included are works from earlier programs, by artists including Mary Daval, Ezra Litwak, Scott Rankin, David Bunn, Paul Kos, Victoria Bearden, Paul McCarthy, Lynne Kirby, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Jeffrey Vallance.

The Open Channels program, an overview of which was recently featured at the Third Fukui International Video Biennale in Japan, provides selected video artists with $2,000 cash grants, as well as a case of videotape stock, technical support and access to participating cable operators’ post-production studios.

RESTORED BOTTICELLI: “The Coronation of the Virgin,” a masterpiece by the 15th-Century Italian artist Botticelli, has gone back on show in Florence 50 years after it was removed for restoration. The work, painted by Botticelli between 1488 and 1490, is on display for the first time since 1940 in a chapel of the city’s Uffizi Museum. Lengthy restoration was needed after the surface of plaster and glue on which Botticelli painted started to disintegrate, restorers said. According to Reuters press agency, museum officials said the work would be moved in April to the Uffizi’s Botticelli room which contains the artist’s “Birth of Venus” and “Spring.”

LANDMARK: Pacific Asia Museum has been designated a California State Historic Landmark. According to architectural historian Karen Weitze, the building qualified for the designation because it is “the only known structure (among) California’s early 20th Century cultural centers to combine commercial art dealership and collecting with a formally designed, planned and built proto museum. . . . (Museum founder Grace Nicholson’s) first-and second-story plans, with eight specialized exhibition rooms below and two viewing rooms and lecture hall above, were state-of-the-art museum arrangements in the United States of the 1920s.” Weitze said that the building, which was completed in 1929, is one of only seven American museum buildings known to have used a Period Revival architectural design--this one emphasizing a rare stylistic Chinese Model--as opposed to the Classical style museum design. The museum, at 46 N. Los Robles Ave., is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

VIDEO DISC: The Southwest Museum has completed production on its first video disc of images from its historical photograph collection. Photographer Alan Liechty has spent the last year copying 52,000 photographs from the museum collection onto the disc. The featured photographers, whose works document Native Americans from North, South and Central America as well as the Hispanic and Anglo history of the Southwest and Southern California, include A. C. Vroman, George Wharton James and Charles F. Lummis. The video disc is available for use by researchers in the reading room of the museum’s library. A second video disc will be produced in 1990 and will contain paintings, works on paper and the remainder of the photo collection.

APPOINTMENT: Diana du Pont has taken over as curator of exhibitions for Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum. Du Pont came to the University Art Museum from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she had been assistant curator of photography since 1987.