Curators prize goes to LACMA

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has emerged as a winner in the Assn. of Art Museum Curators’ latest round of awards for excellence, which were announced this week at the group’s annual meeting in New York.

Senior curator Stephanie Barron’s reinstallation of LACMA’s permanent collection of modern art, including the recent acquisition of the Janice and Henri Lazarof collection, was cited as the most outstanding exhibition or installation in the Pacific time zone category.

In the Eastern time zone, the judges called a tie between the Museum of Modern Art’s ‘Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937,’ curated by Anne Umland, and the Jewish Museum’s ‘Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976.’ The latter was curated by Norman Kleeblat and a team of consultants in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and the St. Louis Art Museum. ‘Action/Abstraction’ also garnered the Central time zone award for its St. Louis edition, curated by Charlotte Eyerman.

Among publications honored by the association, ‘Drawn by New York: Six Centuries of Watercolors and Drawings at the New York Historical Society’ by Roberta J.M. Olson was named the most outstanding catalog of a museum’s pemanent collection. ‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’ — Expanded Edition’ by Sarah Greenough was deemed the best exhibition catalog. ‘Marsden Hartley’s Aryanism. Eugenics in a Finnish-Yankee Sauna’ by Randall R. Griffey was the top essay.

— Suzanne Muchnic