LAVA EVENTS WILL TOAST LOCAL TALENT

In tribute to the vitality of L.A.’s art community, Los Angeles Visual Arts (a collaborative effort between commercial art galleries and academic institutions) has planned a number of festive events beginning Jan. 21.

An exhibition titled “To the Astonishing Horizon” was organized by New York art critic and writer Peter Frank; it opens Jan. 21 at the Los Angeles Design Center. The show consists of 131 works by California artists and remains on view through Feb. 15.

The Fourth Annual LAVA tours of member museums and galleries is set for the weekend of Jan. 26 and 27. Mayor Tom Bradley will proclaim a LAVA week, free chartered buses will run for the two-day event and performances by professional acting groups and performance artists are planned.

Free maps to guide visitors to the various sites will be provided; refreshments and parking will be available.

Cinema art director Fred Harpman has been retained as special design consultant on visuals to enhance opening ceremonies and the LAVA Beaux Arts Costume Ball (co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art) on April 13.

Harpman will work with art students from UCLA, USC, CalArts, Cal State LA, Otis/Parsons and Art Center College of Design to realize the project. In addition, USC, UCLA and CalArts students will be doing three custom-designed and hand-painted billboards commemorating LAVA events, with space donated by Foster and Kleiser.

For additional information call 680-4097 or write: P.O.Box 30857, Los Angeles, Calif. 90030.

A “new” Santa Barbara Museum of Art opens its doors Jan. 26 with 16 new or refurbished galleries. The museum has increased its previous space by 70%--up to 56,000 square feet.

Architect Paul Gray provided improvements within a limited space by designing a six-level addition to the 6,000 square-foot building site, called the Park Wing. The new wing is the museum’s operations hub, containing two galleries, extensive art storage, curatorial and administrative offices, a bookstore and a 157-seat auditorium.

To assure visual consistency, Gray incorporated architectural features from the original David Adler design. For example, in keeping with the original museum facade arch motif, a 22-foot-high Palladian arch dominates the new Park Wing entrance.

The renovated interior area (within the previously existing walls) is now 90% public space. Fourteen galleries allow for the display of a generous selection from the permanent collection as well as changing exhibitions and presentations of the museum’s growing photography, prints and drawings collections. The Ala Story Collection of International Modern Art will be housed in one of the new galleries.

A totally renovated Ludington Court, nucleus of the museum’s collection of classical sculpture, serves as an impressive prelude to areas displaying art and artifacts from other historical periods and various cultures.

Expansion was made possible by an intricate financing plan triggered by a generous bequest from former trustee Alice Keck Park. The new wing, named for Mrs. Park, also houses the museum’s new security control center and fire safety system.

These were designed by art security professional Joseph Chapman, who is also responsible for such installations at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and the National Gallery in Washington.

Dedication ceremonies are scheduled at the museum’s State Street entrance at 11 a.m. Jan. 26, followed by music and dance presentations and a host of other events featuring visual and performance artists in cooperation with the business community in the downtown Santa Barbara area.

Four exhibitions of unusual interest open in New York next month. The Metropolitan Museum of Art hosts a major painting show of works by Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio, Feb. 9 to April 14. Titled “The Age of Caravaggio,” it contains about 40 works by Caravaggio, 14 by his precursors from Northern Italy and some 45 paintings by his most important contemporaries active in Rome and Naples during his lifetime. They include Annibale Carraci, Federico Barocci, Peter Paul Rubens, Adam Elsheimer and Guido Reni. This is the first large exhibition of Caravaggio’s oeuvre ever held in the U.S.

The Museum of Modern Art presents a landmark survey of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, Feb. 21 to June 4, and the first comprehensive survey of the drawings of Henri Matisse, Feb. 28 to May 14.

Jointly sponsored by MOMA and the Reunion des Musees Nationaux de France, “Henri Rousseau” features some 60 paintings dating from the beginning of his documented career, in 1886, to his last completed work, “The Dream,” done in 1910. Almost all of Rousseau’s acknowledged masterpieces and several key works from foreign collections, never before seen in the U.S., will be included.

“The Drawings of Henri Matisse,” organized by British art historian John Golding for the Arts Council of Great Britain and shown at the Hayward Gallery in London last fall, contains about 150 works on paper, nearly a third of which have not been seen publicly. Many known masterpieces are shown in the company of recently discovered works and some from previously inaccessible collections. They span the full range of Matisse’s draftsmanship from early academic studies to the audacious large-scale works of his last years.

At the Guggenheim, “Kandinsky in Paris: 1934-1944” is the last of a series of three exhibitions mounted as an in-depth study of the achievements of Vasily Kandinsky, one of the most influential figures in 20th-Century art. This exhibition contains 200 paintings, drawings and watercolors made by Kandinsky during the final decade of his life. The artist left Germany when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, and settled in Neuilly-sur Seine, near Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944. The Kandinsky show runs from Feb. 15 to April 14.

Plans have been announced for the establishment of a sculpture garden on a seven-acre site in Minneapolis. The $7-million project, scheduled for completion during the fall of 1986, was made possible in part through a major contribution by Minneapolis-born, Los Angeles collector Frederick R. Weisman. His gift of $1 million established a sculpture purchase fund for the acquisition of major works of art for the garden.

Designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes, the garden will contain permanent as well as temporary installations of large-scale sculpture by American and internationally noted artists, arranged by the Walker Art Center.