Forest Lawn Museum unveils new art history exhibition
By Luke Netzley
Pasadena Weekly Deputy Editor
The Forest Lawn Museum in Glendale has opened its newest exhibition, “Unveiling the Previous: The Art & Record of Forest Lawn,” to celebrate the special creative heritage of the memorial park as effectively as the artwork and architecture throughout Forest Lawn’s six southern California spots.
“Typically, our rotated exhibitions are extremely outward going through,” explained Museum Director Dr. James Fishburne. “But we also have our own abundant archive of drawings, watercolors, 1000’s of photos, and a lot more. I want to share the story of Forest Lawn with people today via images, artworks, and artifacts for the reason that it parallels the background of Southern California.”
Fishburne is an art historian with a PhD in Italian renaissance artwork history from UCLA and has had a enjoy for classical art given that he was a boy or girl exploring artwork museums with his mother. For the previous a few decades, he’s been the director of Forest Garden Museum, household to an incredible assortment of statues, paintings and stained-glass home windows.
“There were being more than more than enough pieces to fill numerous galleries,” he shared. “But it was a make a difference of arranging the exhibition in a comprehensible away. It’s structured chronologically, but it’s actually organized thematically to tell different stories.”
These distinctive tales include things like “A Glimpse of the Past,” which unravels the substantial photographic historical past of the museum’s evolution over the yrs, “Michelangelo at Forest Lawn,” which aspects the backstories guiding each and every of the diverse Michelangelo artworks in the museum, from archival photographs of Forest Lawn’s David duplicate to a mosaic of scenes from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and “Forest Lawn Reimagined.” The latter seems to be at original hand-drawn patterns of competing architectural visions for some of Forest Lawn’s most popular buildings, which includes the legendary hilltop mausoleum.
“In this exhibition, you see the alternate heritage of what could have been had issues gone in different ways,” Fishburne spelled out.
Site visitors to the exhibition can assume to be captivated not only by the spectacular operates of first and replicated art, but also by the attractiveness and gravity of the place.
“Art museums are a wonderful place to stage outside the house of your normal everyday condition and to replicate on a little something that is bigger than you and has been about for a longer period than you,” Fishburne described. “There’s a timelessness to artwork that transcends the day-to-day. It is a meditative place, but also an instructional place.”
Forest Lawn has very long been a regional patron of the visual arts and has performed extensive roles in the communities they’ve served. When the Forest Garden Museum opened in 1952, founder Dr. Hubert Eaton wrote that the park should be a position where by “artists study and sketch where by schoolteachers deliver joyful small children to see factors they study of in textbooks.” It is this eyesight of offering artwork to the public that nevertheless lies at the main of the museum’s mission.
“We’re a place wherever people today can occur to find out additional about vintage do the job of art, and a little bit about our historical past,” Fishburne said.
The exhibition, which commenced Oct. 20, operates by March 13. To routine a absolutely free tour of the “Unveiling the Past” show or to acquire more info about guided excursions in the museum and walking excursions all through the park, get in touch with the Forest Lawn Museum at [email protected].