Alice Hutchison Interview Part I

Extensive and exciting preparations for the new exhibit "Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980" will begin in two weeks, according to Alice Hutchison, curator of the CSULB UAM.

In October, the UAM and the Long Beach Art Museum were jointly awarded a $175,000 grant to research and develop an exhibit which will explore Long Beach’s central role in the early days and development of video art.

The award was one of the 15 grants that the Getty Foundation endowed to museums across Southern California to fund its $2.8-million project “Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980.”

After seeing the UAM’s September exhibit “art/tapes/22” LBMA’s director of collections, Sue Ann Robinson, personally invited curator Alice Hutchison to be involved with the project.

When the LBMA staff asked her, Hutchison said, she told them that the UAM had to be involved. It needed to be a partnership because she could not do it on her own.

Hutchison will be working as co-curator with the LBMA's Kathy Rae Huffman who is currently based in Europe. This means they will be using a lot of the video chat tool Skype, Hutchison said.

"This project is one of the only international features," Hutchison explains, not only because Huffman lives in Europe but also because of the history surrounding video art history.

Three decades ago, artists from around the world traveled to Long Beach to use the state-of-the art technology that was available through the CSULB art department and the LBMA, making the city an important fixture in the developing world of video art.

These pioneering videos of art are “an important piece of art history that hasn’t been told,” Hutchison said. And it is an “important acknowledgment,” she said, for both the city of Long Beach and for the UAM to be a part of this exhibit.