The Escalette Collection of Art is pleased to lend artworks to museums and cultural institutions for exhibitions around the world. Our loan program not only raises awareness of the Escalette Collection, Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Chapman University on a national and international level, but also provides opportunities for new audiences to experience works from the Collection.
We are excited to share that works from the Escalette Collection are currently on loan to the Marta Herford Museum in Herford, Germany. Located in north-central Germany between Düsseldorf and Hanover, the Marta Herford was designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry, who is known in Southern California for designing the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The museum’s collection focuses on contemporary art, architecture, and design.
Four works from the Escalette Collection are featured in the exhibition Mindset Los Angeles – Frank Gehry and the Cool School, which explores the influence of Los Angeles’s emerging art scene on Gehry’s revolutionary approach to architecture. Gehry lived in Los Angeles during the late 1950s, a period when the city was beginning to establish itself as an important art metropolis. An emerging group of artists known as the “Cool School” drew inspiration from Beat literature and embraced experimentation and nonconformity, distinguishing themselves from the Abstract Expressionist movement that had become well established in New York.
For many artists, including Robert Rauschenberg and John Paul Jones, California’s rapidly industrializing and ever-changing landscape was closely tied to a newfound freedom to experiment. New materials, many associated with advertising and commercial production, such as billboards and industrial products, became new mediums of artistic expression. The unique combination of growing cities and expansive freeway systems, set against the Pacific coast and its distinctive light, provided inspiration for generations of artists.
“California was about freedom, because it wasn’t burdened with history. The economy was booming because of the aircraft industry and movie business, and things were going up quickly. Everybody could make whatever they wanted, and, while I didn’t realize it then, I realize now that’s what democracy is about. Democracy didn’t say everybody has to have taste.”
— Frank Gehry
As a young architecture student during the emergence of the “Cool School,” Gehry was deeply influenced by both the California landscape and the artists working in Los Angeles at the time. Mindset Los Angeles brings together artworks from around the world to trace the influences, ideas, and individuals that shaped Gehry’s early development as an architect. The exhibition features works by Ken Price and Ronald Davis from the Escalette Collection.
Price was a landmark figure in the Los Angeles art scene, exhibiting at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1960 at just twenty-five years old. He experimented with unconventional forms in ceramics and sculpture, pushing the boundaries of both materials and shape. His distinctive sculptural forms also found their way into his drawings and prints, which often depict fantastical or impossible objects, such as the sculpture represented in Acrobatic Figurine Cup (V). His later work, including Untitled, reflects his interest in the expansive landscapes of the American Southwest, where he moved in 1970.
Ronald Davis is known for his geometric abstraction and his innovative use of illusionism. Employing new technologies and materials, Davis became a master of geometric perspective, color, and space. Later in his career, he explored printmaking as another means of investigating these ideas, including through the lithograph held in the Escalette Collection.
Through loans such as these, the Escalette Collection is able to share its holdings with audiences beyond our campus in Orange, contributing to exhibitions that connect Southern California art, contemporary artistic practice, and broader histories of art and design. We are proud to see works from the Collection represented in Mindset Los Angeles and to contribute to this international exploration of the artistic influences that helped shape one of the most influential architects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
We invite you to explore all the works in the Escalette Collection by visiting our eMuseum.
Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences is the proud home of the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art. The Escalette Collection exists to inspire critical thinking, foster interdisciplinary discovery, and strengthen bonds with the community. Beyond its role in curating art in public spaces, the Escalette is a learning laboratory that offers diverse opportunities for student and engagement and research, and involvement with the wider community. The collection is free and open to the public to view.
