Walking gallery of art
This year’s Wear LACMA collection seems to take flight or fill with light. The wearer is a showplace.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently announced that its fall 2016 Wear LACMA collection will include wearable items inspired by Japanese ceramics, the street-lamp sculpture permanently installed in front of the museum and a 1959 painting by Jay DeFeo.
The art-meets-fashion mashup, launched in 2012, recruits local design talent to create limitededition items inspired by artwork in the museum’s permanent collection.
The upcoming installment, which will be available to purchase beginning Nov. 7, is set to include the following items:
Oliver Peoples has designed sunglasses inspired by Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” (2008) installation of street lamps. The popular display of lights is featured on the sunglasses case, and if you breathe on the gold-tone, photocromic-mineral lenses, the LACMA logo will appear.
Pam & Gela, the newest endeavor by Juicy Couture founders Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor, has created a minicollection of women’s T-shirts and a jacket that features crane and blossom motifs plucked from 19th and 20th century ceramics found in the museum’s collection of Japanese art.
Each Wear LACMA offering includes jewelry.
Past collections have included exquisite pieces by Jennifer Meyer (inspired by an Ed Ruscha painting), Irene Neuwirth (inspired by a jeweled mother of pearl snuffbox commissioned by Frederick the Great of Prussia) and Anita Ko (inspired by a reading table and porcelain bottle from Korea’s Joseon period).
This time it’s a suite of jewelry that includes necklaces, bracelets and earrings created by Lisa Eisner. The inspiration, fittingly, is “The Jewel,” a 1959 painting by DeFeo.
LACMA’s announcement included a comment from Eisner about her inspiration: “Every time I visit LACMA, I pay homage to Jay DeFeo’s ‘The Jewel.’ This painting resonates with me in a spiritual way like when one goes into a beautiful church in Italy. The sculptural element of the work — the layers and layers of building up and breaking down, the sunburst middle and the rays beaming out to the edges — it completely moves me with its energy and beauty.”
Over the years, the Wear LACMA program has enlisted an impressive roster of local design talent, including George Esquivel, Monique Lhuillier, Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the Elder Statesman’s Greg Chait, Gregory Parkinson and Libertine’s Johnson Hartig.
The new Wear LACMA goods will be sold at the museum’s store at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. and at lacmastore.org, with proceeds benefiting the museum and its programs.