Richard Avedon (1923-2004) set new precedents in fashion and portraiture for nearly seven decades. This exhibition of approximately 90 black and white photographs explores Avedon’s use of the camera to create images that helped to define fashion, theater, and movies as interrelated worlds that shared a similar visual vocabulary. His interest in performance began in the 1940s and 1950s with his early photographs of leading models in designer clothing for magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Taking his models out of the studio, Avedon combined the sophistication and glamour of haute couture with the excitement of modern life he celebrated in the streets of Paris, Rome, and New York.

Donald Wexler practiced architecture during what he calls the “golden age” of California architecture from the immediate postwar years through the 1970s. This was a time when architects enjoyed considerable freedom to employ new materials and technologies in their search for functionally beautiful architecture.

For more than 40 years, John Baldessari has been a mainstay of the Southern California art scene and a key contributor to national and international explorations of conceptual art in its many idioms, whether linguistic, performance-based, or photo and object-based. An underlying theme in his art has been the questioning of perceptual experience – how we see, interpret, and understand the world around us – and how this experience can dislocate preconceived notions and challenge conventional thinking.