EngAGE Stories

For 50 years, Los Angeles-based designers Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman played a central role in the distinctive aesthetic of California mid-century modernism. During Modernism Week in Palm Springs in February, Ackerman, 95, made an appearance at “Masters of Midcentury California Design: The Story of Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman,” an event which featured a panel of writers, curators, historians and gallery directors; and a lecture by Dan Chavkin and Lisa Thackaberry, authors of “Hand-in-Hand: Ceramics, Mosaics, Tapestries, and Wood Carvings, and Hardware by the California Mid-Century Designers Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman.” It also included the premiere of “In Tandem: The Life and Work of Jerry and Evelyn Ackerman,” the film made by Margaret Halkin and Katie Nartonis, and the unveiling of Ackerman-designed doors to be installed at the medical center.

To get more information, you can visit their website, learn more about the book, and read a recent LA Times article.

“In the spring of 1932, capitalist (and prolific collector of Mexican art) Nelson Rockefeller hired Mexican painter and staunch socialist Diego Rivera to paint a mural for the lobby of the newly erected Rockefeller Center in New York City. Sketches were drawn and approved, but when reporters leaked that Rivera had added an image of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a battle began.

“In the end, the painting was destroyed, ideological differences hardened and the two families lived with a legacy of animosity. But now the daughters of the two men have teamed up to leave the past behind and preserve not only their fathers’ legacies, but the art they both loved. Guadalupe Rivera Marin, 90, and Ann Rockefeller, 80, aim to raise $3 million each to build individual galleries in their fathers’ names at the Mexican Museum, set to break ground at a new and bigger site this year in San Francisco.”

Get the full story here from NPR.

“‘Robert Williams: Slang Aesthetics‘ is a survey of the artist’s recent work, with more than 84 pieces, including painting, water colors, concept sketches, drawings, prints and some cartoonishly insane looking sculptures. Among them: a 9-foot fiberglass piece from 2013 titled “The Rapacious Wheel,” a circular arrangement of bared teeth that looks like a combination of a Mayan totem and Wile E. Coyote’s worst nightmare.” Read more here about the 72-year-old whose life was “inspired by hot rods and comics.”