“A CRASH COURSE IN POSTWAR L.A. ART”
A devoted booster as well as collector and journalist, Quinn describes, in one video, her collection, her family and her enthusiasm for art and artists in California, Armenia and around the world. Another video presents her own photographs documenting
Jim McHugh, Portrait of Joan and Jack, 1983, Innova archival pigment print, 25” x 40”. Photograph by Jim McHugh.
Quinn said that people asked her if she would show the exhibition at their galleries and women’s clubs and community things. “And I said no,” she replied. “Because I thought it was so narcissistic to take your collection and have people say, ‘Oh, look what you’ve done, look what you’ve bought.’”
OPPOSITE PAGE: Samvel Saghatelian, Untitled [portrait of Joan Agajanian Quinn], 2003, oil on canvas, 40” x 30”. Photograph by Ken Marchionmo.
The rollicking energy of “On The Edge,” an exhibition of mostly Southern California artists of the 1970s through the ‘90s from the Jack and Joan Quinn Family Collection, is only rivaled by the exuberance of its collector, Joan Agajanian Quinn.
Now in her 80s, Quinn finally gave in to the dogged requests of curator Rachel McCullah Wainwright of the Bakersfield Museum of Art and agreed to share her art with the public. For the show’s first iteration in the Central Valley, Wainwright selected pieces from the Quinns’ home, the homes of their twin daughters Amanda and Jennifer, and holdings at Jack Quinn’s former law firm, Arnold and Porter in Los Angeles. To fit the Armenian Museum’s simpler quarters, the curator trimmed the Bakersfield show from 146 to 86 pieces.
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“I’ve changed over the years. The artists are very well known. Their voice can make a difference in the community. The community can know them and learn from them, and schools can come in.”
ON THE EDGE: LOS ANGELES ART 1970S-1990S FROM THE JOAN AND JACK QUINN FAMILY
ON THE EDGE BRINGS QUINN COLLECTION TO ARMENIAN MUSEUM
This vibrant art lover, in partnership with her now-deceased husband, the prominent Los Angeles attorney Jack Quinn, lived and entertained amongst layers and layers of art, art objects and Armenian rugs they amassed over their 56 years of marriage. Architectural critic Martin Filler called the collection, on view through November at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts, “a crash course in post-war L.A. Art.”
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High in a corner, paired photographs of Jack and Joan, wearing Edwardian costumes from the movies of Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov, survey the room. The Yerevan photographer Zaven Sarkissian captured these set pieces in the famed director’s home-turned-museum. Shaded by a broad-brimmed hat lavished with white roses, Quinn’s dark, haunting eyes conjure up a lost time. “There should be more light on Jack,” she murmured.
REFUGE P A I N T I N G S B Y J C A I R O L D I O c t o b e r 8 - 2 9 SEPT/OCT 2022 33
her ubiquitous presence within the Southern California arts milieu. Wall labels provide QR codes linking viewers to 35 years of Quinn’s YouTube interviews with the artists from her PBS series on the arts, “The Joan Quinn Profiles.”
On the Armenian Museum’s third floor, Joan Agajanian Quinn welcomes me, cane in hand, and walks me past the main works toward the companion show, “Discovering Takouhi,” her Armenian name, translating as “Queen.” These 30 portraits of Joan by artists of the Armenian Diaspora and homeland — expressionistic, abstract, conceptual and magical — are only a few of the 300-plus portraits she’s received as gifts from artist friends and admiring strangers (some are also scattered in the larger exhibition).
Quinn points to her surrealistic portrait by Samvel Saghatelian, a suggestively-clad woman holding an open book and, in her arms,
An icon herself, Quinn was born in San Pedro, the extroverted daughter of second-generation ArmenianAmericans. Her mother was artistically gifted and her
ABOVE: Joe Goode, Torn Sky (from the Vandalism Series), 1975, layered and cut oil on canvas, 24 1/2” x 20 1/2”. Photograph by Alan Shaffer.
Several works, pulled from their domestic settings, groan against the strictures of a white-box showcase. A battered Frank Gehry “Experimental Edges Chair” of corrugated cardboard betrays Quinn’s preference for practical use over pristine preservation. Early on, she claimed, she carried Billy Al Bengston’s aluminum “Camera Case Portrait,” hand-painted with her beloved Louis Vuitton’s brown-and-tan “LV”/quatrefoil pattern, to art openings, “but after that I treated it as an icon.”
father a racing car owner and motor-race promoter. In her teens, Quinn befriended Billy Al Bengston, a motorcycle racer and painter who later showed with The Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles’ trailblazing post-war venue for contemporary art. Just a few years out of USC, Joan proved a natural educator, training student teachers in her first-grade classroom overflowing with visual images, exhibits, hand-lettered signs and color.
BELOW: Lita Albuquerque, Volcanic Equinox 20/100, 1999, silkscreen print, 25 1/2” x 54 3/4”. Photograph by Alan Shaffer.
The tone of the main exhibition is lighter. As Wainwright informs us, the works from the show’s three decades “[represent] the significant strides artists made in establishing Los Angeles as a competitive counter-market to the New York and European scenes [and also begin] a momentous shift in diversity where various backgrounds and intentions flooded the scene and flourished.”
her “alter ego,” a stern-faced, naked child, both bound together with a silver cross and ropes of pearls. Potatoes with words attached float above in the desert sky. In 2001, Joan chose Saghatelian’s works for the Venice Biennale, while co-commissioner of the Armenian pavilion. He was asked by the artists to paint Joan and Jack in gratitude. He later moved to Los Angeles and created this work, recalling a moment of sharing baked potatoes before sharing a common language.
She and her husband, Jack, began buying art on a budget for their home. Jack frequently helped artists out and traded legal services for their work. Along the way, Quinn developed her native gifts for promoting art and educating the public. She met Andy Warhol at a party in 1978 and bonded with him over their shared passion for jewelry. He proposed she become West Coast editor of his “Interview” Magazine. Her career as an editor, journalist, interviewer and collector blossomed.
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“We were buying to support our cadre of friends, who were very close to us, and one artist introduced us to another,” Quinn said, explaining the network of artists they became friendly with. “And then Jack would bring his young lawyers in from the [Los Angeles] County Bar Association. Actually, we were educating lawyers, which I didn’t even think about at that time. So, we were doing little things, and little things built up to “Nowadaysthis.…I was [recently] talking with somebody who said, ‘Oh, we just bought three new pieces of art.’ I said, ‘Have you seen them?’ She said, ‘Only one.’ I asked, ‘Do you know the artist?’ ‘No.’ She’s bought two pieces of art — she’s never seen them! How could you do that? Because it’s an investment, and we never bought as an investment.”
Wainwright’s groupings reveal individuals floating socially and ideologically from one group to the next, often in hybrid styles. We see the early “Cool School,” a mostly male clique of assemblage and experimental artists associated with the Ferus Gallery: John Altoon, Ed Kienholz, George Herms, Billy Al Bengston, Joe Goode and Ed Ruscha. Nearby we find the “Light and
After support waned for contemporary art in Los Angeles, a new generation of artists began taking boldly to conceptualism and politics. Feminism asserted its presence. The Quinns collected drawings, paintings and collage by Vija Celmins, Allen Ruppersberg and Carole Caroompas, as well as the material pours of Lynda Benglis, Claire Falkenstein’s slumped glass and Lita Albuquerque’s Land Art and documentation.
Serving on the Beverly Hills and California Arts Councils, and ever-expanding national and international committees, Joan reached out to “Los Four,” a Chicano artist group of Carlos Almaraz and his wife Elsa Flores Almaraz and collected abstract paintings of Black arts activist Gregory Wiley Edwards. The Quinns befriended Londoner David Hockney, and Jean-Michel Basquiat drew Joan’s wrists bedecked with vintage watches.
Space,” and “Fetish Finish” groups — experimenters with aerospace and industrial glass, metal and polymers — and minimalists, formalists and nonconformists like Ed Moses and Chuck Arnoldi.
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PREVIOUS PAGE: Ed Moses, Untitled (Wedge Series), 1972, colored pencil, graphite and watercolor on drafting tissue, 30” x 24”. Photograph by Alan ABOVE:Shaffer.Gregory Wiley Edwards, onResonanceExpanded,1992,acryliccanvas,46”x693/4”.PhotographbyErinKatgely.BELOW:CaroleCaroompas,BetweentheLines,1974,mixedmediaonpaper,201/2x231/2”.PhotographbyAlanShaffer.
The images can be grim — Joe Goode attacks the concept of painting with his
65 Main Street, Watertown, www.armenianmuseum.orgMA
Sarah
Jim McHugh’s 1983 photograph of Jack and herself in their living-room as a true portrait of their lives together: “That’s how my house was. It didn’t have something that ‘fit over the couch.’ It had something that we bought yesterday that we put on the wall and it looked great. See, on the wall, Ed Moses put that painting up in the stairwell, and it’s still there to this day.”
www.artcomplex.orgOutGrowthSarahMyersBrent
In one of Quinn’s “Joan Quinn Profiles” for PBS, she interviewed Ed Moses, who talked about his process of “collision” — a word that Quinn emphasized, accenting how he brings disparate things together and then brings something else in and sees what happens. Couldn’t this be Joan Quinn’s art form, too?
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Gregory Wiley Edwards Frank AndyEdHelmutGehryNewtonRuschaWarhol
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Thursday through Sunday 12 - 6 pm
Astrid Preston, Freeway 1984, Oil on canvas, 68 x 54 inches From the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection
“One of the top five things to do in Boston!” WBUR
SEPT 25 - NOV 27, 2022
Presented by Lita VijaLyndaJean-MichelJohnAlbuquerqueAltoonBasquiatBenglisCelmins
Susan Denniston, Kelly Knight, Michel Morelli, Baudouin Mouanda, Sarah Pettitt, Anne Plaisance, Stephanie Todhunter, Robin Whiteman SEPT 18 - DEC 4, 2022
Reception: Oct 9, 2022, 1:00 - 4:00 pm
“Torn Sky” canvas, one layer of ripped canvas revealing another, and he describes his perforated works on pigmented paper as “mixed media with gun shots.” Or funny — Jim Ganzer’s “Polka Dot Lamp,” perhaps channeling Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” stiffens a pair of upside-down surf shorts and mounts them over a light Quinnbulb.regards
Anne Plaisance, Say her name (detail), 2022. Mixed media on canvas. Myers Brent, Curious Cultivations (detail), 2020. Repurposed items and mixed media.
The Blue Notebooks
Detail from
Open through November 30, 2022
Los Angeles Art 1970s – 1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection
Elizabeth Michelman
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“On the Edge” features more than 75 artists including: Alden Street Duxbury, MA 02332 781-934-6634
Curated by Rachel McCullah Wainwright.