The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation is proud to provide major support for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’ upcoming exhibit With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art 1972-1985, on view from October 27, 2019 until May 11, 2020.
With Pleasure is the first full-scale scholarly survey of this groundbreaking American art movement, encompassing works in painting, sculpture, collage, ceramics, installation art, and performance documentation. Covering the years 1972 to 1985 and featuring approximately fifty artists from across the United States, the exhibition examines the Pattern and Decoration movement’s defiant embrace of forms traditionally coded as feminine, domestic, ornamental, or craft-based and thought to be categorically inferior to fine art. Pattern and Decoration artists gleaned motifs, color schemes, and materials from the decorative arts, freely appropriating floral, arabesque, and patchwork patterns and arranging them in intricate, almost dizzying, and sometimes purposefully gaudy designs.
This exhibition includes artwork by several artists in the Foundation’s collection, including Frank Stella, Valerie Jaudon, Billy Al Bengston, and Alvin Loving Jr.