A Night at the Pomona College Museum of Art

Siyao Xie

Pomona's Museum of Art, which is currently displaying, "It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973" through May. The museum is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Life & Style

By Elisabeth Pfeiffer

Published 8 months ago

It's 1 a.m. on a Saturday night, and a group of friends are wandering the gallery rooms of the Pomona College Museum of Art. And no, they didn't break into the museum. It's currently open 24/7.

"It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973" is an exhibit on display in three parts from Aug. 30 to May 13 of next year. Part one, "Hal Glicksman at Pomona," is now on display at the Pomona College Museum of Art. During the 1969-70 academic year, Hal Glicksman was the Museum's curator and director. He started an artist-in-residency program, a new concept at the time, so that artists could camp out and work in parts of the museum like a workshop. As his son David Glicksman put it, "… a lot of his colleagues and friends of the time just had these weird-ass ideas, and no one else was doing it, and he didn't see any reason not to."

Rather than bring pieces of art to the museum space, artists were able to experiment in the museum gallery. The result of those radical art projects by local artists associated with Pomona College is now known as Light and Space art. This movement, originating in Southern California in the 1960s, used unheard-of materials to make art and dematerialize it. The Light and Space movement was typified by an emphasis on how perception and sensation could be influenced through different uses of light, size, and volume.

Why is the museum now open 24/7? This undertaking is part of artist Michael Asher's contribution to the exhibit. David Glicksman elaborated on how opening the museum 24/7 is a contribution, remarking, "So that itself is an art piece. The art piece is that he is making it available for anyone to see at 3 o'clock in the morning… stumble in drunk, and have a time of it." Asher wanted anyone to be able to enter the gallery, transforming it into an unrestricted area open to the public at all times—a quality almost no other museum can claim.

As I explored the different rooms of the exhibition, I found myself constantly surprised by what I saw, from "Ball drop, 1969" by Ron Cooper, a project created with video media, to Judy Chicago's "Snow Atmosphere," a series of photos and a video of a canyon with smoky flares to soften the viewer's perception. Also featured were pieces by artists Lewis Baltz, Lloyd Hamrol, and Robert Irwin.

One of the pieces that stood out was "Rise" by Tom Eatherton. In creating "Rise," Eatherton meant to create an immersive environment that would affect the perception of viewers differently. I entered the space through a dark, rectangular opening in the wall. As I turned the corner, an intense, vivid blue light exploded before my eyes, encompassing me and the circular room I was now in. On my way out, I felt so disoriented that I almost collided with the side of the wall. As David Glicksman described it, "If you really buy into the piece, you just sort of go outside yourself."

David then told me a story Eatherton had told him about how when the piece first opened, years ago, "… he was there one day and a family came in with a little girl. She was standing there completely quietly and she reached down and patted around on the ground, just to make sure it was there." By the end of the exhibit, I felt the same way as the little girl had—unsure of my surroundings, and of what was actually reality. Check out the exhibit—it's waiting for you, at every hour.