Los Angeles curator Walter Hopps organized his first major group exhibition ‘Action’ (1955) in the Santa Monica Pier’s Merry-Go-Round building. Hopps wrapped the carousel in fabric and suspended paintings by a number of California abstract painters including Sonia Gechtoff, Craig Kauffman, Jay DeFeo and Richard Diebenkorn. Unusually Hopps also included a musical component to the exhibition, playing recorded jazz music and the carousel’s soundtrack as well as his own renditions of some John Cage works.
As part of ‘Against the Edge’ Jonathan Hepfer, Artistic Director of Monday Evening Concerts, devised a program of music to play in homage to Hopps’s exhibition. On Thursday, February 16th at 7:30 PM, Hepfer and a cast of notable figures from the worlds of visual art and music - Isabelle Albuquerque (Radio), Orion Catoto (Radio), Arman Naféei (Newsreader), Ariana Papademetropoulos (Radio), Ariana Reines (Newsreader), Sissón (Radio), Hamza Walker (Radio) - will perform John Cage’s Speech, composed the same year as the Hopps exhibition took place. (Monday Evening Concerts, or MEC, was founded in 1939 by Peter Yates, music critic for Arts & Architecture magazine.)
This event is part of Santa Monica Pier’s Locals Night
To read the complete text for MEC Action 3 at the Merry-Go-Round Building, click here
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Doors: 7PM
Performance: 7:30PM