West LA Times

Frieze and the City of Santa Monica revealed details of a new partnership to grow the City’s Art Bank collection. The partnership will see an art acquisition made at the Frieze Los Angeles Art Fair, which this year will take place at the new location of Santa Monica Airport. As part of this partnership, artwork will be selected and acquired from the much-celebrated Focus section of the fair, which features galleries under 12 years old. Frieze Los Angeles 2023 will take place from February 16 to 19 and is supported by Global Lead Partner, Deutsche Bank.

"We look forward to welcoming Frieze LA to Santa Monica and are excited to be working with the Santa Monica Arts Commission to acquisition a new work from the fair to the City’s Art Bank collection, which contains works from a plethora of notable artists,” said Shannon Daut, Cultural Affairs Manager for the City. “This new artwork can be enjoyed by the public for years to come and we hope to continue the partnership in the future.”

The work acquired for the Art Bank collection will be chosen by a selection committee comprised of:

Christine Messineo, Director of Americas, FriezeAnne Ellegood, Executive Director of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA, LA)Deepa Subramanian, Santa Monica Arts Commissioner

The work will be selected on Thursday, February 16, 2023, at the Fair. Criteria for the acquisition include a requirement that the work be made by an artist based in Southern California, and that it illuminates the diverse lived experiences of artists from our region.

“Our partnership with the City of Santa Monica will celebrate the creative capital of the region by recognizing an emerging artist voice,” said Frieze Director of Americas Christine Messineo. “It’s wonderful that an artwork from Frieze Los Angeles will have a permanent home within the city’s art collection, particularly as the fair establishes its place in the cultural fabric of Santa Monica.”

This year the Focus section at Frieze Los Angeles includes 20 galleries and is curated by Amanda Hunt (Head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact at Walker Art Center) alongside new Associate Curator Sonya Tamaddon (Consultant and Curator). Focus, a core section of Frieze, is a renowned point of discovery and celebrates both Los Angeles and national emerging artists and galleries.

Santa Monica’s Art Bank collection was instituted in 1984 to bring art into Santa Monica’s public spaces and is funded through the City of Santa Monica’s Percent for Art Program. The Art Bank contains over 200 works - including sculpture, painting, photography, and works on paper - by such notable artists as Laura Aguilar, Lita Albuquerque, Charles Gaines, Kerry James Marshall, Linda Vallejo, and other artists active in Southern California. The collection also incorporates gifts of artwork received by the City over the course of the last century, including 18th and 19th-century landscape and portrait paintings and preparatory drawings and maquettes by artists commissioned to make public art in Santa Monica. The acquisition of artworks to the City’s collection has helped support many artists of the Southern California region.

More about Frieze Los Angeles at frieze.com/fairs/frieze-los-angeles.

Visit the full City of Santa Monica Art Bank collection at publicartarchive.org/search/collections/Santa-Monica-Art-Bank.

Original source can be found here.