Armory Center for the Arts

The Armory Center for the Arts is a community arts center that offers innovative approaches to creating, exploring, and presenting the arts to students of all ages. In addition to providing an outlet for contemporary art exhibitions and performances, the Armory offers studio art classes and a variety of educational outreach programs to schools and throughout the community.

Upcoming exhibitions include:

Jeff Reese: A Memorial Exhibition

A posthumous survey of the photographic work of Jeff Reese, Jeff Reese: A Memorial Exhibition, will be on view at the Armory in the Mezzanine Gallery January 17 through February 21, 2010. Los Angeles-based photographer Jeff Reese was receiving increased recognition before his untimely death in 2008. His work in the early 1990s–with the traditional photographic subjects of the female nude, still life, and portrait–was slowly transformed by his fascination with the role of the artist in society and his deep passion for and knowledge of the Old Masters, philosophy and Greek mythology.  As homage to his talent and growth as an artist, this exhibition features work from his first series, Art and Artists, inspired by psychoanalyst and theorist Otto Rank, in which Reese employed the use multiple exposures, as well as pieces from his color photograph series based on Plato’s Republic.  His final, uncompleted series, Mythos, Reese painted directly on 35 mm film, depicting faces of Greek gods and images from the Iliad.

Quinton Bemiller, Hahamongna

Quinton Bemiller’s site-specific mural Hahamongna occupies both walls of the Main Stairway and includes a painted muslin sheet draped overhead.  This painted environment interprets the natural environment of Hahamongna Watershed Park, a natural area of the Upper Arroyo Seco linking urban Pasadena with Angeles National Forest.  The name Hahamongna honors a group of Tongva Indians who once inhabited the area. Bemiller’s painting is composed of meandering horizontal lines of varying thickness that allude to streams, wind, and pathways.  Thicker, wobbly vertical bands suggest oak trees.  The colors of the painting reference direct observation of the Hahamongna area, including the specific colors of plants, trees, rocks, streams, and sky.

Retrospective of Rauschenberg’s Art at Genini G.E.L.

A retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s three decades of creative achievement at Gemini G.E.L. is being organized by the Armory Center for the Arts, where it will be on view in the Caldwell Gallery January 17 through March 21, 2010. For nearly 35 years, Robert Rauschenberg produced more than 250 different prints at Gemini G.E.L., the world-famous multiples workshop in Los Angeles, which was organized in 1966 and is still run by two of the founders, Sidney Felsen and Stanley Grinstein.  At Gemini, Rauschenberg transformed what a “print” multiple was, not only in scale, but in how variable one print in a single edition could be from another; in how many physical dimensions it could have; in how many media a single multiple could involve; and in how the viewer could interact with the multiple and make it different. No other artist has ever pushed the boundaries of what “printmaking” could be as much as Rauschenberg. As Stanley Grinstein has said, “Rauschenberg taught us what Gemini could be.”

The Armory Center for the Arts
145 North Raymond Avenue, Pasadena.  (626) 792-5101. Website: www.armoryarts.org.  Open Tuesdays through Sundays, noon until 5:00 p.m. Cost: Free.