Rare display of Olmec artworks is one of three inaugural shows to debut Resnick Exhibition Pavilion

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, the first West Coast exhibition of massive works and small-scale sculptures produced by Mexico’s earliest civilization. Olmec-style artworks reveal the great mastery of the architects and artists who produced the earliest monumental structures and sculptures on the North American continent. These include enormous basalt portrait heads of their rulers in addition to small-scale, intricately carved objects from such precious stones as jadeite. The opening of Olmec will coincide with Los Angeles celebrations of the bicentennial of Mexico’s independence and the centennial of the Mexican revolution. Featuring approximately 120 works, Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico will be on view in LACMA’s new Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion from October 2, 2010 to January 9, 2011.

“It is an honor to present this rare exhibition of extraordinary Olmec artworks at such a momentous time for both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Mexico,” says Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “The show will provide a revelatory look into the richness and complexity of the ancient American civilization of the Olmec.”

Olmec civilization
Ancient populations have occupied the Mexican landscape for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until around 1800 BC that the traits associated with Mesoamerica’s first civilization began to emerge. The name Olmec refers to both an archaeological culture and an art style that appeared throughout Mesoamerica; it is not known what these people called themselves, but their major centers flourished from approximately 1400 to 400 BC in the present-day Gulf Coast states of Veracruz and Tabasco. With an abundant supply of water and natural resources on the coast, these groups of people thrived on the abundance of their agricultural surplus and the exchange of rare resources, such as jadeite and ilmenite. The highly productive environment fostered the development of such innovations as elaborate transportation networks; a complex philosophy rooted in the natural landscape; and a hierarchical society with an elite class that sanctioned its sacred and secular authority with exquisite artworks.

Exhibition overview
With an overarching theme of discovery, the exhibition presents the emergence, chronology, and significance of Olmec civilization as well as the unique art and archaeology of its major cities. The introductory gallery shows how Olmec style first came to public attention in the mid-nineteenth century with the serendipitous discoveries of the first great portrait head along with smaller but equally beautifully carved objects. Subsequent sections of the exhibition focus on archaeological investigations that have revealed the nature of Olmec art and society, including a life-size tableau that has never previously traveled outside Mexico. Featuring two elegantly dressed human figures and an otherworldly feline, the tableau commemorates a sacred action that took place in a specific location—an important characteristic of Olmec art. Monuments and portable objects alike will illustrate the distinctive culture of the most important Olmec centers, including San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, La Venta, and Tres Zapotes, and the smaller towns that formed part of the political hierarchies on the Gulf Coast over the course of a thousand years.

The multiple dimensions of Olmec civilization will be revealed through the presentation of key objects that focus on the natural and supernatural creatures that comprised Olmec cosmology, or worldview, including realistic animal effigies in ceramic and stone along with composite creatures combining the traits of jaguars, serpents, and other mythical beings. Works displaying the human power and authority derived from and symbolized by these powerful cosmic creatures will also be on view.

Olmec rulership
The wealth of Olmec society reflected a diverse social hierarchy encompassing nobility, warriors, artists, and farmers. Artists created monumental portraits of their rulers made of basalt—some weighing up to twenty-four tons—documenting royal costume and paraphernalia. In addition, these monuments display the importance of ancestors in sustaining their descendants. Stature and authority were also expressed through specific regalia emphasizing the ruler’s ability to ensure maize fertility for his community. For example, sacred and secular authority was often embodied in jadeite and other greenstone objects, which symbolized maize and its importance in sustaining Olmec society. The vast quantity of jadeite attests to the long-distance trade and exchange of rare resources that Gulf Coast peoples engaged in as early as 1000 BC. Over the course of 3,000 years of Mesoamerican history, Olmec artists were unsurpassed in their ability to work this extremely hard stone with elementary tools of chert, water, and sand.

Olmec shrines
At San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, the earliest Olmec city, a number of shrines house complex tableaux of stone axes and figures that reflect cosmological belief and ritual practices among the Olmec. Often associated with springs and other water sources, the shrines convey the importance of water for this civilization that was built on agricultural abundance. The exhibition will include two major offerings from the shrine sites, including a remarkable life-size wooden portrait bust, elegant stone masks, and a rubber ball, indicating that the knowledge of processing latex dates to at least 1700 BC.

Olmec influence and legacy
Outside of the Gulf Coast Olmec heartland, various centers flourished across the Mesoamerican landscape. Objects from a series of cultures from the central highlands (Tlatilco, Tlapacoya, Las Bocas), Morelos, Guerrero, and the Pacific coast of Chiapas, will be presented to demonstrate the nature and extent of Olmec influence as well as local aesthetic expressions. The exhibition will conclude with the topic of Olmec legacy among later Mesoamerican civilizations. Objects adorned with elements of Olmec motifs from distant places over the course of Mexico’s three thousand year past display the descendant populations’ great reverence for their ancestral roots. Other significant legacies of Olmec civilization include the development of a calendar, encompassing both ritual and solar cycles, and the emergence of writing, which is directly tied to documenting royal histories rather than to economic recording, as it was in the ancient Near East.

Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico is co-organized by Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, LACMA, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Major loans will be on view including works from the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the Museo de Antropología, Universidad Veracruzana, in Xalapa, and the Parque La Venta in Villahermosa. LACMA’s presentation is curated by Virginia Fields, senior curator of Arts of the Ancient Americas. After closing at LACMA, Olmec will travel to the de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco from February 19 to May 8, 2011 (dates are tentative).

Catalogue
Olmec will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, an international collaboration featuring essays by experts from Mexico and the United States. Informed by the most recent scholarship, the catalogue brings together a diverse selection of more than one hundred monuments, sculptures, adornments, masks, and vessels—a number of which have never before been published. The catalogue is published by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and LACMA in association with Yale University Press.

Credit
This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco with the collaboration of the Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes–Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia de México. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

About LACMA
Since its inception in 1965, LACMA has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography—and represent Los Angeles’s uniquely diverse population. Today, the museum features particularly strong collections of Asian, Latin American, European, and American art, as well as a new contemporary museum on its campus, BCAM. With this expanded space for contemporary art, innovative collaborations with artists, and an ongoing Transformation project, LACMA is creating a truly modern lens through which to view its rich encyclopedic collection.

General Information: LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036. For more information about LACMA and its programming, call 323 857-6000 or visit lacma.org.
 
Museum Hours and Admission: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, noon–8 pm; Friday, noon–9 pm; Saturday and Sunday, 11 am–8 pm; closed Wednesday. Adults $12; students 18+ with ID and senior citizens 62+ $8; children 17 and under are admitted free. Admission (except to specially ticketed exhibitions) is free the second Tuesday of every month and on Target Free Holiday Mondays. After 5 pm, every day the museum is open, LACMA’s “Pay What You Wish” program encourages visitors to support the museum with an admission fee of their choosing.

All photos courtesy and copyright LACMA

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