Long Beach Art Museum Portraitures: About Face

It’s happened to many of us. You go to a contemporary gallery and see all these random works, many of which are abstract, hard to understand and in general difficult to relate to. Looking at the construction you may even think, “Come on, my kid brother could do that,” if only he had that coveted piece of paper from a university or fancy art school.

About Face: Portraiture, now open now through March 23, is not that type of exhibition. In fact, it is a refreshing return to a topic that has always been at the center of many artistic endeavors, the issue of capturing an accurate portrayal of the human form. In other words, if you like staring at people, then this exhibition will definitely quench some of your voyeuristic thirsts.

Peter Zokosky, a Cal State Long Beach State Art Department professor, came up with the idea for an exhibition featuring accurate portraits created in the year 2000 and after. The exhibition was further limited to paintings by living artist, so if your soul interest is printmaking, photography or sculpture, this might not be the ideal exhibit for you.

For such a small museum like the Long Beach Museum of Art, this narrowly tailored idea works perfectly. One of the advantages of featuring living artists is the inclusion of insightful artist statements that accompany most of the works.


In a gallery discussion on Feb. 2, Zokosky said regarding portraiture, “A lot of artists seem to be reinvestigating a thing that perhaps 20 years ago was seen as a little passé or a little bit irrelevant.”

He further explained, “Whenever something becomes passé there’s always a group of people that see that and realize that there’s a lot going on there.”

He discussed the significance of the exhibition in that it captures a trend of how artists are reinvesting in traditional techniques while maintaining a “recognition of modernism” and capturing the essence of what contemporary people actually look like and what they project.
Jim Amirkhan, a CSULB psychology professor and art collector, further elevated Saturday’s discussion by intriguing museumgoers to consider the subconscious choices made by the artists.

“If we as viewers are astute enough, we should be able to look at a painting and figure out what the artists problems are,” Amirkhan said, drawing laughter from the 20 or so museumgoers at the afternoon discussion.

He also said the problem with that is, “When we look at an image … it brings us our own unconscious material so we don’t get a clear idea of what the artist meant or what the artist issue might be cause their clouded with there own concerns.”

He argued that every piece of art is a place to project your own desires, wants, conflicts and guilty feelings. Finally, he suggested that some of the reasons you might be drawn to certain painting is that the artist chose to portray something that was in congruence with your own subconscious world.

Even though the criteria of this exhibition are somewhat specific, the variety both in human subjects portrayed and artistic styles and techniques makes it impossible to be bored as you walk past one intriguing face to another.

Some of the pencil-drawn pieces are so photo-realistic that it’s astonishing that just a hand and some lead could capture such complex features of the human anatomy.

Overall, this exhibition is well worth the nominal $6 admission, but if you’re still not convinced, then the museum is free on Fridays, and more importantly, is conveniently located on Ocean Avenue near Cherry Avenue, so you can forget about the 405 to the 110 to the 10 like when you’re visiting the hot L.A. art shows.