Monday Evening Concerts: Action 3

Frieze Projects: Against the Edge
Curated by Jay Ezra Nayssan & Del Vaz Projects

One night only:
Thursday, February 16th at 7:30 PM
Reserve your entry here.

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 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.)