Mark Bennett,
Phyllis Lindstrom Minneapolis, MN, 2005
/ Ink and colored pencil on vellum /
11 5/8 x 26 1/8 in. /
COLLECTION OF THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
Mark Moore Fine Art and the artist are pleased to announce the acquisitions of six drawings by artist MARK BENNETT from his Fantasy TV Sitcom Series were just recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Since its inception in 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has been devoted to collecting works of art that span both history and geography, in addition to representing Los Angeles’s uniquely diverse population. Today LACMA is the largest art museum in the western United States, with a collection that includes over 120,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present, encompassing the geographic world and nearly the entire history of art. Among the museum’s strengths are its holdings of Asian art, Latin American art, ranging from pre-Columbian masterpieces to works by leading modern and contemporary artists; and Islamic art, of which LACMA hosts one of the most significant collections in the world. A museum of international stature as well as a vital part of Southern California, LACMA shares its vast collections through exhibitions, public programs, and research facilities that attract over a million visitors annually, in addition to serving millions through digital initiatives, such as online collections, scholarly catalogues, and interactive engagement online. Situated in Hancock Park on over 20 acres in the heart of Los Angeles, LACMA is located between the ocean and downtown.
For the past 30 years, Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bennett has made art firmly rooted in the collective American experience of television. His drawings and lithographs are “blueprints” of famous television houses from such classic sitcoms as The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Brady Bunch, and Perry Mason. Drawing these fictional dwellings from memory, Bennett documents the minutiae of the characters’ lives by constructing their environments with a painstaking level of detail. His floor plans narrate the American Dream, charting not only the architecture, but also the subtext of our culturally accepted models for living.
Unlike American Pop artists of the 1960s such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated images from mass media as subjects for their work, Bennett has reconstructed spaces that were intended only to flicker on the screen. In labeling his seemingly straightforward blueprints with colorful details about the interiors, architecture, and inhabitants, he reflects on the idealized and stereotyped notions of American life as perpetuated by mass culture. He also makes us realize how often that these ideas are, in turn, mirrored in our own domestic architecture.
Mark Bennett has been included in over 3 dozen major museum and gallery group exhibitions, including a major show at the Corcoran Gallery Of Art, Washington, D.C. (titled “Mark Bennett: TV Sets and The Suburban Dream”; which travelled To Cleveland Center For Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio; and the Aldrich Museum Of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut. Since his induction into the gallery in 1995, Bennett has been included in over three dozen significant museum and group exhibitions, including those at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (D.C.), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (CT), Walker Art Center (MN) and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA). His work has been acquired for the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.); The Honolulu Museum of Art (Hawaii); Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA); The West Collection (Oaks, PA); and the Portland Art Museum (OR), among others.
In keeping with this theme, Mark Moore Fine Art is very pleased to present an Exclusive ARTSY Online Exhibition of Mark Bennett: The Original Drawings as part of our new ARTSY LEGACY SERIES of exhibitions. These are the artists and shows over the last 15 years on ARTSY that have been the most acclaimed and the most viewed by their patrons and art critics.
You can view this exclusive ARTSY online exhibition of the original drawings at the following link: bit.ly/3nIjyOt
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