Psssst. Have you been following PST? Pacific Standard Time, funded by the Getty Foundation, includes over 60 exhibitions around Southern California. First stop should be the core exhibition held at the Getty Museum: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970. This show includes examples of the era's Pop art, hard-edge geometric painting, assemblage, ceramic sculpture and much more by David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz, Sam Francis and others.

Thanks to $10 million in funding, nearly every museum, institution and gallery in Southern California is participating to some degree in the excavation and presentation of this region's cultural history. The influence of Marcel Duchamp and Dada can be seen in Beatrice Wood: Career Woman at the Santa Monica Museum of Art while artists from the Light and Space movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, well-known figures like Robert Irwin James Turrell and Doug Wheeler whose work is rarely seen together, are in Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Out in Pomona, the experimental work shown at the college's small museum, including Tom Eatherton and Lloyd Hamrol, is the subject of Art at the Edge of Los Angeles. African American artists including Betye Saar and John Outterbridge are featured in Now Dig This: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 at the Hammer Museum while Feminism and the art of the Women's Movement is explored in Doin' It in Public at Otis College of Art and Design. The Chicano art collective ASCO is on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art while the larger influence of Mexican art culture can be seen at the Latin American Museum of Art in Long Beach. The Long Beach Museum of Art, one of the first strong supporters of video art, hosts a survey. Further south is an overview of Conceptual art State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 at the Orange County Museum of Art.

These are but a few of the possibilities. Panels, performances and parties are ongoing facts of PST, an opportunity for Southern California to learn more about itself, about the impressive depth and diversity of its artists, architects, designers, writers, musicians, and performers. It is an opportunity to dispel old and largely inaccurate clichés about the limits of culture in a sunny clime. Of course, you have to drive but KCRW will be with you, covering PST with regular reports on Art Talk, DnA and other shows. Stayed tuned.

-- Hunter Drohojowska-Philp
Commentator for KCRW and author of Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960's.