Join us in West Hollywood for a conversation between Senior Curator Emerita of Modern Art Carol S. Eliel and artist Mary Weatherford, in celebration of ‘Night Window. David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958 – 1964.’ 

The conversation will be followed by the opening reception from 7 – 8 pm. 

This event is free; however, reservations are recommended. Please register here.  

About the exhibition 
Long considered the sculptor most closely associated with abstract expressionism, David Smith (1906–1965) was in fact a restless polymath for whom sculpture, drawing and painting formed a single creative current—sculpting by day, working on canvas and paper by night.

‘Night Window: David Smith Spray Paintings, 1958–1964’ is devoted entirely to his trailblazing Sprays. A seldom-seen body of work, the Spray paintings both develop from and ultimately invert Smith’s exacting sculptural process: negative space becomes structure, color becomes atmosphere, absence becomes subject. These luminous palimpsests compress the physical world into radiant fields that reveal a painterly sensitivity as rigorous and as radical as the artist’s sculpture.

About Carol S. Eliel 
Senior Curator Emerita of Modern Art, worked at LACMA from 1984 through 2023. She organized many exhibitions with catalogues for the museum, including ‘Light, Space, Surface: Works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,’ ‘Betye Saar: Call and Response,’ ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present,’ ‘John Altoon,’ ‘Helen Pashgian: Light Invisible,’ ‘David Smith: Cubes and Anarchy,’ ‘Lee Mullican: An Abundant Harvest of Sun,’ ‘L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918–1925,’ ‘Annette Messager,’ and many others.  Dr. Eliel was also actively involved in building LACMA's collection, including acquisitions by Larry Bell, Andrea Bowers, Mary Corse, Claire Falkenstein, Lee Krasner, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Alice Rahon, Alison Saar, and Betye Saar. In addition to her work at LACMA, Dr. Eliel has lectured across the United States and written on a wide variety of subjects ranging from 18th-century French painting to cutting-edge contemporary art, chairs the Modern & Contemporary Art vetting committee at TEFAF, is on the board of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation, and served (2011-13) as president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). The French government named her a ‘Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’ in 1999. Dr. Eliel received her BA from Yale University and her MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

About Mary Weatherford 
Mary Weatherford (b. 1963, Ojai, California) has become increasingly recognized as one of the leading painters of her generation, as well as one of the most astute and daring practitioners taking on the legacies of American abstraction. As she explores and expands the medium’s possibilities, she honors its history by seizing opportunities to break with tradition at every turn. Over the course of her career, she has produced feminist revisions of large-scale Color Field painting, posited new directions for the landscape genre, and explored the social histories of California. Her notable incorporation of sculptural elements—including the neon tubes that have been a presence in her work since 2012—as well as her fearless and physically embodied approach to painterly gesture, have allowed her to employ abstraction as both a formal language and a poetic, highly personal mode of engagement with the world outside the studio. 

Mary Weatherford was the subject of the survey exhibition Canyon–Daisy–Eden, presented at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2020) and SITE Santa Fe, NM (2021). Other solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Italy (2022); Aspen Museum of Art, CO (2021); Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum, Claremont McKenna College, Claremont, CA (2014); Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University at Bakersfield, CA (2012); and LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Recent group exhibitions include Color is the First Revelation of the World, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2024); Making Their Mark, Shah Garg Foundation, New York, NY (2023); America: Between Dreams and Realities, Selections from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Montreal, Canada (2022); Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO (2019); Between Two Worlds: Art of California, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2017); and The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2014). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate, London, England; Brooklyn Museum, NY; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. In 2019, Lund Humphries published an in-depth monograph surveying the artist’s oeuvre. Weatherford lives and works in Los Angeles.