Barnes to bring NYC pizazz to WLAC

Renowned art dealer, curator and radio personality Molly Barnes has joined West Los Angeles College in Culver City as an artist in residence.

“Most women my age who have been art dealers all of our lives end up running museums or art education projects,” said Barnes.

  “I am thrilled with my new position at West Los Angeles Community College because I can give back to art students what has been given so generously to me and help make Culver City the art capital of the West Coast.”

Barnes, born in London, England graduated from Marlborough School and UC Berkeley. While in Los Angeles she worked for Feigen/Palmer Gallery, Ryder Gallery, Rolf Nelson Gallery Frank Perls Gallery, and the California Arts Commission.

Barnes has been involved with the art world since the 1970s and opened her first gallery showing the work of Ray Parker, Jack Youngerman, Victor Vasarely. She discovered L.A. artists John Baldessari, Gronk, Mark Kostabi, Jack Reilly and Don Eddy.

“I moved to New York and opened a gallery at the Roger Smith Hotel in l989, where I still work doing shows and art lectures monthly,” said Barnes.

“ I have had over 400 hundred speakers including Clement Greenberg, Milton Estrow, Caroline Goldsmith, Kenny Scharff and the heads of the deKooning and Pollock foundations.”

In addition to her art accomplishments, Barnes has hosted numerous radio shows and was nominated for an Emmy for her cable show for Falcon Communications.

In addition to sharing her wealth of experience and knowledge with the college’s aspiring artists, she will coordinate a free, bring your lunch lecture series for the college that is also open to the public.

The series begins this spring April 24 from noon – 3 p.m. in the Fine Arts Theater at West Los Angeles College with the topic, “A Career in Art – To Do’s and To Don’ts.”

Samuel Freeman, owner of the Samuel Freeman Gallery, will share his top 10 list of how to break into the art world and what not to do. Other panelist include Tressa Williams, director of the George Billis Gallery L.A, Tim Nye, owner of Nye + Brown and Donna Stein, associate director of the Wende Museum Postwar Artifacts.

The Wende Museum preserves the cultural artifacts and personal histories of Cold War-era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to inform and inspire a broad understanding of the period and its enduring legacy.

It houses more than 60,000 objects from Communist-era Eastern Europe, including furniture and décor, paintings, sculptures, posters, flags and banners, signs, political propaganda, clothing, tapestries, textiles, books, scrapbooks, films, electronics, remnants of Checkpoint Charlie and the longest stretch of the original Berlin Wall outside of Germany.

The Wende is simultaneously an archive of material culture and educational institution, fusing interdisciplinary scholarship with its programs.

The Wende Museum recently acquired the old Culver City Armory building, enabling it to open the world’s largest Cold War visual archive.

All of the galleries represented at the WLAC talk are located in or adjacent to Culver City’s Art District referred to as a “nascent Chelsea” by The New York Times.

Guests should park in the south parking structure, which is immediately adjacent to the Fine Arts Theater. A parking pass can be purchased for $2.00 at the pass dispenser machines. Exact change is required.