Don Bachardy. Joan Agajanian Quinn, 1977; graphite on paper. Joan and Jack Quinn Collection.

The exhibition Joan Quinn Captured at the Brand Library Art Center aims to challenge this viewpoint by presenting dozens of portraits of one woman, Joan Agajanian Quinn, from “what is perhaps the largest portrait collection by contemporary artists in the world,” according to the organizers. For over forty years Quinn has been a passionate supporter of the arts in Southern California and beyond. A Los Angeles native, she was introduced to the Ferus Gallery group in the 1950s through artist Billy Al Bengston, who would race his motorcycle at a track owned by her father. This began her decades-long role as patron, promoter, and chronicler of contemporary art, fashion, and culture. In 1978 Quinn was chosen by Andy Warhol to be the West Coast editor of his Interview magazine, and she held positions at numerous other publications, including as L.A. editor of Germany-based Manipulator magazine and senior editor of Stuff. Since 1993, she has hosted “The Joan Quinn Profiles,” a show on cable television that features interviews with artists, designers, actors, and musicians—two per episode, for 400 episodes and counting. She has served on numerous arts, film, and architecture organizations, including a stint as the longest-sitting member of the California Arts Council. The exhibition is not only a composite portrait of Quinn; it also offers a personal and subjective lens focused on various artists and movements. Through one face, viewers see many stories.

Kevin Whitney. Joan Quinn, 1984; watercolor on paper. Joan and Jack Quinn Collection.

It would be trite and wrong to say that the work in the exhibition is a “who’s who” of L.A. art of the past four decades. The Ferus artists—Bengston, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Joe Goode, Larry Bell—are well represented to be sure, as are other heavyweights like Allen Ruppersberg and Frank Gehry. But the exhibition zigzags around the globe from swinging London (David Hockney, Duggie Fields, and Kevin Whitney) to downtown New York (Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Mapplethorpe). What makes this collection interesting is that it’s not limited to major, well-known artists in the same way that the Broad or the Fisher collections are. Emerging or forgotten artists are given equal billing with established ones (and for that matter, memorable works are hung alongside a few forgettable ones). High art sits next to fashion photography (Helmut Newton) and design (Zandra Rhodes), blurring these taxonomic distinctions and presenting an expansive vision of culture that includes all of the arts.

The portraits range from traditional to evocative. The representational ones all share certain characteristics: Quinn’s large, bright eyes; her elegant, aquiline nose; her mane of dark (now graying) hair. Her fingers are covered with jewelry, her wrists with multiple watches and bracelets, and around her neck, a large cross. (Basquiat’s portrait depicts only her bejeweled arms, alongside images of monkeys and the written amount “$65,000.”) She is often portrayed as a queen or princess—portraiture is, after all, not for the meek—though one gets the impression that this is less because of her personal hubris than the artists’ reverence for her influential support. Within these parameters, however, great variations are evident. Don Bachardy’s 1977 full-body, graphite-on-paper portrait, Joan Agajanian Quinn, lends her face a sense of tenderness and fragility. Rupert Jasen Smith’s Portrait of Joan Agajanian Quinn from a Warhol Polaroid (1988) renders her face in profile: head tilted slightly back and hair cascading behind, lending her a regal, monumental quality. By contrast, in a 2009 canvas, Joan Agajanian Quinn, young artist Lucie Abdalian paints her as a tortured apparition in thin washes of fleshy peach, jet black, and crimson, with wide, lizard-like eyes.

George Herms. Portrait of Joan Agajanian Quinn, 2003; assemblage, mixed media. Joan and Jack Quinn Collection.

Less literal depictions are just as varied. A 2003 assemblage piece by George Herms, Portrait of Joan Agajanian Quinn, is composed of a rusted ocean buoy atop ballet slippers and Zandra Rhodes’ textiles—perhaps alluding to Quinn’s role in determining cultural currents. Laddie John Dill’s funky glass and plywood sculpture, Joan Quinn (1984–85), looks like a cross between a Cubist figure and a piece of Memphis Milano furniture with no discernible purpose. An old, yellowed copy of Interview resting on the work reveals its function as a magazine rack, portraying Quinn as cultural arbiter in her role as editor and writer.

Laddie John Dill. Joan Quinn, 1984-85; sculpture/tempered glass, ground minerals, wood marine plywood. Joan and Jack Quinn Collection.

The portraits in the exhibition have been exhibited previously, but this is the first time they have been shown next to representative works by many of the artists. They are also augmented here by various ephemera, from copies of the magazines Quinn worked on, to episodes of The Joan Quinn Profiles playing on TVs, to a slideshow of her society snapshots (which were unfortunately washed out by the harsh Southern California sun). There is also an ambitious series of talks and film screenings focusing on themes related to the exhibition. This context is a welcome addition to the artworks on view, which are given additional layers of meaning through inclusion in this larger narrative. The show, after all, is not a greatest-hits survey of the last half-century, but is instead a subjective tour of a series of movements, moments, and artists through the eyes—and images—of one woman.

Joan Quinn Captured is on view at The Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale through August 1, 2014.

Album cover by Vivien Goldman, moderator of last weekend's Punk Panel at Honor Fraser Gallery.

On Saturday, July 16, Honor Fraser Gallery in Culver City hosted a panel on Punk. The panel preceded the openings of two shows, one an earnest exploration into punk’s visual precedents and antecedents, and the other an extravaganza of posters, bills, and graphics from the Punk movement of 1970s Britain. The Punk panel, chaired by Vivien Goldman, who has been a writer, performer, scholar and manager—she’s recently written a book on reggae—included a surprise guest who came in and put his motorcycle helmet on his chair about ten minutes after the panel’s scheduled start time.

Linder, "Pretty Girl I 1977/2006," Pigment print of original artwork, 7 x 9 2/5 inches, Edition 1 of 5. Courtesy Honor Fraser.

This surprise guest was Billy Idol, one of the more accessible of the punk rockers who started out in Britain’s scene. He had his signature leather, sunglasses and spikey hair, and, when the panel finally started, a lady in the front row went on to take a good few hundred photographs of him. A few others were making cell phone videos. But the woman next to me, chicly dressed and probably in her sixties, handed me a paper and asked if I could please write down the name of the man with the sunglasses so she could remember.

Billy Idol does not qualify as obscure, but many of the bands whose posters are plastered to the walls of Honor Fraser—the Slits, for instance—remain utterly unknown in certain circles. But their provocateur posture and moody DIY aesthetic will, I assume, strike most in the Western world as familiar.

A professor I had in grad school used to say all artists are either punks or hippies. My classmates and I spent a lot of time picking out who was who, and it’s harder than it sounds. Are you a hippie just because you use organic shapes and found materials? And are punks more defiant and streamlined? Can you be a concise hippie? Can you be an earthy punk?

George Herms, "The Librarian," 1960.

A show that brings hippies and punks together in a concert of dissonant materials is the George Herms: Xenophilia (Love of the Unknown) exhibition that just opened at MOCA. Herms, a California artist who came up with no-holds-barred assemblage artist Ed Kienholz in the 1960s, has always had a slightly more elegant approach to gritty found object sculpture than his burly peer. The MOCA show puts some his early and later works into conversation with a number of 21^st century artists, among them Amanda Ross Ho, Kaari Upson, Sterling Ruby and Elliott Hundley. Upson and Ruby are definitely punk; the blatant way they use ceramics and plastics feels insidious, unapologetic and almost dirty. Hundley is a hippie. His hanging sculpture is too organic and comfortable with itself. It has no bone to pick, but it’s painfully self-aware. Others, I can’t quite tell. What about the sprawling canvas made by Dan Colen, Agathe Snow and friends that looks like Sam Francis’ take on Warhol’s flowers? Even Ross Ho’s haphazard installation has a hippy-like mood, but a punk resistance to having meaning’s imposed on it. Whichever it is, the Herms show really does have a great, nonsensically collaborative mood to it, and I highly recommend a visit.