The Loft at Liz’s presents Craft Meets Art & Design. This exhibit is a PST inspired show featuring some of the most critically acclaimed artists working in southern California from 1945 – 1980. The Loft will host LAMA (LA Modern Auctions) and Reform Gallery including works from artists: Ed Ruscha, John Kapel, Charles Arnoldi, John [...]

Charles Arnoldi, also known as Chuck Arnoldi and as Charles Arthur Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker. He was born April 10, 1946 in Dayton, Ohio. While visiting a girlfriend’s grandmother in New York, he took the opportunity to view works by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Observing their smudges, smears, and [...]

Artist Statement As an artist in the 1950s, I first started carving in wood, then welding. The created works were based on biblical themes, fossil forms and images from nature. I began utilizing twenty five years of machine shop experience in 1963, the next phase of my art. When machining aluminum, light, reflected from its [...]

Since 1965, Pamela Weir-Quiton has made functional wood sculpture. Her art has progressed from simple doll and animal iconography to complex architectural commissions of extreme scale and structural sturdiness. Little dolls became 13′ wooden caryatids and giant 36′ cardboard tube dolls, while animal boxes and adult sized rockers morphed into my first wooden playground. Along [...]

Garry Knox Bennett (b. 1934, Alameda, CA) is a furniture maker who works in Oakland, CA. He attended the California College of Arts and Crafts where he learned to paint and sculpt. In the 1960s, he used the skills he learned to found a metal plating business, specializing in handmade jewelry. In the 1970’s he [...]

For 50 years, Los Angeles-based artist/designers Evelyn and Jerome Ackerman played a central role in the distinctive aesthetic of California mid-century modernism. Employing their deep knowledge of fine art, traditional craft, and design, the couple created a body of work remarkable for its diversity of styles, techniques, and materials. Jerome (“Jerry”) and Evelyn Ackerman brought [...]

John Kapel – Born June 17, 1922, Cleveland, OH A leader of the modern California crafts movement, John Kapel effortlessly blended studio furniture making with industrial design. After earning a bachelor’s degree at the Ohio Wesleyan University (1947), he trained for two years in Prague, then-capital of Czechoslovakia, and returned to the U.S. to earn [...]

Long Beach woodworker John Nyquist, 72, has hand-built his legacy among aficionados of midcentury design. Though Nyquist still isn’t a household name among the general public, collectors of classic California design have sought his work for almost 50 years, drawn to painstakingly crafted furniture whose hard angles are softened by gentle curves and sloping lines. [...]

Ruscha was born into a Roman Catholic family in Omaha, Nebraska, with a younger sister, Shelby, and a younger brother, Paul. Edward Ruscha, Sr. was an auditor for Hartford Insurance Company. Ruscha’s mother was supportive of her son’s early signs of artistic skill and interests. Young Ruscha was attracted to cartooning and would sustain this [...]

“If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn’t do art.” John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931, National City, California) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California. Initially a painter, Baldessari began [...]