Music History Presented at the Grammy Museum
The Grammy Museum, in conjunction with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945 – 1980, unveiled its latest special exhibit, Trouble In Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975.
Located on the Museum’s fourth floor, the exhibit explores thirty years of the pop music scene of Los Angeles, and its related culture, politics, and popular art. The GRAMMY Museum has partnered with University of Southern California professor Josh Kun, who is serving as co-curator.
“This is such a crucial, formative period in the history of music in Los Angeles,” says Kun. “It’s also a period of great social and cultural transformations, from the building of the freeways to multiple civil rights uprisings, and we hope to use this exhibit to highlight music’s role in shaping the city’s post-World War II identity.”
The exhibit features iconic images, a cross-section of ephemera (album art, handbills, concert posters, etc.), music, and filmed interviews with key figures in the scene. Rather than an exhaustive overview, Trouble In Paradise focuses on the tensions between alluring myths of Southern California paradise and the realities of social struggle that characterized the years following WWII.
Genres of music highlighted in the exhibit include surf rock, jazz, R&B, Laurel Canyon folk rock, the Sunset Strip rock scene and the East L.A. Chicano sound, all of which helped shape the most diverse and influential music scenes in all of America during this socially tumultuous period of L.A. History. Trouble In Paradise: Music and Los Angeles, 1945-1975 will be on display through March 25, 2012. Additional public and educational programming related to the exhibit will be announced soon.
The GRAMMY Museum is located at 800 West Olympic Boulevard, Suite A245, Los Angeles, CA 90015. With an entrance off of Figueroa Street, the Museum resides within the L.A. LIVE campus, at the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Paying tribute to music's rich cultural history, this one-of-a-kind, 21st-century Museum explores and celebrates the enduring legacies of all forms of music, the creative process, the art and technology of the recording process, and the history of the premier recognition of excellence in recorded music — the Grammy Award. The Grammy Museum features 30,000 square feet of interactive and multimedia exhibits located within L.A. LIVE, the downtown Los Angeles sports, entertainment and residential district.
