Keenen, Riley, Pissarro launch Parallel with Light + Space exhibition at The Surf Club during Miami Art Week
Announcing the Launch of Parallel LLC: A consultancy offering integrated, strategic services for developing art collections in close relationship to the spaces that house them—and vice versa Founded by John Keenen, Terence Riley and Joachim Pissarro
Inaugural project to debut at the new Surf Club during Art Basel in Miami Beach
Exhibition of the works of seven Los Angeles, Light and Space artists curated by Joachim Pissarro to be installed at The Surf Club’s Richard Meier pavilion
Parallel LLC, a newly launched consultancy that marries architecture and curatorial practices for its clients, founded by John Keenen, Terence Riley, and Joachim Pissarro, announces its inaugural project to debut during Art Basel in Miami Beach at the new Surf Club, designed by Richard Meier. Curated by Joachim Pissarro in consultation with Riley and Keenen, LAX – MIA: Light + Space will focus on fifteen works by seven Los Angeles Light and Space artists being shown together for the first time in Miami at the Surfside, Florida location of Meier’s architecturally iconic The Surf Club pavilion, north of Miami Beach.
LAX – MIA: Light + Space is commissioned by The Surf Club in conjunction with Fort Partners. It includes works by artists Peter Alexander, Larry Bell, Mary Corse, Laddie John Dill, John McCracken, Helen Pashgian, and De Wain Valentine*. It will be on view from Tuesday, December 1 through Saturday, December 12, beginning with a Wednesday, December 2, 9:30–11 AM Daylight Viewing reception. Larry Bell and Laddie John Dill, eminent LAX – MIA: Light + Space exhibiting artists, will be in attendance for the opening. The exhibition will subsequently be open to the public from 11 AM–5 PM daily. All artworks within the exhibition will be available for acquisition.
Light + Space
Largely gathered around the fledgling, yet intense, art scene located in and around Venice, California, during the 1970s, artists of the Light and Space movement were influenced by the distinctive atmospheric qualities of the landscape of Southern California’s Westside beachfront communities. LAX – MIA: Light + Space reimagines and re-contextualizes notions that fostered the artistic practices of these artists, giving their works a parallel and fresh life on Florida’s eastern coastal edge.
In a group statement, Parallel’s principal partners relate: “To see this unlikely alliance on the dunes of Collins Avenue in the Richard Meier pavilion which is surrounded by the ocean and the sky, is an occasion to enjoy one of the highest moments of radically new creativity in America in the past half-century, architecturally and artistically.”
Parallel co-principal and LAX – MIA: Light + Space exhibition curator Joachim Pissarro adds that the group’s interest in launching the partnership through this endeavor has a great significance to each member of their team, stating: “We could scarcely have imagined a better more evocative, richer and more lyrical dialogue between art and architecture than that between the group of artists in Los Angeles known as Light and Space and the supremely light and luminous architectural shell produced here by Richard Meier. Indeed the qualities of luminosity offer here a remarkable common denominator that articulates the poetical qualities between the architect in charge of this project and the artists, who seem to be serendipitously responding to the call for light articulated by Richard Meier so powerfully.”
About Parallel LLC
Following closely upon the observation made by Louis Kahn that art and architecture are not the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside,’ but rather, prolong and sustain each other, Parallel LLC is John Keenen, Terence Riley, and Joachim Pissarro, each partner with well over thirty years of experience in their respective fields. Parallel’s collective mission is creating strong and complementary partnerships devoted to the relationship between art and architecture. Parallel offers a new and unique concept to the contemporary art world: a symbiosis of exceptional architectural and curatorial practices for major private or institutional art collections worldwide that seamlessly bring together architecture, design, and art collecting under one and the same program. Embracing a wide range of possibilities within the design of buildings, both interior and exterior, to exhibition displays, Parallel also offers consulting on the essential aspects of acquiring, managing and preserving collections and innovative ways of exhibiting art in any given space.
Parallel partner Terence Riley elaborates: “All too often curators and designers are working at odds, or are in the dark about what each other is doing. Parallel was conceived to combine curatorial and design and architectural perspectives to conceptualize and create spaces devoted to art: museums, galleries, and private collections.”
With Parallel’s guidance and highly sophisticated conceptualization, design skills, and project management, a broad range of clients with either residential, commercial and institutional facilities is able to seamlessly tap into the combined expertise of Parallel’s principals to accomplish such projects as building a museum from its inception—taking into consideration both its walls and its content in harmony. Parallel, however, also readily intervenes in projects where walls for a museum space exist without a collection, or in cases where a collection exists without walls. In doing so, Parallel addresses the needs and goals of each stakeholder, from museum directors, to its trustees and even private art collectors.
Parallel Principal Biographies
John Keenen studied Art History at Georgetown University, and received his Masters of Architecture from Columbia University. He has twice been both the recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant and a finalist for the prestigious international Andrea Palladio Award for Architecture. He is a Trustee of the Design Trust for Public Space.
Joachim Pissarro studied Art History at the Sorbonne, the Courtauld Institute in London, and received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been the Bershad Professor of Art History and the Director of Hunter College Galleries in New York since 2007. From 2003 to 2008, he was a curator in The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Department of Painting and Sculpture, and has also held senior curatorial positions at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas, and the Yale University Art Gallery.
Terence Riley studied architecture at both the University of Notre Dame and Columbia University. In addition to being a practicing architect for over thirty years, Riley has served as the Philip Johnson Chief Curator for Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and subsequently served as the Director of the Miami Art Museum (now the Perez Art Museum). Riley also occupied a lead role in the architect selection, programming, and design processes for Yoshio Taniguchi’s renovation and expansion of MoMA, as well as the new waterfront Herzog & De Meuron-designed waterfront museum facilty for the Miami Art Museum.
RSVP is required for the Wednesday, December 2, 9:30-11 AM Daylight Viewing reception.
The Surf Clubwww.thesurfclub.com
