Jet Set Saturdays: Channa Horwitz at SolwayJones and kunsthalle LA

By Anne Martens

If Channa Horwitz wasn’t female and 78 years old, she’d perhaps—and deservedly—be as well known as her male, L.A. artist contemporaries Robert Irwin and James Turrell. At the time of Ferus Gallery’s emergence, she lived in Tarzana—then as Channa Davis—raising three children, where she created remarkable works of art. One wonders, had she hung around La Cienega Boulevard often enough, would the boys have let her in the clubhouse? This Jet Setter doubts it.

In 2005 and 2007, SolwayJones Gallery exhibited Horwitz’s contemporary work. The gallery’s current two-part exhibition, one at its main space on Hill Street; the other at kunsthalle LA on Chung King Road, showcases the artist’s seminal work of the 60s, 70s and 80s, as well as a piece from 2000 and one from this year. Upon a recent visit to both gallery spaces, Michael Solway pointed out a 1971 LACMA exhibition catalog in a vitrine — tangible evidence of the type of historical exclusionism female artists face. On the cover, about a dozen artist-faces, all male, stared back. Nearby hangs Davis’ 1968 notated sketch for a sculpture, Suspension of Vertical Beams Moving in Space. The sculpture would have included eight moving parts and eight light beams, suggesting the complexity and ambition that any “Light and Space” project would have entailed. The artist had submitted the drawing as part of a proposal for an installation she planned to execute if accepted into the prestigious “Experiments in Art and Technology” program—in which artists were paired with scientists and engineers to explore perceptual phenomena—that culminated in the LACMA show. Although she was admitted into the exhibition, the more significant installation proposal got rejected.

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