Light and Space

Mesmerized by the white-hot light of Southern California, generations of Americans have been lured west to a promise of the California Dream. Never mind the gold rush or the oil boom; for artists, the draw was an ethereal landscape flooded with diffuse light—an atmosphere that would become the basis of Los Angeles’ Light and Space Movement in the 1960s. Using local developments in engineering and aerospace technology, artists experimented with new materials—like resin and plexiglass—to filter and refract light to alter the perception of their viewers. “We don’t see the world in frames,” Robert Irwin once said of the group. “Information comes in all levels on every sensory level.”