ART

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Video artists, 49 and 52

What they’ve done: Since the early 1980s, the well-known L.A.-based brothers have produced single-channel videotapes and monumental video installations that are poetic ruminations on the myriad ways in which the electronic revolution is creating the strange worlds in which we live today. Their post-Pop narratives chart new and unexpected identities, in which borders dissolve and the past is rarely what it seems.

Outlook for ‘99: The inaugural gallery exhibition in the Japanese American National Museum’s new, 85,000-square-foot pavilion--opening across the street from its established Little Tokyo site in a landmark former Buddhist temple--is billed as the most comprehensive survey to date of the Yonemotos’ work. “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance” (Jan. 23-July 4) will also spill out of the new pavilion to include a newly commissioned work, “Silicon Valley,” to be installed in the old sanctuary of the former temple.

Sidney B. Felsen

Print gallerist, photographer, 74

What he’s done: For more than 30 years, Felsen has been a prominent player on the local, national and international art scenes, as one of four founding partners of Gemini G.E.L., the Melrose Avenue graphics workshop that has produced some of the most remarkable prints in the postwar revival of the medium. Working with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Vija Celmins, Bruce Nauman and dozens of others, Gemini created an unprecedented environment for collaboration between artists and master printers, which ran counter to the established idea of the singular genius working alone in the studio.

Outlook for ‘99: Felsen, with his signature shaved head and Panama hat, has overseen the day-to-day operation of Gemini from the start, and with his camera he’s photographically recorded the working processes and private moments of many of our most important artists. At the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, “Artist’s Proof: Photographs by Sidney B. Felsen” (Feb. 16-April 25) puts on view a selection of the entrepreneur’s images from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Raymond Pettibon

Artist, 41

What he’s done: It’s practically unheard of for an artist to develop a major international career based entirely on an output restricted to drawings, but that’s exactly what L.A.-based Pettibon has done. Pettibon’s ink and watercolor drawings first began to garner attention in the early 1980s in crossovers between music (album covers for bands such as Sonic Youth) and art (photocopied in ‘zine-like booklets or, in galleries, casually pushpinned to the wall as if it were a “Community News” bulletin board).

Outlook for ‘99: Pettibon’s repertoire of now instantly recognizable images--from all-American baseball players to an often rather bemused Jesus, from noir-ish hard-boiled detectives to a big-mouthed, cartoonish fellow who periodically bellows Vavoom!!--are surveyed in an exhibition of some 500 examples. Winding up a tour that includes prominent venues in Chicago, New York and Philadelphia, the show arrives at the Museum of Contemporary Art on Sept. 26, and will remain on view through 1999.