Catherine Opie, Geoff McFetridge Artworks Unveiled as Part of Beverly Center Renovations

The Beverly Center is living large. 

The Los Angeles mall, currently undergoing an extensive $500 million renovation, is now covered in several large-scale artworks from well-known local artists including Catherine Opie and Geoff McFetridge. It’s the latter who is responsible for Girl Lifting Skirt 2, seen above.

The image that now looms above the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Third Street is 70-feet tall and said to evoke “the open and civic spirit of Beverly Center’s reimagining — itself, a kind of lifting of skirts,” per a statement from the center. 

Meanwhile, Opie’s work, Untitled (Beach Day #2), brings the beach to the city. On a large exterior scrim, which spans 160 by 100 feet on Beverly Boulevard, the blurred image features figures on a beach. Below it on a pedestrian walkway, the renowned photographer contributed new works, “hands on surfboards,” all of which were photographed on local beaches. 

The installations are part of an art program that launched in July, organized by curator Jenelle Porter in association with the Hammer Museum. The mall remains open during renovations, with work scheduled to be completed by the 2018 holiday season.

The remaining works will debut this month and include:

• Julian Hoeber’s Artists and Models: Hoeber’s work is a kind of seating pavilion composed of a curved billboard with an image of a woman’s face pressed against the glass. The facade wall is interrupted by a doorway that allows visitors to metaphorically enter the face, behind which is a sculptural bench and intricate floor that forms a relaxation space.

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• Karen Kimmel’s Stay: An artist and designer, Kimmel has created a temporary sculptural installation, exclusive to Beverly Center, that incorporates usable seating for customers in the form of benches, platforms and stools whose shapes derive from Kimmel’s visual vocabulary of abstracted, biomorphic forms. 

• Sharon Lockhart’s Stanley “Tom” Durrell, Tinsmith: An accomplished filmmaker and photographer, Lockhart’s work monumentalizes a worker’s lunchbox and its contents. The lunchbox becomes a kind of portrait of its owner, a tinsmith at Maine’s Bath Iron Works shipyard. The work is 60 feet high by 80 feet wide and positioned on the corner of Beverly and San Vicente Boulevards.

A photograph showing Catherine Opie’s “Untitled (Beach Day #2)” image on display at the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. (Courtesy of the Beverly Center.)

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