Athenaeum
Music & Arts
Library
CONCERTS
Jazz, Chamber, New Music & Acoustics
The Karatz Chamber Series continues with members of the Great Wall String Quartet performing a program of Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Piazzolla. The spring Athenaeum Jazz series continues at Scripps Research with the Bill Frisell Trio, featuring Frisell on guitar, Thomas Morgan on bass, and Rudy Royston on drums. Stereophile wrote, “Bill Frisell has quietly been the most brilliant and unique voice to come along in jazz guitar since Wes Montgomery.” The New Yorker noted, “Bill Frisell plays the guitar like Miles Davis played the trumpet: in the hands of such radical thinkers, their instruments simply become different animals.”
LECTURES
Art History, Music & Architecture Lectures
Dr. Diane Kane will lecture on Art Nouveau, 1890–1915, the international art movement that rejected historical references and traditional geometric forms, and featured florid vegetation, sinuous lines, and asymmetry. In four richly illustrated lectures, this series will examine the style’s Belgian origins and its regional variations in Paris, Vienna, and Barcelona during the 1890–1915 period. Also, join us for an artist talk with Yang Jiang. She will share a special presentation at the AAC on her Athenaeum show, I thought I’d Be Braver, and how it connects to her career and process.
ART CLASSES & LITERARY CLASSES
Winter 2025 Session & Spring 2025 Session
The Spring & Summer 2025 art classes are now available for registration. Create Handmade Cards with Judith Christensen in the AAC Print Room. Explore Gelli Printing and Beyond with Robin Roberts in the La Jolla Studio. Discover Life Drawing with Jean Krumbein in the AAC Art Studio. Join the School of the Arts Book Club with Anna DiMartino in the Jacobs Music Room. Learn Drawing from the Masters with Ken and Stephanie Goldman online via Zoom. Register today!
The Athenaeum offers a wealth of resources that are unique to this region. The library, devoted exclusively to music and art, has an outstanding and ever-expanding collection of books, periodicals, reference material, CDs, DVDs, sheet music, and librettos, as well as one of the most significant collections of artists' books in Southern California. Members have access to a wide variety of materials that range from rare, historic items to the latest in video technology.
Explore the concerts and lectures the Athenaeum has to offer. Enjoy intimate jazz, chamber, and new music concerts, as well as artists’ talks and art history lectures.
The Athenaeum Art Center (AAC) in Logan Heights has four exhibition spaces, an event space, a fully equipped print studio, a kiln, and art studio. It offers a unique set of bilingual programming that includes the exhibition of national and international artists, music concerts showcasing the distinct sounds of our binational region, participation in community festivities, free after-school art programs, art classes, and a variety of unique experiences in collaboration with local organizations.
Exhibitions
Julian Tan will exhibit End Trances, a body of work centered on a blinding, mysterious light in the sky and humans’ moments of wonder, panic, and solace as they witness it. In creating these paintings, Tan was thinking about recent trends including the use of AI in art making, the vastness of knowledge at our fingertips in a world dominated by instant information, public fascination with unidentified aerial phenomena, and a pervasive sense of being at the precipice of something—whether the end of the world or a cultural shift we have yet to understand as a society.
The show will be on display in the Joseph Clayes III Gallery and the Carolyn Yorston-Wellcome Rotunda Gallery from January 18 through April 19, 2025.
Murals of La Jolla is a project of the Athenaeum. The mural project enhances the civic character and vitality of the community by commissioning public art projects on private property throughout La Jolla. Each work is on view for a minimum of two years. Since 2010, thirty-seven large-scale artworks have appeared in a variety of locations throughout the village of La Jolla, some prominently displayed while others are tucked away in more discreet locations.
The Athenaeum's
Erika & Fred Torri
Artists’ Books Collection
Artists' books are works of art in book form. They are published in small editions or as one-of-a-kind objects. The Athenaeum's artists' books collection has become one of the most important collections in its holdings and is a driving force in the library's development. Among its holdings, it contains the complete collection of artists' books by Ed Ruscha, Ida Applebroog, Allen Ruppersberg, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and other artists.
