Site specific public art is designed to either be appropriate to the size and scale of the site, refer to the history of the site or relate to the use and function of the site. "Long Beach XXIII" does none of these things. Rather, it is one of the 95 works making up the "Circuit" series that Frank Stella executed between 1981 and 1984. Purchased for $180,000, it was transformed from a gallery and museum piece into public art by hanging it outdoors on a dark green marble wall adjacent to the plaza lobby. Stella described the title of the series as referring "to the intricate connection within the structural networks of the pictures."1 Serpentine shapes weaving in front of honeycombed aluminum and fiberglass panels refer to automobile race courses. "Long Beach XXIII" briefly went back into an indoor setting for which it was designed when it was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989 in a retrospective of Stella's work.
Footnotes:1 "Frank Stella: 1970 - 1987" by William Rubin, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, c. 1987.
The text has been provided courtesy of Michael Several, Los Angeles, December 1998.
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