LOS ANGELES, CA.- The University of Southern California Fisher Museum of Art presents the exhibition Seven Decades of Collecting: Celebrating the USC Fisher Museum of Art, a selection of artworks from the Museum’s permanent collection. Organized by USC Fisher Museum of Art curator Ariadni A. Liokatis, the exhibition will be on view through February 8, 2009. Seven Decades of Collecting will showcasesome ofthe museum’s most prized possessions as well as recent acquisitions ranging from 16th century European paintings to 21st century Spanish and Latin American art.

Seven Decades of Collecting: Celebrating the USC Fisher Museum of Art traces over 70 years of collecting with art from the founding collection of Elizabeth Holmes Fisher, the Museum’s namesake and founder, and Armand Hammer. A selection of 16th& 17th c Italian and Dutch masterworks, 17th & 18th c European portraits, and 19th and early 20th c American and European landscapes will be on display. Three major European works of art, having been on a long-term loan to the Getty Museum, will be displayed together at the Fisher Museum for the first time in years. Of important note is the 16th c Bacchiacca’s Portrait of a Woman and Child, which has recently been conserved and never shown before at Fisher. The Fisher Museum is proud to display artwork that has been on loan to museums locally, nationally, and internationally, such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, the Berkshire Museum in Massachusetts, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Mauritshuis in the agueHHague (Holland), the Dulwich Picture Gallery in England, as well as other venues in Mexico City, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.

The exhibition will also feature our contemporary holdings and most recent acquisitions: Carmen Calvo, Mira Bernabeu, Salomon Huerta, Patssi Valdez, Gronk, Marta Palau, and Einar and Jamex de la Torre are among the artists to be showcased. We will also be introducing Kate Ingold, an artist from Chicago whose work represents a convergence of Mexico and Chicago in its cityscape's embrace of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This exhibition provides a window into the history of collecting in the context of a university museum, and a reflection both on past collecting practices and current and future collecting trends.