Archive for February 2014

New Donator to Joy Kingston Foundation : Liz Gordon

Liz Gordon

Liz Gordon never planned to specialize in antique hardware and lighting. As a very novice 21-year-old antiques dealer (she’d been in the business for a week), she was looking for merchandise in a dumpster in a Chicago alley and met a man who was doing the same thing. He said his name was Peter (it turns out it wasn’t, but that’s another story). He told her that he had a nearby warehouse full of stuff that she might be interested in buying.

Liz followed Peter to the industrial warehouse, climbing up four stories to his space. Peter opened the door and Liz met her career.

The 4000 square foot space was full of antiques, but what caught Liz’s eye were the barrels, drawers, and piles of hardware. Within a week she borrowed $6,000 from her grandmother to buy the warehouse from Peter. It turned out to be a good investment on her grandmother’s part—she was repaid within a year—and a great investment on Liz’s part.

More than thirty-five years after meeting Peter she owns the world’s largest retail showroom devoted to antique hardware and lighting.

Liz’s Antique Hardware has been a vital part of the Los Angeles design and historic preservation community for over two decades. It’s a store, but it’s also a research institution devoted to hardware and lighting. The inventory represents 200 years of industrial design, interior design, and architecture.

Building upon her interest in art and design, Liz opened the Loft at Liz’s in 2007. The Loft features both emerging and established artists and artisans, fostering an open dialogue between eclectic and diverse points of view, ideologies and experiences in all mediums.

Art is 100: Portrait of Natacha Rambova

To kick off the year-long Art is 100 celebration, we’ve
chosen to feature first on our Highlights Wall a painting
that many visitors list among their favorite works—even
without knowing its interesting backstory. The Portrait of
Natacha Rambova was presented in 1949 by her mother,
Mrs. Richard A. (Winnifred Kimball) Hudnut, as part of
the donation that helped create the Utah Museum of Fine
Arts. When Rambova learned that this portrait would be
on display for the UMFA’s 1951 opening, she immediately
wrote to the museum director, asking that her name not
be attached to the work. Rambova, who would donate her
Egyptian collection to the Museum in 1952, cited concerns
that supporting the fledgling Museum would conflict with
her funding from the Bollingen Foundation, which was
financing her work studying Ramses Vl’s tomb art. Family
history, however, suggests another reason: While sitting
for the portrait in 1925, Rambova wore a very bohemian
outfit, much to her mother’s displeasure. Mrs. Hudnut
instructed the painter, Pavle Jovanovic, to substitute what
was, in her view, a more suitable dress.The result was a
mishmash: Rambova’s distinctive headwear paired with
a dress that was more to her mother’s taste. Although
the painting—with the generic title Portrait of a Lady-
was popular whenever it was on display, thanks to her
mother’s sartorial meddling, Rambova herself could never
stand it.
Portrait of Natacha Rambova will be on display in spring
2014, the work’s first time on view since the frame was
restored in 2012 through a gift from The Joy Kingston
Foundation and Chairman/CEO Paul Matthew Layne.