Maurice Tuchman, LACMA’s first curator (1964–1993) of 20th century art, remains an outsized figure in the history of art in Los Angeles. Known for a legacy both controversial and groundbreaking, his most well known exhibitions—Art and Technology (1971), The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (1986), and Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (1992)—continue to resonate today. The following conversation looks more deeply into Tuchman’s motivations for staging the Spiritual in Art exhibition, his struggles to realize it, its reception, and the continued influence and controversy of “the spiritual in art” today.

In 1967, Maurice Tuchman, a young LACMA curator, initiated the Art and Technology program: a "hair-raising idea" to pair artists, scientists, and corporations that aimed to envision the future. It was a project so ambitious and optimistic it had to fail.

Artist Billy Al Bengston and architect Frank Gehry have been friends for more than 50 years. In 1968, when Bengston was given a museum survey at LACMA, they collaborated on the installation: Reconfiguring the galleries with plywood walls, borrowed furniture, Black Power posters, they knocked exhibition design out of the white cube.