Orange Crate Labels (France)

Ben Sakoguchi’s witty combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art use the gloss of advertising to dramatically reveal the modern lie of a capitalist blossoming that benefits all, and makes everyone happier.

Sakoguchi is best known for the series Orange Crate Labels, begun in the mid-1970s and later reprised in the mid-1990s. These 10×11-inch panels borrow their format from illustrations on wooden crates. As a child, Sakoguchi regularly observed stacks of crates in the grocery store run by his parents in the “Orange Empire” of the San Bernardino Valley in California. Each panel appropriates the basic elements of a vintage label—a title set in alluring typeface that also names a particular brand or variety. Sakoguchi’s acrylic-on-canvas works repackage objects of satire in the language of fresh produce, ripe for the selling. The Orange Crate Labels offer a clever homage to the mid-century search for the modern sublime.

From April to July 1997, Ben Sakoguchi lived in the village of Giverny, site of the famous gardens of impressionist painter Claude Monet. He served as a visiting artist at the Fondation Claude Monet, Académie des Beaux Arts, Institut de France. While at Giverny, Sakoguchi painted from vintage postcards and other materials he gathered. As regions of France crate their namesake wines to send out to the world, Sakoguchi cleverly uses the frame of the Golden State’s most famous product to wryly comment on how culture is also a commercial export, with political contingencies. In other works from this series, pilots and artists are paired to show their gravity-defying feats, drolly implying the converse adage: everything that goes up must come down.

Ben Sakoguchi (b. 1938, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Pasadena. During World War II, Sakoguchi and his family were interned at a camp in Poston, Arizona. After the war, the Sakoguchis returned to Southern California and reopened their modest grocery store. He received his BFA and MFA from UCLA and taught at the Art Department at Pasadena City College until his retirement in 1997. He has exhibited solo projects at Ortuzar Projects, New York (2020), POTTS, Alhambra (2018), The Skirball Center, Los Angeles (2016), The Alternative Museum, New York (1992), and San Francisco Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco (1980). His work has featured in institutional surveys and group exhibitions including L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena (2012), Sub-Pop, Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011), Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2000), and The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, and The Studio Museum, New York (1990). He was twice awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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