Angelus News | May 7, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 9

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
Judson Studios: “Stained Glass from Gothic to Street Style” exhibit is open at Forest Lawn Museum through Sept. 12. | COURTESY FOREST LAWN MUSEUM
A taste of California Gothic
Forest Lawn Museum takes its stained-glass collection seriously.
After a year of being closed, it hopes Angelenos will, too
Everyone knows that Forest Lawn is a giant cemetery off
the 134 in Glendale.
But do we all know of the Forest Lawn Museum?
James Fishburne, Ph.D., Forest Lawn Museum director and
exhibition curator, says, “We’re a hidden gem and I want to
make us a visible, widely known gem. Forest Lawn is a whole
institution. Art is part of our DNA.”
“There’s the outdoor statuary, of course. And the buildings
themselves are works of art: stained glass, mosaics, paintings.”
The Hall of Crucifixion-Resurrection, for example, houses
the largest religious painting in the Western Hemisphere:
Jan Styka’s “The Crucifixion” from the 1890s. Robert Clark’s
“The Resurrection” (1965), also massive, literally slides on a
track.
“The building itself is really incredible, a loose recreation on
the outside of the cathedral in Orvieto, Italy, a kind of Gothic
Renaissance. Then you step inside and it’s French Gothic,
and you step in farther and the style becomes reminiscent
of a mid-century movie palace. It’s a neat mashup, sort of an
‘only in LA’ type of thing.”
The museum, free and open to the public, launched in
1952. A permanent gallery houses more traditional, 19th- to
20th-century European and American painting and sculpture.
30 • ANGELUS • May 7, 2021