Jorge Pardo

1998 Jorge Pardo 4166 Sea View Lane, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

Garnish and Landscape, with Tobias Rehberger, Gesellschaft fuer Gegenwartskunst, Augsburg, Germany

One Component of the Work Is That the Show Will Have Many Titles, One of Them Being: MoCA.Three Prints Per Second, Friedrich Petzel / Nina Borgmann, New York, NY

2010 The Artist's Museum: Los Angeles Artists 1980-2010, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA

A Basic Impulse, Galleria Comunale d'Arte Contemporanea di Monfalcone, Monfalcone, Italy

The Jewel Thief, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY

Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001-2006, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.

2007 Exhibitionism: An Exhibition of Exhibitions of works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, NY

Celebrating the Lucelia Artist Award, 2001-2006, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

View Eight: A Few Domestic Objects Interrogate a Few Works of Art, curated by Bruce Ferguson, Mary Boone Gallery, New York, NY

.all Hawaii ENtrees / luNar reggae, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland

Trans/Migrations: Graphics at Contemporary Art, San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, Old San Juan, Puerto Rico

Design¹ Art, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, NY

100 Artists See God, curated by John Baldessari and Meg Cranston, Independent Curators International, The Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Engalnd; Contemporary Art Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach, VA; Albright College Freedman Art Gallery, Reading, PA; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN

2003 Jessica Stockholder: Table Top Sculpture, Gorney, Bravin + Lee, New York, NY

I Moderni/The Moderns, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli, Italy

Refraction, Jorge Pardo and Gerhard Richter, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, NY

No Return, Sammlung Haubrok, Städtiches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Liverpool Biennial, UK

2001 Active Ingredients, Copia, American Center for Food Wine & the Arts, Napa, CA

Comfort, curated by Kristin Chambers, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH

KolnSkulpture3, curated by Dr. Michael Stoffel, SkulptutenparkKoln, Cologne, Germany

In Between: Art and Architecture, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, CA

The Beauty of Intimacy, Lens and Paper, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands

Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism: SITE Santa Fe Forth International Biennal, Santa Fe, NM

2000 Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA

1989, curated by Ilene Kurtz, David Kiehl & Patrick Moore, Curt Marcus Gallery, New York, NY

Talleres: Art from the Guadalajara Workshops, Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, D.C.

Against Design, curated by Steven Beyer, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL; Museum of Contemporary At, San Diego, CA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO

Double Space, curated by A.S. Bessa, Apex Art Curatorial Program, New York, NY

Rags to Riches, curated by Petra Bungert and Alexandra Dimentieva, Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art, Brussels, Belgium (cat.)

What If, curated by Maria Lind and Liam Gillick, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden

Comfort Zone: Furniture by Artists, curated by Amy Wolf, The Public Art Fund, Paine Webber Art Gallery, New York, NY (cat.)

Talleres: Art From Guadalajara Workshops, curated by Carlos Ashida, Track 16 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

DConstructivism: life back in to art, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Center, Australia

Chaos, Control, Chaos, Control. You Like? You Like, curated by Anne Lemieux, Elias Fine Art, Boston, MA

artranspennine, with Atelier van Lieshout, Francoise Quardon, and Langlands and Bell, curated by Penelope Curtis, The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK (cat.)

___, 1994untitled,1994(meettim&burkhard)brançusi,1997, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria

Scratches on the surface of things, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Kevin Appel, Francis Cape, Jorge Pardo, curated by Margaret Murray, Janice Guy, New York, NY

Rooms With a View: Environments for Videos, curated by Nancy Spector, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, NY

Just Past: Contemporary and Permanent Collection 1975-1996, MoCA Los Angeles, CA

Projekte/Projects: Art at the New Trade Fair of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany (cat.)

Hawaii, with Pae White, Mitchell Kane, and Mythter, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, NY

Dark Memories Hovering Below the Transparent Screen of the Present Will Project Images of Reality in Sharp Silhouette, to Create the Pleasurable Effect of a Double World, Marc Foxx, Santa Monica, CA

Das Ende der Avantgarde - Kunst als Dienstleistung, Sammlung Schuermann, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich, Germany (cat.)

Saturday Night Fever, curated by Michael Cohen and Catherine Liu, Tom Solomon's Garage, Los Angeles, CA

Temporary Translation(s) - Kunst der Gegenwart und Fotografie, Sammlung Schuermann, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (cat.)

Pure Beauty: Some Recent Work From Los Angeles, curated by Ann Goldstein, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; American Center, Paris, France

Object/objet, with Stephen Berens, Elizabeth Bryant, and Anne Walsh, El Camino College Art Gallery, Torrance, CA

Facing the Finish, curated by John Caldwell and Robert Riley, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA (cat.)

1990 Omnia ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, curated by Peter Wright, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, CA

Improvements on the Ordinary, curated by Dan Peterman, Randolph Street, Chicago, IL

2010 Coles, Alex. "Jorge Pardo: Living (in) Sculpture." Phillips de Pury & Company: Latin America September 2010: 24-29.

2009 Between the Lines: a coloring book of drawings by contemporary artists. vol. 2 New York: RX Art, 2009.

Bochynek, Martin. "Jorge Pardo: Freizeit Für die grauen Zellen." Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger 12 May 2009.

Clearwater, Bonnie. "Celebrity Equinox." International Corporate Art 2009: 58-59.

Herrera, Adriana. "Rosa De la Cruz: And her new bet on contemporary art." Arte Al Dia Internacional issue 129 December 2009.

Holzwarth, Hans W., ed. 100 Contemporary Artists (L-Z). Cologne: Taschen, 2009. 460-467.

Kelsey, John. "theanyspacewhatever." Artforum International March 2009: 236-237.

Klein, Cecilia F. "In the Belly of the Beast." Artforum International, January 2009: 85-90.

Krystof, Doris. "Jorge Pardo. K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen." Texte zur Kunst 2009.

Kutscher, Barbara. "Der Gewalt Einer Lawine." 20_21 Das Magazin Der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen no. 10 Spring 2009: 10-15.

Last, Nana. "Jorge Pardo. K21 Kunstammung Nordrhein-Westfalen." Artforum International January 2009.

Molesworth, Helen. "Social Problem." Artforum International March 2009: 101-102.

Simblist, Noah. "Theanyspacewhatever." Art Papers January/February 2009: 61-62.

Simon, Jane. "Return to Function." Madison Museum of Contemporary Art 2009: 15-41, 60-61.

Söntgen, Beate. "Der Bildermacher Oder: Wie Man Die Dinge In Der Bar Betrachten Soll, Über Jorge Pardo im K21." Texte zur Kunst vol. 19 issue 75 September 2009: 202-205.

Zsolnay, Robert. "Not a Museum Man." Mercedes Magazine Fine Arts April 2009: 52-56.

2008 Amerikaner, Andres. "Aventura Mall Displays High-End Art." Miami Herald 2 May 2008.

Carrier, David. "Review: Cleveland, Jorge Pardo, Museum of Contemporary Art." Artforum December 2008: 306-307 (ill.)

Cooke, Lynne. "Best of 2008: #1Jorge Pardo (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)." Artforum December 2008: 260 (ill.)

Cotter, Holland. "Ancient Art, Served on a Present-Day Platter." The New York Times 27 August 2008: E1 &E5 (ill.)

Dunlop, Beth. "This House is Art: Think About It." HOME Miami January 2008: 52-57 (ill.)

Hubbard, Sue. "Jorge Pardo, Haunch of Venison, London: When high art is more like Ikea." Independent.co.uk 9 April 2008.

Knight, Christopher. "Jorge Pardo's Pre-Columbian art installation at LACMA." Los Angeles Times 1 August 2008 (ill.)

Kraus, Chris, Lane Relyea, and Christina Vegh. Jorge Pardo. New York: Phaidon, 2008.

McMullan, Patrick. "Moon over Miami and Santa Monica." Interview Magazine March 2008: 5 (ill.)

O'Connor, Anne-Marie. "Sculptor Jorge Pardo: Is it art or furniture?" Los Angeles Times 8 June 2008.

Pardo, Jorge. "Jorge Pardo: On blurring the boundaries between art, architectue and design." Liberate the Home online 24 April 2008 (ill.).

Ratcliff, Carter. "House Proud." Art in America November 2008: 174-179, 207 (ill.)

Shattuck, Kathryn. "Shining a Light On a Movement That Maybe Isn't." New York Times 26 October 2008: 23 (ill.)

Taschen, Angelika. "The Magic of the Sea." Taschen Spring/Summer 2008: 44-45 (ill.)

2007 Alzola, Concha. "La Sexta Edicion de una de las Principales Ferias de arte en el Mundo." Vanidades 2007 (ill.)

Arango, Jorge S. "Shock To The System." House & Garden September 2007: 182-195 (ill.)

Buck, Louisa. "Jorge Pardo: artist in the house." The Art Newspaper: Miami Beach Daily Edition 5 December 2007: 10 (ill.)

Cooke, Lynne. "Gerhard Richter and Jorge Pardo: Refraction." Dia Art online 1 August 2007.

Ebony, David. "Report from Lisbon: Sailing into the 21st Century." Art in America April 2007: 52- 57 (ill.)

"Featured Exhibitions." Florida International Magazine 10th Anniversary Year November 2007 (ill.)

Finkel, Jori. "Here's the Show, The Works Are Elsewhere." The New York Times 2 December 2007: 33 (ill.)

Gillick, Liam. "Ice Sculpture/Important Postmen." Proxemics: Selected Writings 1988-2006. Zurich: JRP Ringier, and Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2007. 248-255 (ill.)

Hanaor, Ziggy. "The Cutting Edge of Wallpaper." Blackdog Publishing January 2007: 112-113 (ill.)

Loers, Veit. "Jorge Pardo, Tomatensuppe." 10 Jahre Skulpturenpark Cologne. Catalogue 2007: 128-131 (ill.)

MacMillan, Kyle. "Draw closer and take a look." The Denver Post 31 August 2007: 3FF.

McCormick, Carlo. "Jorge Pardo." Interview Magazine December 2007-January 2008: 58 (ill.)

Melendez, Franklin. "Jorge Pardo's Manifesto: Boldly Bridging Art and Design Under the California Sun." Soma: The Design Issue August 2007: 52-53 (ill.)

Rosenberg, Karen. "At Fairs by the Beach, The Sands of Creativity." New York Times 8 December 2007.

Schjeldahl, Peter. "Critic's Notebook: Design for Living." The New Yorker 16 April 2007.

Slyce, John. "all hawaii eNtrees/LuNar ReGGae." Art Monthly February 2007: 26-28.

Smith, Roberta. "In These Shows, the Material Is the Message." New York Times 10 August 2007: E27, 29 (ill.)

Suqi, Rima. "As You Leave the Gallery, Please Close the Art Behind You." New York Times 5 July 2007: F3 (ill.)

Turner, Elisa. "Season of the Arts, Looking inward as outside world arrives." The Miami Herald 16 September 2007 (ill.)

Williamson, Damien. "One Art Museum, Two Exhibits, One Fundraiser." Time Out 3-9 August 2007 (ill.)

Yablonsky, Linda. "Scene & Herd: The Hole Shebang." Artforum online 28 March 2007.

Egan, Maura. "Artistic License." The New York Times Style Magazine Spring 2006: 134-139 (ill.)

Egan, Maura. "Ein Kunstwerk in Extralarge." Architectural Digest (German) June 2006: 142-149.

Louie, Elaine. "CURRENTS: Murals; The Transformative Power of a Fresh Coat of Paint." New York Times 23 February 2006.

Rochette, Anne and Wade Saunders. "Place Matters: Los Angeles Sculptors Today." Art in America November 2006: 184-186 (ill.)

Coles, Alex. "Jorge Pardo's Lifestyle as an Ethnography of Design." Ways of Living. Cambrdige: Kettle's Yard, 2005. 35-38 (ill.)

Hirsch, Faye. "Abstract Generations." Art in America October 2005: 123-128, 191.

Last, Nana. "Function and Field: Demarcating Conceptual Practices." Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. Eds. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung. Osxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Pagel, David. "The Hyper-Refined Simplicity of Ravishing Craftiness." Populence. Catalogue. Houston: Blaffer Gallery and The Art Museum of the University of Houston, 2005. 52-64 (ill)

Sanders, Constanze. "Ohne private Spenden läuft nichts mehr in der Kultur." RAG-Magazin April 2005: 8-13.

Alfano, Jennifer. "Lifestyle: The World of Kim Heirston." Harper's Bazaar November 2004: 134 (ill.)

Bloemink, Barbara. "The Continuum Between, and Transformations of, Art and Design." Design Art 2004: 142-145 (ill.)

Coles, Alex. "The Plywood and Rubber Plant School of Art and Design." Contemporary issue 61 2004: 38-41.

Gershon, Stacey B. and Nancy Hall-Duncan. Off the Wall Works for the JP Morgan Chase Collection. Greenwich: Bruce Museum, 2004. 48.

Gilmore, Jonathan. "Jorge Pardo." Art in America no. 8 September 2004: 122-123 (ill.)

"Jorge Pardo – Penelope." Tate Liverpool Exhibitions and Events July-September 2004: 60.

Longwell, Alicia G. North Fork/South Fork: East End Art Now. Southampton: Parrish Art Museum, 2004. 63 (ill.)

Lorenzoni, Rogério. "Jorge Pardo diz que Pichação é legal e estranha." Diversao 29 September 2004 (ill.)

Mönig, Roland, ed. "Michel Majerus." Plum Collection: Museum Kurhaus. Kleve: Museum Kurhaus Kleve, 2004. 108-109.

"North Fork South Fork, The Parrish Museum's Summer Show." Avenue July 2004: 8 (ill.)

Prince, Nigel. "Jorge Pardo – Haunch of Venison." Untitled no. 32 Summer 2004: 60.

Ruyter, Lisa. Catalogue of The Armory Show 2004: The International Fair of New Art. New York: The Armory Show, 2004 (ill.)

Schwendener, Martha. "Fully Furnished." Time Out New York 30 September-7 October 2004: 70 (ill.)

Tumlir, Jan. "Jorge Pardo – Gagosian Gallery." Artforum February 2004: 155f.

Beccaria, Marcella. "Jorge Pardo, l'arte come luogo capace di appartenere alla vita." Abitare vol. 429 June 2003: 182-185.

Ebner, Jorg. "Ruine auf Außenposten, Londoner Galerien: Pardo, Dack, Gillick und Shonibare." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 13 December 2003.

Gonzalez, Veronica and Lara Stapleton, eds. Juncture. New York: Soft Skull, 2003. 155.

Jongbloed, Marjorie, Brigitte Oetker, and Christiane Schneider, eds. Jahresring 50: Jahrbuch für Moderne Kunst. Cologne: Oktagon, 2003. 114-121.

Last, Nana. "Conceptualism's (Con)quests." Harvard Design Magazine Fall 2003-Winter 2004: 14-21.

Sheets, Hilarie M. "There's No Piece Like Home." ARTnews December 2003: 102-103.

Woolford, Donelle and Miljohn Ruperto, eds. "4166 Sea View Lane, A Reader." Commerce Winter 2003.

2002 Adler, Vanessa. The Object Sculpture. Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 2002. 156-159, 169, 192.

Baker, Kenneth. "Viewers experience artist's loss by eating his candy." San Francisco Chronicle 2 November 2002.

Blickle, Ursula, ed. 10 Jahre 1991-2001. Kraichtal: Urusal Blickle Stiftung, 2002. 48.

Grosenick, Uta and Burkhard Riemschneider, eds. Art Now. Cologne: Taschen, 2002. 272-275.

Guzik, Jon Alain. "More Art About Buildings and Food." SOMA vol. 15 10 December 2001-January 2002: 34-35.

Higgie, Jennifer. "Jennifer Higgie on Pae White." Frieze issue 86 April 2002: 64-69.

Lloyd, Ann Wilson. "Art is a Necessity Among Techies Too." New York Times 15 December 2002: 50-51.

No Return. Mönchengladbach: Sammlung Haubrok, Städtiches Museum Abteiberg, 2002. 71-73, 153.

Pappalardo, Bethany Anne. "Jorge Pardo." Tema Celeste no. 89 January-February 2001: 113.

Schmid, Doreen, ed. Active Ingredients. Napa: Copia, 2001-2002. 15, 26, 27, 52-53, 58.

Tumlir, Jan. "Jorge Pardo: The Butler Did It." Flash Art vol. 35 no. 227 November-December 2002: 90-93.

Vendrame, Simona, ed. "News & Around." Tema Celeste no. 93 September-October 2002: 114.

Vincent, Steven. "Collective Obsessive." Smock vol. 2 no. 1 Winter 2002: 82-91.

2001 Berwick, Carly. "A House, a Boat, a Bar." ARTnews December 2001: 112-113.

Chambers, Kristin. Comfort: Reclaiming Place in a Virtual World. Cleveland: Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, 2001. 37, 63-66.

Delson, Susan, ed. "Inspirations." Museums Los Angeles vol. 3 no. 1 Spring/Summer 2001: 128E.

Gopnik, Blake. "Pardo Wins First Lucelia Artist Award." The Washington Post 24 May 2001: c5.

Gregos, Katerina. "New York Now." Contemporary Visual Arts issue 34 2001: 53-57.

Grosenick, Uta and Burkhard Riemschneider, eds. Art Now! Icons. Cologne: Taschen, 2001.

Hornbrook, Kathy. "Museum of Contemporary Art Reclaiming the 'Comfort Zone.'" The Plain Dealer 27 April 2001.

Klein, Jennie. "It's a beautiful Morning." New Art Examiner November-December 2001: 74-81.

Knight, Christopher. "Art For School's Sake." Los Angeles Times Calendar 8 July 2001: 67.

Litt, Steven. "A Spunky Vision of Domestic Future in The Modem Age." The Plain Dealer 18 March 2001.

Lütticken, Sven. "Het schilderi en de afvalbak." De Witte Raaf 89 January-February 2001: 11-13 (ill.)

Mitchell, Charles D. "Making the Case for Pleasure." Art in America November 2001: 122-130.

"MOCA Examines Points of Emergence Of Today's Significant Artists." Antiques & The Arts Weekly 30 March 2001.

Muchnic, Suzanne. "That 90's Show." Los Angeles Times Sunday Calendar 1 April 2001: 4-5, 75.

Pagel, David. "Before Their Art Was Famous." Los Angeles Times 4 April 2001: F8.

Parkett, Collaborations & Editions Since 1984. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001. 186-7.

Roberts, James, ed. "If You Could Have Any Five Artworks…" Frieze November-December 2001: 65-80.

Simpson, Bennett. "The Sociology of Jorge Pardo." ArtNexus no. 40 May-July 2001: cover, 48-52.

Simpson, Bennett. "Specific Spectacles: Art & Entertainment." Art & Text no. 71 November 2000-January 2001: 70-77.

Tumlir, Jan. "90s Art in Los Angeles." Art & Text no. 71 November 2000-January 2001: 42-51.

Von Bonin, Cosima. Bruder Poul Sticht In See. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2001. 68.

2000 Against Design. Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 2000.

Barron, Stephanie, Sheri Bernstein and Ilene S. Fort. Made in California: Art, Image and Identity. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2000. 269.

Blair, Dike. "Thinking Outside the Box." Time Out New York 14-21 September 2000: 111.

Hamilton, William. "New Art's Interior Move." The New York Times 3 February 2000: F1, F8.

Relyea, Lane. "L.A.-Based and Superstructure." Public Offerings. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. 263, 266.

Schafaff, Jorn and Barbara Steiner, eds. Jorge Pardo. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2000.

Singerman, Howard. "Jorge Pardo." Public Offerings. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000. 120-127 (ill.)

Sozanski, Edward. "Along the Fuzzy Boundary between Art and Design." The Philadelphia Inquirer 13 February 2000: A11.

"Very New Art: Jorge Pardo." Monthly Art Magazine Bijitsu Techno vol. 52 no. 782 January 2000: 180-181.

1999 Argyropoulou, Nadia, Stergios Delialis, Yorgos Tzirtzikalis and Dmitra Vamilai. Objecthood 00. Athens: Hellenic American Union, 1999. 62-65.

Ferguson, Russell. "What is Lost for Art is Gained for Life." Parkett no. 56 1999: 122-129.

Goldsmith, Diane. "It's all in how you see it." The Philadelphia Inquirer Home & Design Friday 28 May 1999: Front page, E8.

Grosenick, Uta, Lars Bang Larsen, and Burkhard Riemschneider. Art at the turn of the Millennium. Cologne: Taschen, 1999. 374.

Sherman, Mary. "Weaving a Lasting Message." Boston Sunday Herald 31 October 1999: 76.

Temin, Christine. "Warning: Threads of Dissent May Irritate Skin." Boston Globe 3 November 1999.

Vegh, Christina. "4166 Sea View Lane-ein Kunstlerhaus von Jorge Pardo." Werk, Bauen+Wohnen vol. 3 March 1999: 46-51.

Vegh, Christina. "The Tonality of Contradictory Settings." Parkett no. 56 1999: 130-139.

1998 Avgikos, Jan. "The Shape of Art at the End of the Century." Sculpture April 1998: 46-53.

Basualdo, Carlos. "Jorge Pardo." Cream Contemporary Art in Culture 1998: 320-323.

Codrington, Andrea. "Public Eye: Furniture in Art." The New York Times January 1998: F2.

DeBord, Matthew. "LA casual + NY critical = a New Urbanity." Siksi Summer 1998: 56-61.

Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. "Welcome to the House that Jorge Built." Los Angeles Times Calendar 11 October 1998: 62, 82.

Firpo, Erica. "Home Improvement." Los Angeles Downtown News vol. 27 no. 45 26 October 1998: 10.

Frangenbuerg, Frank. "Die Moral der Kunst." Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger no. 50 28 February-1 March 1998: 39.

Holmqvist, Karl. "Hospital." Flash Art vol. XXXI no. 199 March-April 1998: 79.

"Jorge Pardo: 'Lighthouse.'" Art Now International Gallery Guide February 1998: 10-11.

Knight, Christopher. "Stay-at-Home Artist." Los Angeles Times Calendar 17 October 1998: F14

Lewis, Christopher. "Pardo's House on a Hill." Art in America December 1998: 35.

Rossmann, Andreas. "Landnahme fur die Kunst." Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung 10 August 1998: 35.

Steiner, Barbara. "Ein Haus, Das Kein Haus Ist." Neue Bildende Kunst August-September 1998: 24-29.

1997 Brooks, Rosetta. "Jim Iserman and Jorge Pardo at Richard Telles." LA Weekly 27 December-2 January 1997: 41.

Buchloh, Benjamin. "Sculpture Projects in Muenster." Artforum September 1997: 115-117.

Feaver, William. "Frankly, this Place is Going Down the Drain." The Observer 20 July 1997.

Grabner, Michelle. "Jorge Pardo: Living Without Boundaries." Sculpture Magazine December 1997: 38-41.

Sherlock, Maureen. "The Sentimental Education of a Solitary Walker." New Art Examiner September 1997: 25-31, 69.

Smith, Roberta. "A Channel-Surfing Experience with Beanbag Chairs and Gym." The New York Times 25 April 1997: C22.

Sonna, Birgit. "Kunst mit Altmuhl und Amobe." Suddeutsche Zeitung no. 27 1997: 14.

1996 Guth, Peter. "Menschenstroeme im Licht-Atem." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 20 March 1996: 37.

Hegewisch, Katherina. "Die Kunst der drei Grazien." Wochenpost 21 March 1996: 38-39.

Herbstreuth, Peter. "The First Summer of Art in the Nineties." Atelier International no. 831 November 1996: 17-36.

Herbstreuth, Peter. "In ig fuereinander bestimmt." Der Tagesspiegel no. 15567 15 March 1996: 23.

Herbstreuth, Peter. "Jorge Pardo in der Galerie neugerriemschneider." Das Kunst Bulletin no. 10 1996: 36.

Husemann, Ralf. "Schrille Toene: Die Kunst in neuen Leipziger Messebau." Sueddeutsche Zeitung 15 March 1996: 14.

Volk, Gregory. "Jorge Pardo at Friedrich Petzel." Art in America December 1996: 93.

Ziegler, Ulf Erdmann. "Open City: Report from Munster." Art in America no. 9 September 1997: 34-39.

1995 Dziewior, Yilmaz. "Jorge Pardo." Artforum vol. 34 no. 3 November 1995: 100.

Greene, David A. "I Saw the Light (and Space)...and It Was Good." Los Angeles Reader 21 April 1995: 24.

Mueller, Sabine. "Der Betrachter Prallt Zurueck." Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger 2 June 1995: 14.

Cohen, Michael. "Pachuco Style." Flash Art vol. 27 no. 176 May-June 1997: 87-90.

Fricke, Harald. "Kunst in Berlin jetzt: Jorge Pardo." die tageszeitung May 1994: 18.

Pinkus, Robert L. "Show's ideas are too clever, too obvious and forgettable." San Diego Union Tribune 5 May 1994: 32.

Schmidt-Wulffen, Stephan. "Notizen Zu Skulptur Und Gegenwart." Neue Bildenede Kunst February-March 1994: 16-21.

Wilson, William. "Pure Beauty: Irony Becomes Stale Second Time Around." Los Angeles Times 27 September 1994: F14.

1993 Bellars, Peter. "A Four-Man Show with New Ideas." Asahi Evening News 21 March 1993: 9.

Blum, Timothy and George Porcari. Jorge Pardo. Tokyo: Person's Weekend Museum, 1993.

Greene, David A. "Jorge Pardo at Thomas Solomon's Garage." Art Issues 29 September-October: 38.

Scarbourough, James. "Jorge Pardo: Thomas Solomon's Garage." Flash Art vol. 26 no. 172 October 1993: 88-89.

1992 Kane, Mitchell. Pressure on the Public. Hillsboro, WI: The Hirsch Farm Project, 1992.

Knight, Christopher. "10 California Artists: 'Facing the Finish.'" Los Angeles Times 1 May 1992: F24.

1991 Geer, Suvan. "Jorge Pardo Gets Honest About Hype." Los Angeles Times 2 August 1991: F18.

Riley, Robert. "Remodeling: Notes on Nayland Blake, Jim Campbell, James Luna, Jorge Pardo, and Millie Wilson." Facing the Finish. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1991.

Van Proyen, Mark. "Born to Shop: 'Facing the Finish' at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art." Artweek 24 October 1991: 1, 15-16.

1990 Brougher, Nora Halpern. "Jorge Pardo." Flash Art vol. 23 no. 154 October 1990: 156-157.

Kornblau, Gary. "Jorge Pardo at Thomas Solomon Gallery." Art Issues September-October 1990: 35.

Pardodia Jorge Pardo, 47, has some serious fans. He's a darling of certain design magazine editors because of his art-architecture-design crossover appeal. He got a glowing review this summer for his show at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills from the Times' David Pagel. And the powers-that-be behind the MacArthur awards have just named the L.A. artist a 2010 fellow, which carries with it a $500,000 grant.

Pardo made his name in the art world in the 1990s by working the fine (or post-Duchamp, vigorously erased but ever visible) lines between art and design, and also craft and commodity. In 1998, he opened what would become his home, at 4166 Sea View Lane in Los Angeles, as a work of art (MOCA presented the "exhibition"), before settling in himself. A couple of years later, he famously covered the lobby and bookstore of Dia Center for the Arts in New York in glossy, colorful tiles that made a painting out of the building's interior. And for years he has been making his signature hanging lamps for public spaces or the hideaways of wealthy art collectors.

His work was early on grouped with Andrea Zittel, who also rethinks domestic spaces. But over the years she has in some ways grown more philosophical, and he more technological in emphasis. Being an artist for Pardo means, among other things, being a fabricator. The last time I visited his studio he had a dozen employees running various work stations: It was part woodworking shop, part plastics manufacturer, and part graphic design outfit, complete with laser cutters and a wood router to turn computer images into three dimensions.

In 2007, LACMA director Michael Govan tapped Pardo to design LACMA's pre-Columbian galleries, and he produced a series of undulating wood cabinets to display the artifacts. In this paper, Christopher Knight called the installation "conceptually sophisticated and visually smashing."

When I interviewed Govan around the same time for a 2008 Esquire magazine feature, he picked Pardo as one of five artists who will be remembered 75 years from now. (Yes, it was their 75th-anniversary issue.) "People think Jorge Pardo's work is about furniture because it's made of wood," Govan said. "That's such a red herring. He's really working on the boundaries of art, architecture, and design - crossing genres and asking the question: What is art?"

Art and Commerce: loud paper interviews Jorge Pardo
Interview by Mimi Zeiger

Los Angeles artist Jorge Pardo creates spaces and the objects that go in them - a renovation of the Dia Foundation's bookstore in New York, a set of hanging lamps for Sotheby's headquarters, restaurant furnishings for a trade show in Leipzig, a modernist bungalow (his own) in the Los Angeles hills. Just don't call him an architect.

LP: So how do you view this weird crossover thing that is going on between artists and architects?

JP: I don't see it as a crossover at all. I mean, I think of myself as somebody who is strictly making sculpture. I am involved with a lot of different aesthetic problematics. I certainly don't think that there is anything idealistic in joining these things. I don't believe that these things lack anything. I think that's ridiculous.

If art's going to be about a complicated cultural discursive, you're going to deal with space in a way that it really hasn't at this point. In order to do that it has to engage in the world. Not necessarily the world of architecture, because I think the world of architecture is even more deficient. Art has to enter cities and places. You do that by negotiating buildings. I have no interest in architecture as an artisan. I think what I am interested in are buildings, structure and civic space, and people's of images of themselves.

LP: Do people approach you and say, "What are you now, an architect?"

JP: People do that all the time.

LP: What do you say to that?

JP: I don't know, I think that you have to look at the projects that have architectural components in the same way that you look at other images. At the end of the day it's a convoluted mimetic operation.

LP: How would you explain what you do as an artist?

JP: Art is kind of boring and esoteric. Having a career as an artist, showing in galleries and things like that doesn't interest me. I have a gallery, so I don't mean to say I am outside the system. Projects that make problems in the world are interesting. Case in point being the house up in Sea View, where there are very strange forms of mediation that happen, and I actually can observe the work and there is a certain kind of behavior that is discursive.

LP: Can you program that?

JP: I don't think you can program that. You can sort of set up a frame and a vantage point to look at things.

LP: What is an example of that?

JP: Well there is a consciousness with which a project is made. A museum comes up to an artist and says, do you want to do a show, and you say, well I want to make a house. And I don't want to make a house that goes in a museum, and I don't want to make a house that something weird is going to happen, I want to just make a house and see what happens. It's a very blunt quotidian exercise. I mean, obviously if one follows a more interesting logic you realize the strangeness of the project is about observation and how people behave in relation to something.

LP: So what is part of the artwork then? How people came to the house as an artwork?

JP: That is the artwork.

LP: So [the house] is just a frame.

JP: It's discursive product. That's all it is. The artwork is as many contingencies as come from the experience. I don't think as a structure it is anything anyone can manage. You can't think about it formally unless you're an idiot. Like thinking that by making something green something is going to happen. That is not the way it works. You can think about it in terms of, what would be an interesting sort of gesture to make, what would be a way to sort of address a museum exhibition, or what would be an interesting way for an artist to make a house, or for a painting to be made after this house. Not of the house but as within the same line of sight. You know, you make a house, you make a painting, you make a pair of shoes, you make a drawing. It's like what happens when you try to discern these as anything other than sculpture and painting. It's not making ready-mades. It's something else.

LP: There is this blurring between artwork and product. I mean, you could talk about Andrea Zittel, and her work is a lot about making product, making artwork that comments on product. Youâ€™re actually making artwork that becomes a product.

JP: I think that I am involved in a practice that highly problematizes those kinds of notions. And makes it impossible for me to say things like what she says. For many different reasons. I don't think that art gets made with your hands, as a primary mode.

I don't have any faith in the idea that an object can transform at the rate that a discursive can. Many things are set up that can ask questions from different points of view, that is what I am interested in. Objects are things that I read as very conventional things in that their essence is very problematic to begin with. I don't think that things have essences. Or any of these kinds of properties. That is not a model for an artwork for me.

LP: So how do you deal with then, someone coming to you and saying, I want a lamp.

JP: I give them a lamp. They want a lamp, I want to make a lamp. I like making lamps.

LP: So when you make a lamp, it's a lamp.

JP: It's a lamp and it's an artwork. Because they only come through me because of other projects that I have done. They don't want a lamp. They want a Jorge Pardo. They get a lamp and I get to make a lamp. I get to design a lamp. Maybe I get to use the lamp in some other installation. Maybe it's research for something else.

LP: I've been reading a little about your work and it seems that everyone tries to couch it within the formal elements.

JP: Because I think that's the dominant mode of discourse for art criticism. And that's not going to change any time soon. There is a whole industry that supports it. It's a matter of legacy. People who spend a lot of money on works of art, people who spend millions of dollars on a painting, they want a Marxist discourse. It goes way back. Like they want to buy a Mercedes Benz. It is really that simple. I think art criticism is - and I don't know any artist who would disagree with me - is one of the most impoverished cultural fields that is out there right now.

LP: Except maybe architecture criticism.

JP: Except maybe architecture criticism. It really doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything. What it does is it does this, you know, flat kind of celebratory - it's not describing what's happening when you are in front of a work of art. It's not describing what isn't happening.

LP: It's not describing the artwork.

JP: It can do that but only in the way you describe a shoe. â€¦

It is what architecture is, though. I am not saying that to be facetious. I am saying that the kind of things that seem ancillary are actually what it is.

LP: It's not the work itself, it's the profession?

JP: Yeah. You end up having discussions about professionalism.

And then there are these few people who kind of - you know, I like Rem Koolhaas, because he is such a freak and he is at least saying things like "C'mon guys, architecture isn't about space anymore. Let's go work with Prada. Let's look at trends or something like that."

I don't think that the architectural community has really processed what it might mean for a whole set of new agendas to be what drives it, you know, like the progressive wing or something like that. You know, I like what Koolhaas is doing, or not doing.

LP: Otherwise it becomes a sort of formalist "you like or you don't" sort of thing?

JP: Yeah. And generally architects are people who have always by necessity needed a parasitic relationship to art. It's like a lot of kids become architects because their father says they have to make money. In their head they are thinking they are making art where they can make money. It is not a coincidence that a large number of architects, once they are far enough in their career and they get bored, they start painting. It's retarded but it happens.

LP: What about someone like Frank Gehry?

JP: I like Frank Gehry's early work a lot. I am not interested in another building that looks like a whale or anything like that. But I think he's a serious architect. He did some really interesting things at certain times.

LP: And what about when he talks about himself as an artist?

JP: I don't know why he would want to do that. It doesn't make any sense to me, he seems like a fine architect. Why he needs to feel like he is an artist? I don't know where that impulse comes from. For me, I studied art after I studied biology. It seemed to me what kept my desire to learn, within an art department or with artists around, is that I didn't really have a sense of how I would be formed. And that was just really interesting to me, that being an artist is by nature stepping into what could be a very productive and ambiguous field. And when people like Frank Gehry use the term, it seems like it's for a completely opposite reason.

LP: It's like he looks up to you guys.

JP: I don't know why architects would look up to artists. They're different things. There's a sense of impoverishment making architecture versus making art, that they're not really real. If they would engage the problems of practice in a serious way you wouldn't have these problems, you know? You'd be working. You would try to improve your situation. You'd try to make it more complicated. And actually deal with the world.

LP: What kind of means do you use to engage the outside world?

JP: Well, I make a lot of public art projects. I do things, get asked to do things, and people don't even go through a gallery. And they are asking me to sort of fix [a space] - nobody likes to be here, nothing happens here, maybe you could do something interesting and make something happen here. And that is really interesting to me 'cause it is so fucking open. What would make somebody engage with this space?

LP: And what is your process for that?

JP: I have my assistant visit the place, then I go and I start to talk to people and then I think about culture and I look at my lamps and I look at my drawings and think, well, it would be neat to do that. What would happen if this was here? What happens if you make people look at this? And what happens if the light is like this? What happens to the rest of the area?

It's always a question of a speculative kind of problem solving. Maybe I go somewhere and there's a bunch of beautiful trees, and I wonder, why are they here? And I start to understand maybe why they were planted and how they were planted and how they affect their relationship to the building becomes clear. And that for me is the ideal way to sort of unravel what I do. Proposing a kind of potential for that. And that is very different than decoding, because that implies that there is a key that is a priori

LP: That is something I found in reading about your work - no one gets that. There is something missing, I guess, without actually occupying the artwork.

JP: Well, the artwork is never the actual experience of being in the work. Or being adjacent to the work is never really addressed. Art criticism treats art objects as though people don't really exist. All the walls are painted white, the dealer is five miles away, the guy watching the building, all the things that are really significant to consuming that kind of experience of the artwork are things that are not really made present when somebody criticizes a work of art. And those are the things that I am interested in. When I go somewhere, I have an experience of some sort, I feel like I have engaged in a kind of a multiplicitous kind of sense of being lost.

LP: I like that idea about being lost. I don't quite know where to take it, tell me a little more about that.

JP: Well, I think interesting situations make space for you to wander. When you see an interesting movie you start to leave the film, you start to think about scenarios in your life, places that you have been. You start to think about literature, stories that you've read. You go off. An interesting art work can hopefully make the space where a similar poetic can happen. It happens by there being things that happen all at the same time, where you can't really discern where the work starts and where the work ends.

I mean, where does the work start? At the theater? It is completely transient. It is like being stuck in a tunnel. Like a piece of glass. The history of that space, what Gluckman did before me. There are so many things that constitute what the experience is.

LP: And you are grabbing at every one of those.

JP: And I think you can do that. I think you can work with things like that. That is a more ambitious way to think about art.

LP: I think it is a really ambitious way.

JP: And it is not something you can take away with you. It is not something you can have a punch line for. It's not something you can paraphrase.

LP: It's not something you can sell.

JP: You can sell anything. But you are selling it in terms of fractions. It is not a question of selling or not selling. It is a question of living.

Why quibble? The Cuban-born artist's fanciful imagination knows no bounds, and his works, no boundaries.

PERHAPS IT is the polymorphic exuberance of Los Angeles sculptor Jorge Pardo that made him seem such a natural to reinvent L.A. County Museum of Art's display of pre-Columbian art.

Pardo has spent his career so restlessly straddling the borders of sculpture, design and furniture that he has drawn humorous comparisons to IKEA and Martha Stewart. If you can't afford his luminous, geometric outdoor installations in massive concrete, you can always hope for a lamp. His lush colors and dancing forms make their way into houses, interiors, chairs, even clocks. If you flip through the new Phaidon book "Jorge Pardo," his innumerable mutations feel like a Disney "Fantasia" in which lamps float away as glowing butterflies. Plant-like shapes loom somewhere between Fred Flintstone and the Jetsons, with sprightly touches reminiscent of Picasso cohort Wilfredo Lam. Massive concrete geometric forms are illuminated with warm colors.

Now Pardo has fused sculpture and cabinetry, with wavy wooden cases that will cradle the midsummer reinstallation of LACMA's pre-Columbian display, which curators term "Art of the Ancient Americas."

The pieces LACMA has to choose from are themselves ravishing, like a clay warrior from western Mexico, or the small clay pyramids, which, according to a spec sheet, "may enclose earth-womb shrines and establish an axis with the heavens." But Pardo's massive display cases -- whose wooden ridges seem to roll with movement, with warm interiors glowing with bright Pardo tangerines, limes and lemony yellows -- will also intrigue the eye. Pardo admits that not everybody at the museum is happy about this work-in-progress and that the support of director Michael Govan, along with some "good arguments," helped make the project move ahead.

Some questioned whether his cases would overshadow the pre-Columbian gods and incense burners inside. "I don't think that's possible," Pardo, 45, said, striding around his enormous workshop in El Sereno, trailed by his lanky 4-month-old mutt, Dandelion, talking over the whirring machines. "These objects are so old, and so intrinsically interesting," said the artist, dressed in jeans and an old shirt, his hair a curly mass over a soft, kind face. "I want to animate them in a different way."

Perhaps to some American curators, the cabinets -- with their wavy jigsaws that seem to shimmer with movement -- would seem like a departure from the sober tradition of archaeological display. In Mexico, with the leading displays of such art, however, Pardo might seem a traditionalist. At the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, an Olmec caiman smiles toothily from a hot-pink pedestal. An angry "wrestler" glowers on a burnt-orange base bathed in emerald-green light. Grinning clay toy dogs with wheels on their paws sit in a display of bright pastel mint.

At Oaxaca's Rufino Tamayo Museum, the subtle tan and reddish clays of ancient gods bask in a cerulean purplish-blue. The voluptuous color seduces the eye enveloping the ceramic in its own narcotic mystique. "It's a Mexican tradition they embrace," Pardo said. "Everything that is used to frame them signifies their importance."

At LACMA under Govan, inviting artists to collaborate with museum design is becoming a tradition. Santa Monica-based John Baldessari recently worked with the 2X4 design firm on LACMA's new logo, and in 2006, on the installation of the big Magritte show, and Govan has said he wants to recruit artists to illuminate "as many genres of art as possible. Govan said Pardo deftly uses color and form to transport the viewer of the pre-Columbian pieces into a unique visual experience. "He's an amazing creative asset for Los Angeles," Govan said. "We're very excited about our work with him."

LACMA spokeswomen declined to make pre-Columbian curator Virginia Fields available or discuss details of the Pardo work until just before the opening of the new galleries, which is set for late July.

Govan's relationship with Pardo goes back to Pardo's redesign of Manhattan's DIA Center for the Arts first floor, unveiled in 2000 in buttery yellow, sky blue, orange and browns, with phantom-like abstract forms looming overhead.

Such insistent unpredictability befuddled some critics in the early days. Los Angeles art dealer Patrick Painter wrote in Artforum International in 1998 that Pardo's "stripped-down simplicity is IKEA by way of Martha Stewart, with pretensions to the rigorous elegance of Eames and Neutra."

At this point, many are content to give Pardo free rein. A Pardo one-man show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami earlier this year commingled his lamps, chairs and traditional sculpture.

"Jorge adopts the idea of taking the artwork off the pedestal and putting it in everyday space," said Bonnie Clearwater, the museum director. "What happens when that sculpture looks like a table or a chair? How do you know it's artwork?" she said. "It's that philosophical questioning that has propelled him from the beginning of his career to the present. I love the fact that he gets under my skin with these questions, and I think that it's brilliant that he's doing this at L.A. County Museum of Art."

IF PARDO has become known for resisting easy characterization, that tendency extends to his most basic self-definition as an artist.

Though he is Cuban-born and grew up in a Spanish-speaking household, "I wouldn't define myself as a Hispanic or Latino artist," he said. "I'm an American artist." As an artist, his ethnicity is "kind of second- or third-tier information; I've never wanted to be associated with this kind of typecasting. It closes you down in a lot of important ways, to be cast in an ethnic type. If you don't want to be in it, you fall into it by default, and that's kind of disturbing."

"The funny thing is, culturally I'm incredibly Latin," he added. "I'm totally fluent in Spanish. But I think that's American. That's the thing about this country -- that you get people like me over and over again."

Pardo's family immigrated when he was 6. He grew up in a working-class home in Chicago, fueled in part, he jokes, by the life-sustaining, adrenaline-jolting elixir known as Cuban coffee. "Cubans give cafe con leche to kids when they're, like, 4," he said. Still, "I don't necessarily believe that because I come from a certain place that I'm expected to represent it," he said. "I'm from Cuba. I have a strange relationship with the American dream."

His version of that dream was nurtured at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the mid-1980s. Rising up through the gallery scene, he was asked to create an experimental Mount Washington house as a five-week exhibit for the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1998. The design puzzle is now a 3,200-square-foot home, which he shares with his wife, Veronica Gonzalez, author of the 2007 novel "twin time: or, how death befell me," who has similarly cosmopolitan roots, in Mexico City and Athens, Ohio. They have a 6-year-old daughter, Penelope, and two dogs: Blinker, whom they found in Tijuana, and Dandelion, an abandoned puppy they rescued outside Merida, Mexico, where Pardo is refitting an old hacienda. The couple is at the annual Art Basel fair in Switzerland, where Pardo will lecture and show a clock and some of his three-dimensional portraits.

Pardo doesn't deny the echoes of the pre-fab modernism some see in his work, but he finds the "celebratory nature of modern retro movement a little strange," especially the current love affair with what is currently termed "midcentury modern." "The more-dirty parts of these objects are kind of cleaned up by fetishizing them," he said. "They're not looking at the history these objects represent. It was horrible to be black or to be a woman in the '50s, or Latino," he said. "All these conservatives were thriving in the '50s. Nostalgia trivializes these aspects."

Yet he clearly loves some of the modernist lines and shapes popularized in the 1950s. His luminous, large outdoor sculptures -- such as the massive, warmly lit concrete geometric "Guadalajara Light Piece" for the Solares Foundation in Guadalajara -- have a direct relationship with smaller pieces, like lamps. The smaller pieces allow him to quickly explore ideas that may eventually become large sculptures -- or may simply remain lamps.

"Artists traditionally make drawings to sharpen use of form or color. The lamps are like drawings," he explained. "The smaller things inform the larger ones. They're small trials. When it works well, everything kind of communicates with one another."

His use of color is more than just a language; it's a way of seducing the eye, including his own. "Color is something that I use as a lure," he said. "You kind of need this artifice to attract and engage the work. It kind of keeps people there, and you start to unfold the other elements of the pieces." His bright colors, he said, are "not used as a litmus test for seriousness. I happen to like these colors, and I use them because there is a certain amount of pleasure to using them."

The reinstallation of the pre-Columbian exhibit will unveil a much more ambitious display of LACMA's arsenal, which includes some strong pieces from western Mexico. It will be unveiled in the "Art of the Americas" hall, a rebaptism of the Anderson building that is a next step in the reorganization of the museum. Pardo collaborated with LACMA's Fields, and of course, Govan. "I love working with Michael," Pardo said. "He's a director who has a lot of hands-on with the artists. In Europe there's more of a tradition of that."

Pardo said Govan was "very deferential" to Fields, whose background is in archaeology. "We really had to work with her and show her that we were as serious about what we do as what she does," he said. "Archaeologists aren't trained aesthetically. They're trained historically."

Pardo balanced such concerns with his attempt "to showcase these objects in a different environment, an environment that is more dynamic." One immediate objection was "that 'these are not the colors you show these things in,' " he said. " 'This is not a serious way of showing these.' There were a lot of negotiations."

PARDO HAS always prayed to different gods. In the end, he was himself seduced by the serpent rattle from Teotihuacan, the jadeite masks, the vessels of supernatural beings who could be tapped as mighty intermediaries to sacred powers.

"I don't think those objects are that different than what I'm trying to do," he said. "They're made with the same empathy with form." Pardo was intrigued by their mystery: Some seem tied to ritual, others utilitarian, and in some cases, "someone had given this thing tremendous consideration for reasons that we will probably never know," he said. "People used them to do things," Pardo said, suggesting mischievously: "They could have been like IKEA."

Here's the Show, the Works Are Elsewhere

SINCE it was built a decade ago, Jorge Pardo's house at 4166 Sea View Lane has already had several lives. A redwood structure that snakes around central gardens on a hill above downtown Los Angeles, the house began as a work of art, designed by Mr. Pardo and "exhibited" for five weeks in 1998 by the Museum of Contemporary Art here, complete with docents. Then the artist moved in and made the place his bachelor pad. Now the 3,200-square-foot artistic experiment is a family home, down to his 5-year-old daughter's art on the refrigerator door.

But Mr. Pardo says his home still means something to him aesthetically. "I didn't want its status as an artwork to come just from me calling it art; I wanted to see what happened to the house," he said. "Would it be interesting architecturally? As an artwork? What would it be like for me to live in, with this history? Would it be comfortable or uncomfortable? Would I want to move?"

So far, he reported, the home has worked out well. He has no plans to move. And the very notion of home is the organizing theme of his new exhibition, a midcareer survey that opens Tuesday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami.

Bonnie Clearwater, the director of the museum and the curator of the show, said she has followed Mr. Pardo's work since the early 1990s, when she lived in Los Angeles. Given his penchant for making architectural or contextual work - from the pier he built on a German lake for the Munster Sculpture Project in 1997 to the one-room colonial house he is now remodeling in Merida, Mexico - she knew the exhibition could not be conventional or comprehensive.

"We recognized from the start that much of his work cannot be borrowed or collected," she said. "Too much of his work takes place outside of a museum context."

So the curator and the artist developed another idea: creating nearly a dozen large photomurals of site-specific projects to define different rooms in an open 7,400-square-foot exhibition space. The rooms will also display sculptures from different stages of Mr. Pardo's career.

"It's a great way to organize objects that have tentacles to certain places," Mr. Pardo said in a recent interview.

It's also a way to rethink the cool, supposedly neutral institutional space of a museum. If the artist once turned his house into a museum, he's now turning the museum into a house.

"I'm not a white cube kind of guy; I don't think you can be a white cube guy if you're an immigrant," Mr. Pardo said, referring to his Cuban roots.

Visitors will enter the show in the front "garden," featuring the artist's interpretation of a Chinese-style lacquered bed. The space is defined by a large photomural of the courtyard at 4166 Sea View Lane.

"It's a very traditional interior courtyard, but what makes it dramatic is that the house has such a dependency on it," Mr. Pardo said, noting that early visitors had wondered why his house did not have better views of the city. "Once the gardens grew in, the logic of the house became clear: each room offers views of other rooms, or the courtyard."

On top of the photomural, Mr. Pardo plans to hang some of his colorful silkscreened flower paintings, shown recently at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. Sometimes, he said, a smaller object "can introduce this really intense form of absorption, compared to something really big you get lost in."

Deeper into the museum show, the "kitchen" includes a set of glass bowls designed by Mr. Pardo in 1996 and a refrigerator he painted a robin's-egg blue in 1993. (Ms. Clearwater likened its composition, with its strong horizontal separating the two planes of the freezer and refrigerator compartments, to a Mark Rothko painting.) Nearby is an evocation of the Mountain Bar, which Mr. Pardo designed in the Chinatown section of Los Angeles, complete with glossy red tiles and his signature lamps.

It all adds up to a rather abstract notion of a house. "These are not the French period rooms at the Met," Ms. Clearwater said. "Rooms are not being set up like someone might have lived in them."

Walking through his studio last month, his chinos and pink shirt still wrinkled from a flight from Mexico, Mr. Pardo showed off the room where his lampshades are made. He passed a laser- cutting machine, which looks like a menacing photocopier and can cut through paper, leather and plastic. Egg-shaped lamps with clear, skeinlike plastic shades, developed for the house in Merida, hung from the studio ceiling.

"This isn't like Dan Flavin; I don't think about lighting within art history," he said. "I think about lighting in a space, or how the light produced by that lamp is going to cast shadows and draw on the wall."

Drawings also play a role in the genesis of Mr. Pardo's sculptures. He created the patterns for the Merida lampshades by manipulating images of his flower paintings on a computer.

For Mr. Pardo this sort of fluidity - moving back and forth from two to three dimensions, or from craft to computer - is typical. Most of his works are made by machine and finished by hand. He has a CNC wood router along with the laser cutter, and counts a machinist and a printer among his 10-person staff. "I'm very comfortable moving between different planes and different sources," he said.

He is also comfortable with ambiguity, whether creating art that borders on the functional or placing work in settings where it is both framed and not framed as art. His two earliest exhibitions took place in garages. The first, in 1988 at a Pasadena home he shared with another art student, featured everyday objects like a disposable cup turned into a pinhole camera. The second, at the legendary Los Angeles gallery Thomas Solomon's Garage, featured altered versions of things you might find in a garage, like modified wrenches and a ladder that he tweaked by replacing one leg with rare African bubinga wood.

Because of this emphasis on domestic objects, Mr. Pardo is often cast as an artist who doubles as a designer. But Ms. Clearwater sees it differently.

"The work is part of a movement from the 1990s that I think is only now coming into relief, which involves dissolving boundaries between art and life," she said, also mentioning the artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija. "I want to go beyond the usual discussion of whether his work is art, architecture or design."

So what's the point of rethinking a ladder or a lamp? "The issues I'm interested in have more to do with pictorial, spatial, perceptual traditions," Mr. Pardo said. "I'm talking about aesthetics, not a cool toaster."

He says he is especially interested in the way we "absorb" the visual spectacle around us. His house on Sea View Lane has deliberately clumsy passages to slow you down, including a staircase set in an unlikely place. And his recent project for the Aventura Mall, a 15-minute drive from the Miami museum, consists of a startling explosion of butterflies: 96 lamps suspended at different heights from a three-story atrium, each like a set of four butterflies radiating from a central bulb.

Mr. Pardo said he hoped to make shoppers stop in their tracks, if only for a moment. "A lot of people want to take pictures of themselves in front of the butterflies," he said. "In that sense it's really cool, because it works like a traditional monument."

At the same time, this colony of butterflies creates a new social space, something distinct from (yet part of) the mall. Something like a room in a house. Or, as Mr. Pardo put it, "I can see a bunch of kids saying, 'I'll meet you where the butterflies are.'"

Art and Commerce: loud paper interviews Jorge Pardo Interview by Mimi Zeiger

Here's the Show, the Works Are Elsewhere

Art and Commerce: loud paper interviews Jorge Pardo
Interview by Mimi Zeiger