Review: A timely look at L.A. designer Deborah Sussman

Even after the windfall of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series of exhibitions in 2013, there's still a significant list of postwar Los Angeles architects and designers whose careers remain underexplored.

Among the most intriguing is the designer Deborah Sussman, whose work with Jon Jerde on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics made a cameo last summer in "Overdrive," PSTP's anchor show at the Getty Museum.

Now Sussman, still working at age 82 at Sussman/Prejza, the firm she founded in 1980 with her husband, Paul Prejza, is getting a solo spotlight in "Deborah Sussman Loves Los Angeles," an exhibition running through Jan. 19 at Woodbury University's WUHO Gallery in Hollywood.

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It is a modest but charismatic show. And a timely one, since the role of female architects and designers and how they've been overshadowed by their male collaborators and clients has been much debated in recent months.

Sussman's body of work isn't as vast or significant as that of Denise Scott Brown, the architect excluded from the Pritzker Prize given her husband and partner Robert Venturi in 1991 or Julia Morgan, who last month won the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal in hyper-posthumous fashion, more than 55 years after her death.

But it is more than rich enough to sustain an exhibition like this one, filling the narrow WUHO Gallery with photographs, wall graphics and items under glass.

And in the end, the show's most meaningful themes aren't limited to gender or the nature of creative partnerships. They also include the way Sussman helped graphic design take on a bigger, quasi-architectural scale in the 1970s and 1980s and how the cultural identity of Los Angeles was forged in those decades.

Sussman's work, in that sense, provided a bridge between two definitions of graphic design one about text and the other about the city as well as between two eras in L.A. design history.

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Review: A timely look at L.A. designer Deborah Sussman