Party on, arts·meme people!

Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
It was an arts lovers Saturday night on LaBrea Avenue. A throng of party people clustered ’round a new exhibition, Francisco Zuniga: A Centenial Tribute, to appreciate the great Mexican artist and to celebrate five years of arts blogging on arts·meme. The party was hosted by Jack Rutberg Fine Arts. View the photos here. Like ...

Francisco Zuniga at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts – opens June 1

Theater · Visual arts
We’re very excited to get into the mix at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Saturday night. The highly respected gallery on La Brea Avenue just north of Beverly Boulevard is hosting an evening that’s all about love of the arts. The main event is the opening of a centennial tribute to Mexican sculptor and painter Francisco ...

MOCA’s Jeffrey Deitch reflects on Boston violence

Visual arts
We enjoyed briefly chatting with MOCA‘s Jeffrey Deitch at a press preview of the colorful Urs Fischer installation in the museum’s main building on Bunker Hill. The exhibit extends at a second MOCA facility, the Temporary Contemporary in Little Tokyo. The colorful scene is from the whimsical yet melancholic installation at MOCA by Swiss born ...

Dancers, meet the museum world. Museums: consider dance.

Dance · Visual arts
This weekend, the Hammer Museum presents Dancing with the Art World, a two-day symposium that convenes artists, choreographers, curators, and historians to reflect on the interface between dance and art, consider its historical precedents, and debate its effects on artistic and institutional practice. Dance has long intersected meaningfully with the visual arts. But in recent ...

Preeminent dance movie posters @ Barnsdall

Dance · Film · Visual arts
We’re super looking forward to touring through a wonderful installation of dance movies posters now on display at Barnsdall Gallery Theater. We already saw it once, but it’s so fabulous that repeat viewings are called for. Twenty distinct pieces in varying sizes and rarity comprise GOTTA DANCE!, the majority dating from the golden age of ...

The new Academy Museum gets a launch party at LACMA

Film · Visual arts
We had a ball cruising the room at the inaugural celebration for the future home of The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday, April 11, 2013 at the historic Wilshire May Company Building in Los Angeles. Many film and arts-world leaders and celebs were in attendance. Slideshow here: photos: Todd Wawrychuk / ©A.M.P.A.S., Richard ...

Review: Quirky master-photog Bert Stern captured in doc 1

Film · Reviews · Visual arts
It doesn’t matter that “Bert Stern: Original Madman” falls short in depicting the hectic life and work of the go-go photographer of the sixties. The documentary, a first major effort by Shannah Laumeister, is unevenly told, biased toward the actress-turned-director’s own personal relationship with Stern, and values cheap story elements over artful ones. Yet the ...

Word up … at Rutberg’s

Visual arts
Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles has a beautiful, locally driven, museum-quality show on at its LaBrea Avenue gallery, an expansive exhibition titled “Letters from Los Angeles: Part II – Identity & Self Identity Through Text in Art.” The rich exhibit curated by Rutberg includes more than 70 works by 40 contemporary L.A.-based artists ...

Shulamit Gallery wishes us Happy Nowruz

Visual arts
Circulating around Shulamit Gallery’s quietly beautiful new exhibit that features artists Doni Silver Simons and Pouya Afshar, a single work caught my eye. [This new-ish art gallery, steps away from Venice Beach, has as its mission the support and promotion of Israeli and Iranian artists.] “Nowruz,” the photo-realist work, above, decorates an alcove of the ...

L.A. billboard update

Film · Visual arts
Trolling Sunset Boulevard (which is normally a lot of fun) got an added boost in the form of this huge placard, an open birthday card to Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is now resting at home in Beverly Hills.  Zsa Zsa’s main squeeze, aka Prince Frederic von Anhalt, enjoys using billboards as a means of self-expression. ...