Hocus-pocus, here comes the circus!
Just to prove that Washington D.C. does not have the lock on staging circuses, we’ve got a really cool one coming our way in Los Angeles. It’s a revival, by The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, of The Circus, a Bob Baker original production that has not been seen in nearly 40 years. The Circus, originally ...
Chatting with Michael Govan about ‘Moholy-Nagy: Future Present’
May
28
2017
It was nice watching the at-home manner in which LACMA CEO Michael Govan toured the cascading galleries of “Moholy-Nagy: Future Present” during the impressive show’s opening week in February. The highly recommended exhibition of 250 works by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a visual master much known for photography and filmmaking, will close on June 18. Sure, the ...
California dreamin’ gone haywire
May
5
2017
“I’m definitely playing with the juxtaposition of art and garbage,” says artist Jeff Gillette of his upcoming exhibit at Gregorio Escalante gallery. “As a pessimist observing what’s happening in the world right now, I’m posing questions, ‘What is any of this worth?’ and ‘How do we choose what and how we ascribe worth to things?’ ...
Primitive wonderment by Eleanor Swordy at Moskowitz Bayse
Apr
17
2017
I like these vivid oil paintings by French-born artist Eleanor Swordy soon to be showcased at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles. And I admit being intrigued by the show’s title, “Who Died?” Both the title and the imagery on display in this female artist’s work — the geometric shapes, the primary colors, the bulky human ...
Thank you for your art and for reading arts·meme, Burt Barr 1
Mar
21
2017
At this time of sadness over the death of the great post-modern-dance choreographer, Trisha Brown, it stung to learn that Brown’s husband, video artist Burt Barr, too, passed away just last November. I met Barr when he accompanied Trisha Brown for her company’s performances at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the summer 2011. At the ...
Hendrix gives free concert @ The Grammy Museum
In the photo, the great Jimi Hendrix performs a free concert in the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, June 1967. This seminal image is among sixty now on view as the GRAMMY Museum celebrates one of the most pivotal years in music — and the photographer who captured it, in Jim Marshall’s 1967. Jim ...
Sassy Chahine print enters life of arts·meme
Feb
15
2017
A Sunday visit to the Los Angeles Fine Print Fair — seeking respite from the onslaught of Donald Trump — to attend a public conversation between gallerist Jack Rutberg and artist Ruth Weisberg, spawned a new relationship! A fateful encounter with a wonderful teensy engraving, reproduced above. That in turn makes me the proud owner ...
Klimt’s ‘Adele II’ rightly in private hands, says ‘Woman in Gold’ attorney 2
Feb
10
2017
News of media mogul Oprah Winfrey’s recent sale of Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II,” for a massive $150 million was the buzz of the art world this week. Bloch-Bauer died in 1925, and her Klimt paintings passed, against her wishes, to the Austrian state during the Nazi regime. Her descendants, led by her ...
Oprah Winfrey tires of Klimt masterpiece, sells to China
Feb
8
2017
Our dear (if somewhat fatigued) Adele Bloch-Bauer, the subject of two stellar portraits by artist Gustav Klimt, is again packing her suitcases … this time headed to China. One decade ago she made the rather massive move from the walls of the Belvedere Palace museum in Vienna, first to Los Angeles, then to New York ...
Pasadena Museum of California Art goes to the beach
Our winter is unusually wet and cold at the moment, making visits to our beaches prohibitive. The evocative exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, “In the Land of Sunshine: Imaging the California Coast Culture” (through February 19), will punch the emotional buttons of anyone who has sand in the shoes of their psyche. ...