Michael Govan comments on LACMA’s new film program 1
Apr
6
2011
In a brief message sent to arts·meme at the end of his day in London, LACMA Director Michael Govan writes, “I think we have a real foundation for continued and sustainable growth of the program now.” The just-announced new film program notably lacks the kind of stable financial underpinning that an endowment provides, nor there ...
BREAKING NEWS: LACMA announces new film program
This just in from the museum: “Los Angeles (April 6, 2011)—The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced today that it has entered into a partnership with Film Independent, the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. LACMA and Film Independent will inaugurate the new weekly Film ...
L.A.’s artistic and cultural heritage vs. a rock 2
Los Angeles, megalopolis, hosts a cool, vibrant and progressive art scene, an expression of its unique history and inimitable cultural mix. Many Angelenos will derive pleasure and meaning from Michael Heizer‘s Levitated/Slot Mass, a pyramidal granite boulder suspended on concrete rails above a pit carved into the northwest corner of the L.A. County Museum of ...
The ABCs of being Eli Broad
Los Angeles is blessed with a surfeit of alphabet-soup acronyms for its world-class museums, famously, LACMA and MOCA. Both derive from the mother of all art-museum acronyms, MOMMY, er … MOMA. In a Huffington Post blog item, bad-boy Coagula Art Journal editor Mat Gleason posits options for Uncle Eli’s swank new warehouse of contemporary art. ...
William Eggleston straddles Wilshire Boulevard
Nov
9
2010
Artist Ed Ruscha called him “a blessed rascal.” He influenced filmmakers David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, and Sofia Coppola. But more than that, he totally changed the medium of photography, according to William Eggleston expert Carole Thompson in a gallery talk at Edward Cella Art + Architecture, right across Wilshire Boulevard from LACMA. Cella, relatively new to ...
Renoir show still on view
May
2
2010
It’s the last week to catch LACMA’s “Renoir in the 20th Century” focused on the last three decades of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s career prior to his death in 1919. Of the 80 paintings, sculptures and drawings, in the portrait-laden show, this beautiful Riviera landscape was my favorite (click for better view). Also heartbreaking and inspiring were ...
Saving the village: our struggle to save LACMA’s film program
Sep
7
2009
On 28 July, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced that CEO Michael Govan’s vision for more comprehensive treatment of cinema at the museum required the axing of a superb 40-year-running film program. That kind of logic reminded me of the Vietnam War general explaining that the U.S. army had to “destroy the village in order to save the village.” But our little hamlet of Los Angeles ...
Quatorze juillet – California edition 1
Jul
15
2008
We passed the la fete nationale, Bastille Day, as follows: We attended a great LACMA double-bill featuring the suave, yet underrated, French film actor, Charles Boyer. C’etait vendredi, that was Friday. We then flew to San Francisco on Sunday and enjoyed a cafe creme and pain au chocolat at Cafe de la Presse. Vive la France.