L.A. may be derided for its sprawl, but Spanish architect Andrés Jaque says the city’s in-between spaces make for a unique brand of urbanism — not to mention, some highly creative informal architecture. He has created installations inspired by these spaces in his new show at REDCAT in downtown. You can read all about it in my story in ARCHITECT.
I road the Station to Station train in from Barstow to L.A. this week. It’s got its good things (some damn fine music and some interesting people) and some not so good stuff (little sense of history). Get my take over at KCRW.
In the meantime, here’s the UFO I saw while sitting in the desert outside of Barstow. It’s really real.
There are some insanely cool things about being a reporter. One of them is access — to people, to information, to old artist notebooks. As part of reporting a story about Ed Ruscha and his artist books for NPR, curator John Tain of the Getty Research Institute (GRI) took me into the Institute’s archive and showed me some of Ruscha’s materials. (The GRI holds all of Ruscha’s so-called ‘Streets of Los Angeles’ projects.) We poked around old notebooks and contact sheets. My favorite was the sketch above, which shows how Ruscha executed Every Building on the Sunset Strip. An image which I simply had to snap…
The Getty currently has a show devoted to Ruscha’s early photography. (You’ve got one more week before the show closes!) And my profile of Ruscha is now up at NPR. It includes 1933 Ford pick-ups and vintage audio of the Doors playing at the Whiskey A Go Go. Please tune in!
Hey Folks:
Souris Hong-Porretta is launching her Outside the Lines artist coloring book at MOCA Grand Avenue today, Saturday, from 3-6pm.
There will be music and coloring and plenty of artistes present, including Bret Nicely, Carol Es, Celso, CYRCLE, Dabito, Gary Baseman, JEGA, Jeni Yang, John Freeborn, Katsuo Design, Keith Scharwath, Kozyndan, Laurie Lipton, Lia Halloran, Min Cha, RISK, Saelee Oh, Shepard Fairey, Sherise Lee, Silvio Porretta, Steven Harrington, Theresa Castro, Tofer Chin, Travis Millard, Young Kim and Yuri Shimojo.
If you don’t already have a book, you can pick one up at the MOCA bookstore. And if you’re not in L.A., there is always the internets.
I got to walk through Eli Broad’s under-construction art palace on Tuesday in the company of Elizabeth Diller, of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the architect on the project. See the pix and read the story in ARCHITECT.
My profile of architect William Pereira is up at the KCRW Design and Architecture podcast.
(He designed the University of California Irvine, above, as seen in 1966. Image courtesy of the Orange County Archive.)
A view of Nothing Else Left, 2013, at the Grand Central Art Center. (Photo by C-M.)
Colombian artist Adriana Salazar has a pair of very stirring installations at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana and the California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. My story about her work (and her very unusual research methods) is now up at KCRW. Please tune in!
…and how women are dubbed ‘selfish’ for not having them — now up at Time.com.
The bebe above comes courtesy of Cosimo Rosselli at the Huntington Library. Pic by yours truly.