Art Los Angeles Contemporary, which opens tomorrow and runs through January 30, wraps up a month-long, city-wide pageant of international art shows that included photo l.a, artLA projects, and the Los Angeles Art Show, along with a handful of smaller niche projects. Staging its first annual return with a move from the Pacific Design Center to Santa Monica Airport’s Bark Hangar, ALAC features more than 70 galleries representing 11 countries, a jam-packed roster of tours, performances, panels, and special events throughout the weekend.
Berkeley-based photographer Katy Grannan is known for portraits that reveal intimacies about her subjects, even as they skirt conventions of portraiture. Her earlier work used models and other people known to her, at specific times and places, often in evocative poses borrowed from art history. But for the last few years, Grannan has taken her practice to the streets and replaced her complicit subjects with anonymous passersby. Her current show, Boulevard, at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery assembles an eclectic array of ordinary folks of outlandish appearance — interesting strangers, unaware of their role.
For those of us in the US who’ve always dreamed of a Sanrio theme park, the Japanese toy company has finally heard our plea. Small Gift is a traveling art exhibit, playground, marketplace, and big-top, all in one, celebrating Sanrio’s 50-year legacy as the connoisseur of kawaii. The purveyor of pop culture has been home to such characters as Hello Kitty, Chococat, Badtz-maru, My Melody, and dozens of others. Now, the childhood (and adulthood) icons are coming to life at full-scale, carnival-style extravaganzas in Los Angeles and Miami, with Sanrio shops surfacing between. The only negative is that the pop-up fun-fair isn’t sticking around.
Los Angeles photographer John Humble has been documenting the dynamic structure of the city and all of its rivers, highways, and suburbs for more than 30 years. The recipient of a 1979 National Endowment for the Arts award to photograph the city on the occasion of its bicentennial, Humble continued over the years to capture the views that make LA unique. From funky signs on concrete block commercial buildings to residential homes and amusement parks surrounded by elevated highways and electrical lines, Humble records the urban landscape in all its visual glory.
South Carolina-based artist Karen Ann Myers paints pictures of the beauty women desire, often at the expense of their own sanity.
Myers’ psychologically intense, densely decorated portraits examine our culture’s hypersexualized obsession with glamour and physical beauty, touching on its aesthetic extremes, seductive appeal, and emotional casualties. Each image represents a certain aspect in a sort of collective self-portrait, with her subjects inhabiting a kaleidoscope of loneliness, power struggles, cocktail dresses, and clashing patterns.
At 765 pages, Architecture of the Sun, Rizzoli’s lavishly illustrated survey of Los Angeles modernism from 1900 to 1970, is as angular as an Eames building but with the warmth of a Charles and Henry Greene California bungalow. Perched on a coffee table, a monolith of receding straight lines and hard cover, the volume peers over an ocean of pacific blue rug and recalls Pierre Koenig’s famous Case Study #21 house. But like the modernism the book examines, there is more here than form; there is content too. To give proper due to the buildings and the men who built them, author Thomas Hines needs all the pages he can get.
Aesthetic super-studio Ball-Nogues is like the 21st-century love child of the Factory and the Bauhaus.
Ball-Nogues is a one-stop shop for art, architecture, public projects, and design objects, both concepted and largely manufactured on-site in its cavernous Downtown LA Gallery District space. The studio’s conceptually avant-garde, eco-friendly, urban romanticism has been lauded in museums, showrooms, and festivals, garnering a rep for laid-back luxury.
Artist Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia is in the habit of taking things — especially paintings — apart and putting them back together again; recently, he de- and re-constructed his wife’s childhood.
Segovia is known for shredding paintings and weaving them into art that is literally more than the sum of its parts. His new series …by Deborah Calderwood metaphorically performs the same process on a trove of his wife’s childhood art-class drawings, incorporating her youthful lexicon of characters, fantasies, and out-sized signatures into sophisticated images that touch on themes of authorship and naivety.
Global-based web project CitID is enlisting the help of artists to give cities worldwide a typeface makeover. As they explain on their website, “Our hope is that creatives from around the globe will make a logo or a visual interpretation of the city closest to their heart.” We rounded up a few of our favorite designs from larger cities around the country to see if the fonts matched the local scenes; let us know what you think in the comments.
Southern California artist Lola Gil‘s dreamlike portraits are packed with imaginative subjects and curious rituals placed in surreal, often ethereal settings.
The artist, who goes simply by Lola, applies a self-taught technique emblematic of her local heritage, with each painting inspired by an antique frame from her collection of flea-market finds. The personal narratives harmoniously blend with fantasy, created, says Lola, while being “pulled along by the moon as the unexpected guest, mesmerized by its significance for the love of a story.”
, Rizzoli’s lavishly illustrated survey of Los Angeles modernism from 1900 to 1970, is as angular as an Eames building but with the warmth of a Charles and Henry Greene California bungalow. Perched on a coffee table, a monolith of receding straight lines and hard cover, the volume peers over an ocean of pacific blue rug and recalls 
