Most nights on Hollywood Boulevard, the urban soundtrack blends together the dull thump of music spilling out from bars, the raucous laughs of club kids and the plaintive mumbles of panhandlers in need of a buck. For much of June, there was also the sound of a typewriter, its clicks and clacks...
The figures in Joakim Ojanen’s “What a Time to Be Alive :(” look like they might be the same guy: a sensitive soul who has suffered plenty of indignities growing up in a cruel world yet still brings an open heart to every experience that comes his way. Innocence and persistence come together in...
At Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles, seven new paintings by Roland Reiss square off against nine drawings the L.A. artist made 50 years ago. The pairing is thrilling. Each body of work reveals elements of the other that would not be evident if the two groups were seen separately. Together,...
When Andy Warhol called his studio the Factory in 1962, he put an end to the romantic idea that artists labored alone in garrets where they poured their souls into works that would be misunderstood, if not completely ignored, by the general public. Los Angeles artist Carl Cheng took Warhol’s proposition...
For American Ballet Theatre dancer and South Pasadena native Stella Abrera, it has been quite a year — one that started with her unexpected and emotional promotion to principal, the company's top rank, in August. An admired and distinctive company veteran noted for her buoyant jumps, lush phrasing,...
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the married songwriting team behind "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling," "On Broadway" and some of the most enduring hits in the history of pop music, have been finishing each other's songs — and each other's sentences — for 54 years. But since they became characters...
Daniel Richter's "a big mistake, too late," 2016, oil on canvas. It's one of three more abstract works that don't depict human bodies. (Daniel Richter / Regen Projects, Los Angeles) Porn and painting make for strange bedfellows. But the two come together to romp, often recklessly, in Daniel Richter’s...
“We must never forget.” That bittersweet phrase, often repeated on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, was the code by which author, journalist and outspoken Jewish activist Elie Wiesel lived. The Romanian Nobel Peace Prize laureate and ardent Holocaust educator -- perhaps best known for his...
Happy Fourth of July! May your barbecues be searing and your beer chilled. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, and this is your essential guide to the week’s top arts and culture stories. Obama picks library architects The architectural guessing game of who President...
As Garrison Keillor lumbers across the Hollywood Bowl stage during a Thursday rehearsal for “A Prairie Home Companion,” the mood feels like the last day of summer camp: loose, filled with camaraderie and somewhat bittersweet. A breeze ripples through the venue’s nearly 18,000 empty seats as Keillor’s...
It's the 50th anniversary of the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach -- a Southern California summer tradition. To mark the occasion, we sent a photographer to capture a day in the life. (Christina House / For The Times) Patrons walks through sawdust on opening day of the 50th anniversary of the Sawdust...
The Fourth of July is fast approaching, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t stuff to see around Los Angeles — including a show by key female artists, a new gathering of Japanese-inspired ceramics and a video that toys with questions of identity. Here are four shows to see this week: “Eau de Cologne,”...
During Palm Springs’ heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, odds were likely that you’d pass by or walk into a restaurant, hotel or country club designed by architect William F. Cody. Unfortunately many of Cody’s Midcentury Modern designs have gone the way of the wrecking ball. That includes his quirky...
"Cats" — and cats — seem to follow Betty Buckley wherever she goes. As Grizabella, the raggedly forlorn Jellicle from the blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, the actress delivered a rendition of "Memory" that routinely brought down the house at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, solidifying...
Negotiations to resolve a minimum wage dispute between Actors’ Equity Assn. and members of the theater community have failed and the parties are headed to court, according to a statements released by both sides this week. At the center of the lawsuit is Equity’s 99-seat theater plan, which calls...
To design his presidential library, Barack Obama has chosen a pair of New York architects whose cool, precise style in some ways mirrors his own. The Barack Obama Foundation announced today that Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, a firm best known for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and...
This week: A “Dreamgirls” reunion, a trio of short stories adapted for the stage, and a controversial Holocaust-themed drama from Poland. EST/LA One Act Festival Three distinct programs of short works by over a dozen writers; schedules at www.estlosangeles.org. Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, 3269...
Most art is tribal art, when it comes down to it — an assertion of peoplehood, a manifestion of values. Even the most conceptual gesture amounts to flying one's flag. The paintings on found fabric, metal and stone at New Image Art are made by the collaborative Land (Austin, Texas-based artists...
Delicacy and tenacity come together in Jane Hugentober's art much like her identities as mother, daughter and maker fuse into a single self. Life and work are matters of process, craft, handwork. Jane Hugentober's "And That Was That," jute and latex. (Harmony Murphy Gallery) In her first solo show...
The Rauschenberg Foundation has named 10 winners of its annual Artist as Activist Fellowship, providing a total of $775,000 over two years so recipients can explore issues relating to incarceration. Among this year’s recipients is the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a performance art group dedicated...
Toward the back of the Jason Vass gallery, past nearly 40 other works on paper, canvas, fabric and resin by Los Angeles artist Nancy Evans, sits "Lion," a tabletop sculpture with enough dense energy to serve as an exclamation point to all the rest. "Lion" bronze sculpture by Nancy Evans, cast from...
East West Players has found its new artistic director from within its own ranks and will announce on Wednesday that Snehal Desai will succeed outgoing producing artistic director Tim Dang, who has led the downtown Los Angeles theater company since 1993. Desai, 36, is set to assume leadership on...
With “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale,” Tennessee Williams’ 1951 revision of his earlier play “Summer and Smoke,” Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice continues its 30th anniversary season with a quietly remarkable production. Williams preferred “The Eccentricities of a Nightingale” to its predecessor....
If you think improvisational theater is a freewheeling genre that’s strictly for laughs, you haven’t experienced an Impro Theatre show. The seasoned team at Impro raises the stakes of improv. Impro doesn’t do quick blackout scenes that are the stock-in-trade of improv. Nor do actors perform scripted...
Is there a fate worse for a painter than being remembered primarily as a “precursor” to a later, very major development in the history of Western art? Take Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867), the subject of a fine, newly opened survey exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Once he had been celebrated...
Martin Werthmann’s huge, engrossing woodblock prints recall the surfaces of paintings that have been built up in layers and then sanded down in areas, revealing glimpses of the history of their own making. In the Berlin artist's work, stratification and discontinuity are actively in play, yielding...
Rita Moreno, whose career has spanned an Academy Award-winning turn as the hotheaded Anita in 1961’s “West Side Story” to her role as Liliana De La Vega on the CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” will be honored at the Music Center of Los Angeles’ inaugural Summer Soirée next week. The veteran actress-dancer-singer,...
The works of Ellen Lesperance and Helen Mirra on view at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena lay out a quietly powerful network of ideas around work, bodily presence and activism. The show opens with a collaborative project initiated by Mirra in which she asked 51 weavers each to create...
The women are back — and they have something to say. German feminists Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, whose Sprüth Magers gallery expanded to Los Angeles in February, are revisiting the exhibition “Eau de Cologne” starting Tuesday in the Mid-Wilshire space. The five-woman show debuted in...
Multimedia artist Doug Aitken will take over the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s cavernous Geffen Contemporary this fall — and the event promises to be a Happening. On Monday, MOCA is expected to announce “Doug Aitken: Electric Earth,” a sweeping survey exhibition opening Sept. 10. With...
“Beautiful – The Carole King Musical” is that rare Broadway offering – a jukebox musical with a soul. The touring production, which opened Friday at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, reveals the reason this show has become the “Jersey Boys” for the XX chromosome set. Borrowing the tried-and-true...
A photographer takes on teen girls. A performance artist rewrites famous novels. And a longtime Los Angeles artist shows that creativity still flows at 90. Plus: A show about boundary-pushing prints and a screening about labor in Tijuana. Here are five events to check out in the coming week: Deanna...
It’s possible that Susan Silas’ relentless (some would say obsessive) self-portraiture at CB1 Gallery only seems powerful to me because I, too, am a middle-aged woman. If you are old enough to have seen your face start to sag in the mirror, you may find something quite touching in Silas’ unflinching...
The drama surrounding George Lucas' planned $700-million museum has become more intense than a showdown between rebel fighters and forces of the Empire. Officials at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced Friday that they are no longer considering Chicago as a site for the museum and that...
Todd Gray’s latest exhibition at Meliksetian Briggs is a touching tribute to his friend Ray Manzarek, keyboardist for the Doors, who died in 2013. In 2014, Manzarek’s widow let Gray borrow the musician’s wardrobe for a yearlong performance in which Gray wore Manzarek’s clothes every day. He refused...
Ecaterina Vrana’s paintings at Nicodim Gallery are striking in their idiosyncrasy. The Romanian artist handles paint like frosting, depicting dream-like scenarios dominated by women and snowmen, birds and fish, and lots of blood-red tears. The world they inhabit is by turns humorous and dark but...
During a recent SongFest public master class, the director Peter Sellars was coaching Mishael Eusebio, a poised tenor who told Sellars to call him Mish and brought confident emotion to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of the old American song “The Boatman’s Dance.” Sellars asked that the boatman call...