Gallery sights in California
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Museum of Children's Art
This museum, also known as MOCHA, is a combination children's art gallery, and children's art class, where your kids can create their own masterpieces. Not surprisingly, it's a very popular venue for children's birthdays. A lively farmers market takes place every Friday morning outside the museum, making this a particularly good time to visit.
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Geffen Contemporary at Moca
Arty types can pop next door to gawk at the cutting-edge and often provocative exhibits at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
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Laguna Art Museum
With its back to the Pacific Ocean, the Laguna Art Museum is a great example of a local gallery - dedicated to supporting and exhibiting the work of local artists, past and present. It also plays a significant role in Californian art conservation and scholarship.
Laguna has an enduring reputation as an artists' haven, despite the ineluctable creep of real estate (and Republican) values. While the heady days of the 20s (in which it was estimated that artists made up half the town's population) are long-gone, this little museum keeps the flame burning. The permanent collection holds more than 5000 works by over 800 different artists, documenting Californian art since the…
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Italian Hall
A few doors down from the Avila Adobe is the Italian Hall, which sports a rare rooftop mural called América Tropical by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of Mexico's great early-20th-century muralists. The 1932 work shows a crucified Native American in front of a Mayan pyramid and was so controversial back then that city fathers ordered it whitewashed immediately. The Getty Conservation Institute recently rehabilitated the mural and may possibly build a public viewing platform. Meanwhile, you can see a replica in East LA.
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Diego Rivera Gallery
Diego Rivera's 1931 The Making of a Fresco Showing a Building of a City is a trompe l'oeil fresco within a fresco, showing the artist himself as he pauses to admire his work, as well as the work in progress that is San Francisco. The fresco covers an entire wall in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, on your left through the entryway courtyard. For a memorable San Francisco vista, head to the terrace cafe for espresso and panoramic bay views.
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Lisa Dent Gallery
The smart old money is on Lisa Dent Gallery, purveyor of cosmopolitan sophistication and meticulous attention to craft. Dent is a bona fide curatorial star, who ditched the Whitney and the New Museum to return to her hometown, and take risks on international and local talent. Look here for major intrigue in minor details: Marcia Kure's spindly figures painted with kola-nut pigment, Jason Middlebrook's mirror-mosaic car parts, Jeong Im-yi's fastidious trompe l'oeil recreations of her studio walls.
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New Langton Arts
Strange is the norm at New Langton, where artists have done odd and occasionally unprintable things since 1975. This nonprofit is where Tony Labat stepped into the boxing ring with his critics and Harrell Fletcher distributed newspapers by teen reporters he’d commissioned to collect good news from their neighbors. Don’t miss the Musée d’Honneur Minuscule, a window box in the entryway featuring small, ambitious works, such as Jill Sylvia’s tiny cityscape made from accountants’ ledger paper.
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Self-Help Graphics & Art
The Self-Help Graphics & Art has been nurturing and promoting Latino art for the past three decades. Because of budget troubles, it's rarely open these days but the remaining staff still puts on the Southland's best and largest Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Day) celebration on November 1. The mural on the eastern wall (above Super Taco) is a recreation of David Alfaro Siqueros' controversial América Tropical on Olvera St. Call for opening hours.
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Ikenobo Ikebana Society
The oldest and largest society outside Japan for ikebana (the Japanese art of flower-arranging) has the displays to prove it: a curly willow branch tickling a narcissus in an abstract jiyubana (freestyle) arrangement, or a traditional seven-part rikka landscape featuring pine and iris. Even shoppers hell-bent on iron teapots and maneki neko (waving kitty) figurines can't resist stopping to stare at the arrangements.
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Pasadena Museum of California Art
The Pasadena Museum of California Art is a progressive gallery dedicated to art, architecture and design created by California artists since 1850. Shows change every few months and have included masterpieces by Maynard Dixon, collages by Beatnik artist Jess, and vinyl toys by Gary Basemen, David Gonzales and other artists. Also swing by the Kosmic Kavern, a spray mural by Pop artist Kenny Scharf, in the garage.
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Southern California Institute of Architecture
The Arts District got a nod of respectability when the Southern California Institute of Architecture moved into the former Santa Fe Freight Yard in 2001. It's a progressive laboratory whose faculty and students continually push the envelope in architectural design. You can see some of the results in the gallery or attend a lecture or film screening; call or see the website for upcoming events.
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Lightbox
Gallery-hopping in Culver City is the current must-do, with 30 galleries jostling for space along Washington Blvd and La Cienega Blvd south of the I-10 (Santa Monica Fwy). Lightbox, an artist-friendly enterprise is located here. The first Art Walk drew 1500 people, and the Exposition light-rail line is set to open in 2010. Before you know it, the artists will be gone, looking for the next new thing.
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Brewery Art Complex
The Brewery Art Complex is LA's largest artist colony, housed in a former brewery. There are a few galleries, but studios are generally closed to the public except during the biannual Artwalks (usually in spring and fall; call or check the website for details), though you can wander around to examine the large installations – usually works in progress – scattered throughout.
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Gallery Paule Anglim
Here you’ll find marquee names like Tony Oursler, whose video projections of distorted faces grumble and squeak in the corner. But works by local upstarts threaten to steal the show, including Ala Ebtekar’s paintings of soldiers and storm clouds gathering on ancient Iranian prayer scriptures, and Bull Miletic’s video views of San Francisco from the perspective of a flitting butterfly.
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Bergamot Station
One of LA’s best-known art nodes, this onetime trolley stop now houses 35 contemporary art galleries, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, a café and plenty of free parking on its 8-acre, campus-style complex. Stop by the museum for cutting-edge exhibits, a map and a look at the orange-tiered shelves of Gracie, an artistically inclined, non-traditional gift shop.
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Blum & Poe
Gallery-hopping in Culver City is the current must-do, with 30 galleries jostling for space along Washington Blvd and La Cienega Blvd south of the I-10 (Santa Monica Fwy). The renaissance began in 2003 when Blum & Poe, with its roster of well-known artists, moved from the comfy confines of Santa Monica to the once-industrial blocks of La Cienega.
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USC Fisher Gallery
Harris Hall at the University Of Southern California is the home of USC Fisher Gallery , which presents changing selections from its ever-expanding collection of American landscapes, British portraits, French Barbizon School paintings and, perhaps surprisingly, Mexican modern masters such as Rufino Tamayo and Gronk (Glugio Nicandro).
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Hosfelt Gallery
Trancelike states are often induced by Hosfelt, where visitors step from gritty SoMa sidewalks into dreamy, meticulously detailed interior worlds. Close inspection of Russell Crotty’s giant orbs reveals nocturnal landscapes painstakingly sketched with a Bic pen, and Marco Maggi’s minutely carved stacks of office paper make paperwork seem sublime.
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Avenues of Art & Design
Design is big in WeHo, with around 130 trade-only showrooms at the Pacific Design Center alone and dozens more in the surrounding Avenues of Art & Design . PDC showrooms generally sell only to design pros, but sometimes you can get items at a mark-up through the Buying Program.
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The Lab
Escape from the drab certainties of laundry and airport hassles to the wild what-ifs of the Lab. Since 1984 this experimental art space has offered outrageous flights of fancy: Corey Hitchcock's attempt to engineer desire with a machine and fashion shows where one-off designs are sold right off the models' backs.
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Headlands Center for the Arts
In Fort Barry, you'll find the Headlands Center for the Arts. It's a refurbished barracks converted into artists' work spaces and conference facilities. The center hosts open studios with its artists-in-residence three times a year, and two or three times a month there are talks, performances and other events.
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Anthony Meier Fine Arts
The toast of international art fairs, Anthony Meier specializes in abstract thinking from major museum artists and emerging talents, from Richard Tuttle’s shape-shifting abstract assemblages to lacy, ethereal collages made of transparent office tape by San Francisco’s own Rosana Castrillo Diaz.
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San Luis Obispo Art Center
Mission Plaza is bounded by the gentle San Luis Obispo Creek, which is lined with public art and is a nice spot for respite or a picnic. It leads straight to the San Luis Obispo Art Center, a showcase for local artists as well as visiting exhibits from around California.
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Laguna Art Museum
The breezy Laguna Art Museum has changing exhibits usually featuring one or two California artists, plus a permanent collection heavy on California landscapes, vintage photographs and works by early Laguna artists. The museum also makes an effort to support new artists.
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LA Louver
Inside the sleek, cool walls of LA Louver, it’s easy to forget the adjacent Venice Beach kookiness. Exhibits in this compact two-story gallery rotate every few months but expect an array of contemporary artists from LA up-and-comers to established international names.
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