Category: visual

The tally comes from adding up exhibitions, both major and minor, that opened since January at the J. Paul Getty Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art; UCLA Hammer and Fowler museums; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Craft and Folk Art Museum; California African American Museum; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (With zero, LACMA was the unfortunate outlier.) That’s impressive. – Los Angeles Times

Fairey’s mural, at the same school, is of Robert F. Kennedy – at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools complex, on the footprint of the hotel where Kennedy was shot. It is “arguably one of the school’s defining visual elements.” If Beau Stanton’s mural of Ava Gardner is painted over, he says, his should be too. He’d rather not, though: “I thought that cooler heads would prevail because this is absurd.” – Los Angeles Times

The mural, by Brooklyn artist Beau Stanton, features Ava Gardner with a radiating starburst behind her head. And in a 16-page letter sent to the LA Unified School District last month, a neighborhood coalition president objected strenuously to the starburst as a symbol of Imperial Japan. The Times‘ art critic: “Given the motif’s architectural roots in Art Deco design, the prominence of stylized light beams in nostalgic wall murals is hardly surprising.” – Los Angeles Times

Monster Chetwynd wanted to undermine saccharine holiday art – and work with bioluminescence. “If you let people believe they can do something, it’s more likely to happen. Depressing people stops them taking action. A lot of what I do is deliberately uplifting for that reason.”  – The Observer (UK)

Or is it an elaborate hoax by the Mafia? “New testimony from some inside the Sicilian mafia has led investigators to believe the Nativity can be recovered, and soon. They have followed leads to Switzerland and – it emerged in the autumn – to eastern Europe.” – The Guardian (UK)

While the men were at synagogue, the women were finding community elsewhere. “The dresses my grandmother sold were often showy, long, filmy, shiny concoctions, with sequined necklines and lace sleeves. They were priced for working-class people with fairy-tale aspirations, and they came in nylon and sateen and other cheaper fabrics; the skirts often swirled, and the waists had big stiff bows.” – The New York Times

A pioneer of Sri Lankan modernism, de Silva was the first Asian woman to become an associate of The Royal Institute of British Architects. With Sri Lankan independence, she launched her own architecture firm in Columbo, and “her trademark was to develop modernist architecture in harmony with the landscape and traditional craftsmanship.” But her studio, home, and many of her projects have fallen into disrepair and even ruin. Will there be a revival?  – The Guardian (UK)

The church seems to think so, since it sued the university for access. On Thursday, the church “said the manuscripts were stolen and demanded their return, asserting that they had been taken during World War I from a monastery in Kormista, a village in northern Greece.”  – The New York Times

While society is constantly redefining what constitutes as fine art, Killer Mike has a plethora of ideas to broaden the High’s scope, including more involvement by members of Atlanta’s infamous hip-hop and R&B community to deeper reflect the city’s culture. – ArtsATL