Artist who created TV 'Bonanza' map dies at 98

Artist Robert Temple Ayres died Feb. 25 at his Riverside County home at the age of 98, but not before making one last pilgrimage to the Ponderosa two days before his heart finally gave out.

In his career as an artist for MGM, Paramount and the Walt Disney Co., Ayres created his most famous work, officially called “Map to Illustrate the Ponderosa in Nevada.” It was created in 1959 so it could burn up weekly on television screens for the ensuing 13-plus years.

While the immortal “Bonanza” theme music played at the start of each episode, Ayres’ map appeared, then dissolved in flames, revealing the Ponderosa ranch’s inhabitants on horseback –- the Cartwright clan played by Lorne Greene, Michael Landon, Dan Blocker and Pernell Roberts.

The map had hung for decades in the home of “Bonanza” creator and producer David Dortort before his family donated it to the Autry National Center of the American West after his death in 2010. When the Autry Center announced last June that the Ponderosa map had gone on permanent display, The Times contacted Ayres to get his thoughts on his TV icon that was now a museum piece.

Art Center buys postal facility, plans to expand and renovate

A major redesign is in the works for Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, which is gearing up for what its president says will be the largest fundraising campaign in its history to pay for an expansion of its south campus and renovations to its distinctive, elongated main campus set into a hillside about five miles to the north.

Art Center, often ranked among the nation’s top design schools, announced Tuesday that it has spent $7 million to buy a former U.S. Postal Service mail distribution center next to its existing satellite campus in south Pasadena, and has hired the Los Angeles firm Michael Maltzan Architecture to do master planning and design work.

'Spring Awakening' team to bring fairy-tale show to La Jolla

“Spring Awakening” collaborators Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater are dipping into the well of 19th century European literature yet again, with a musical version of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale  “The Nightingale.”

The La Jolla Playhouse announced Tuesday that the work-in-progress will have a public workshop staging July 10 to Aug. 5 as part of the playhouse’s Page to Stage new play development series.

Composer Sheik and lyricist-librettist Sater will have a high-profile collaborator in director Moises Kaufman, who helped get Page to Stage off on the right foot in 2001, directing its inaugural installment, Doug Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife.”

That show, with Kaufman as director, went on to win the 2004 Pulitzer prize for drama and 2004 Tony Awards for best play and best actor (Jefferson Mays in a solo turn playing dozens of characters). Kaufman co-wrote and directed “The Laramie Project” for his own documentary stage company, Tectonic Theater Project, and directed well-received stagings of Rajiv Joseph's "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" at L.A.'s Kirk Douglas Theatre and Mark Taper Forum in 2009-10, as well as its 2011  Broadway production starring Robin Williams.

Before Page to Stage debuted, the La Jolla Playhouse helped launch “Spring Awakening” with its initial in-house workshop in 2000 under former artistic director Anne Hamburger. That show, based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 drama about teen angst in sexually repressive, Victorian-era Germany, went on to win eight Tony Awards in 2007, including best musical, best book (for Sater) and best score and orchestrations (for Sheik).

Mike Tyson to debut onstage in one-man Vegas show about himself

Mike Tyson is ready for his close-up as a stage performer, starring in a one-man show about himself set to premiere with a six-night shakedown run next month at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.

"Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth -- Live on Stage" will run April 13-18 in the 740-seat Hollywood Theatre, offering the man himself telling what it's like to have been feared, reviled and pitied in a career that may be boxing's answer to Sophocles' "Oedipus" cycle.

The director and co-writer (with Tyson's wife, Kiki), is L.A.-based playwright Randy Johnson, creator of "Elvis the Concert" and "One Night With Janis Joplin."

Tyson has already won acclaim for telling his own story on screen in "Tyson," the 2009 documentary by James Toback (pictured with Tyson).

In it, as Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote, virtually the only voice heard was that of the fallen champ, "holding you spellbound with his thoughts on his past. The result is as gripping as a title fight and as mesmerizing as a conversation with a cobra. You may not be happy with everything said, but you will not be bored."

Johnson said Friday that he avoided seeing "Tyson," opting instead to spend many hours talking with his subject, then crafting a script and a sequence that he said will allow for a written question or two from the audience.

Video and live music will augment the evening. "It's a theater piece, not a lecture, but a real one-man show," Johnson said, along the lines of stage monologue evenings such as Carrie Fisher's "Wishful Drinking" and William Shatner's "Shatner's World: We All Just Live In It."

MOCA curator Philipp Kaiser to lead museum in Cologne, Germany

L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art has gone through a series of unexpected high-level departures recently, but at least one outgoing staff member is leaving on a more relaxed timetable.

That’s senior curator Philipp Kaiser, who on Nov. 1 will become director of Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, which is dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

Kaiser was a curator at Gegenwartskunst Basel in Switzerland before coming to MOCA in 2007.

Museum Ludwig, where he’ll succeed Kasper Konig, named him its director designate last August. Since Kaiser means “emperor” in German, and Konig means “king,” it’s a museum that's developing a royal line of leaders.

NEA-style community-building via arts has lost ground in state

Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, came to Watts and neighboring Willowbrook on Thursday for walking tours and briefings on how $720,000 in grants funded or coordinated by the NEA is being spent. 

The money was generated by Our Town and ArtPlace, two programs begun under Landesman that aim to use the arts as a tool for neighborhood improvement and fostering economic growth.

But a major new California state policy works at cross-purposes to what Landesman is trying to accomplish on a federal level. From the late 1960s on, municipal redevelopment agencies in the state often funded arts and cultural projects on the same theory that guides Our Town and ArtPlace -- that in addition to their aesthetic and educational value, arts attractions foster tourism, an engaged and active citizenry, and economic growth.

Those efforts ended on Feb. 1, when California's redevelopment agencies, which were created to fight urban blight and promote economic activity, ceased to exist. Driven by the budget crises lingering over Sacramento and municipalities, and questioning the efficacy of redevelopment spending, Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature abolished the agencies so that billions of dollars in property taxes they'd controlled could be diverted to other government purposes.

More than $350 million in arts projects have been funded by redevelopment agencies in Los Angeles County over the past 45 years, including construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Grand Avenue headquarters ($23 million) and the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts ($60 million).

Ansel Adams' photos of 1940 L.A. show him working in urban mode

About 60 of Ansel Adams’ stepchildren will spend the coming four weeks hanging out in a downtown art gallery.

They’re pictures the great photographer of natural landscapes took of urbanized Los Angeles around 1940 – and donated to the Los Angeles Public Library more than 20 years later, with apologies because he thought that “none of the pictures were very good.”

John Huckert, director of drkrm gallery, which on Saturday will open “Ansel Adams Los Angeles: Photographs From the Los Angeles Public Library Ansel Adams Collection,” says the idea is to prove that Adams underestimated himself, while showing a side of his work far removed from the majestic scenes of Yosemite and the Southwest that made him famous.

Adams took the pictures while on assignment for Fortune magazine, which was featuring the burgeoning city and its aviation industry. They include shots of a hot dog stand and the Ocean Park pier in Santa Monica,  a view of downtown’s Hill Street from the heights of Bunker Hill, and pictures shot in a bar and a bowling alley.  The exhibition will run through March 17, occupying both the drkrm space and the adjoining Edgar Varela Fine Arts gallery, both at 727 S. Spring St.

The Fortune article, “City of the Angels,” ran in March 1941 and included just a few of the 216 photos Adams had taken, Huckert said.  Adams kept the negatives and apparently forgot about them until the early 1960s, when he looked through his files during a move from San Francisco to a new home in Carmel.  He donated them to the library rather meekly, noting in a letter that when he shot them -- he guessed it was around 1939 --  “the weather was bad over a rather long period and none of the pictures were very good…. If they have no value whatsoever, please dispose of them in the incinerator…. At any event, I do not want them back.”

Obama's 2013 budget calls for 5% increase for arts and culture

President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, released Monday, calls for a 5% increase in spending for three cultural grantmaking agencies and three Washington, D.C., arts institutions.

Obama aims to boost outlays from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion, encompassing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Gallery of Art.

The arts and humanities endowments each would get a 5.5% boost, to $154.255 million -- nearly restoring cuts announced in December. But if Congress approves the president’s proposal for the fiscal year that begins in October 2012, the NEA and NEH will still be well short of the $167.5 million each was set to receive before two separate rounds of cuts instigated by Congressional Republicans during 2011.

Obama is proposing $231.9 million for IMLS, a $439,000 reduction.

The Smithsonian Institution, by far the heavy hitter of federal cultural spending, would receive $856.8 million -- a 3.7% hike for its operating budget, which would rise to $660.3 million, and a 12.3% increase in capital expenditures, to $196.5 million. The biggest capital expense would be $85 million, to continue construction on the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Jordan Roth, 'Clybourne Park's' Broadway producer, makes West Coast swing

Broadway producer Jordan Roth was sitting in a downtown Los Angeles hotel lobby late Friday afternoon, laughing and giving a broad wave of his hand at the suggestion that he’d stumbled upon a new showbiz corollary to the “you break it, you bought it” rule of commerce.

Earlier this month, Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, bought the 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Clybourne Park” to save it from breaking. At the time, It appeared that Bruce Norris’ satire might not make its planned transfer to Broadway after the Feb. 26 conclusion of its run at the Mark Taper Forum, because of a sudden $1-million hole in its $2.5-million New York production budget.

But Roth saved the day by anteing up an unspecified amount of Jujamcyn’s cash and recruiting several other investors, whom he declined to name for now.

“Clybourne Park,” which also won a 2011 Olivier Award for best new play on the London commercial stage, will begin previews at Jujamcyn’s Walter Kerr Theatre on March 26. It opens April 19, in time to be eligible for the 2012 Tony Awards.

Al Pacino, Andre Watts among National Medal of Arts winners

Actor Al Pacino, pianist Andre Watts, visual artists Will Barnet and Martin Puryear and art philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer are among the winners of the 2011 National Medal of Arts, to be bestowed Monday by President Obama in a ceremony at the White House.

Also announced Friday were winners of the National Humanities Medal -- including classical music scholar Charles Rosen.

The ceremonies will be streamed live Monday at 10:45 a.m. (Pacific) on the White House website.

Pacino, famed for wide-ranging film and stage roles that include the sympathetic gay bank robber of “Dog Day Afternoon,” mob boss Michael Corleone in “The Godfather” trilogy, and Shakespeare’s Shylock and King Richard III, is being cited for his “signature intensity” and as “an enduring and iconic figure, who came of age in one of the most exciting decades of American cinema, the 1970s.”

Watts, who is not expected to attend the ceremony, according to the White House, is being recognized as “a perennial favorite with the most celebrated orchestras and conductors around the world,” his performances marked by “superb technique and passionate intensity.”

Barnet, a New York City painter and printmaker who turned 100 last year, was cited for “nuanced and graceful depictions of family and personal scenes” that are “meticulously constructed of flat planes that reveal a lifelong exploration of abstraction, expressionism and geometry.”