Fork-in-the-road sculpture will be site of food drive

The folks behind Pasadena’s 18-foot-high, fork-in-the-road street sculpture are at it again.

This time, they plan to use the giant utensil for a food drive.

From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, volunteers will collect nonperishable food items at the site of the whimsical sculpture at the intersection of South St. John and Pasadena avenues.

The food drive will benefit Union Station Homeless Services, which holds a Thanksgiving dinner each year in Central Park at South Fair Oaks Avenue and East Del Mar Boulevard.

The fork sculpture started off as a prank to celebrate the 75th birthday of Bob Stane, who owns the Coffee Gallery Backstage in Altadena.

Philip Coombes, a friend of artist Ken Marshall, came up with the idea for the food drive. People can remain in their cars because volunteers will be standing by with bags for the food, Coombes said.

The Pasadena real estate broker said he wanted to put another positive spin on the fork, which went from birthday present to guerrilla art.

“It makes you feel good to help other people,” Coombes said. “At least, it makes me feel good.”

The fork was erected on Halloween and since has become a piece of impromptu public art in Pasadena.  Stane and his friends have now proclaimed the site as Fork Plaza.

“We’re trying to make it one of the biggest food volunteering projects ever in Pasadena,” Stane said.

Coobes is still looking for volunteers for the event. Anyone interested can contact him at phil@agentphil.com.

—Nicole Santa Cruz

Photo: Pasadena's newest piece of street art, "The Fork in the Road," at South Pasadena Ave and St. John Avenue will be the site of a food drive this weekend. Credit: Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times

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L.A. City Council lists top 10 places where bureaucracy makes it hard to film

The Los Angeles City Council, in an attempt to stem runaway production and make television and motion picture filming less of a hassle in the city, ordered up a list of the 10 most popular locations where bureaucratic regulations and other factors make it hard to film, with hopes of eventually fixing the situation.

The worst of the worst are, in no particular order: the

• Hollywood sign.

• Griffith Park Observatory.

• Los Angeles Zoo.

• Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce headquarters.

• AT&T Building downtown.

• Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center.

• Farmers and Merchants Bank downtown.

• Japanese American National Museum.

• Library Park, also known as Maguire Gardens, at the Los Angeles Central Library.

• Terminal Annex Post Office near Union Station downtown.

The city’s financial analysts compiled the list with the help of film industry location managers through their union, the Motion Picture and Theatrical Trade Teamsters Local 399.

The location mangers said those sites are difficult to film for a variety of reasons, including rental costs, difficulty securing permits, government regulations restricting public access and even things such as restrictions on providing food for crew members.

“Los Angeles is the film capital of the world, but there are too many places in which we tell filming to go away,’’ said Council President Eric Garcetti.
 

Three cities under consideration for Eli Broad's contemporary art museum

Art collector and philanthropist Eli Broad has nearly doubled the size of the museum he plansto build on the Westside for his 2,000-piece collection of contemporary art, and Beverly Hills and Santa Monica are vying to be its home.

Saturday evening, in an interview with The Times' Mike Boehm--as he prepared to preside as co-chair over the local art scene's big event of the season, the 30th anniversary gala for the Museum of Contemporary Art--Broad said that he isn't playing the two municipalities against each other. He said a third city was also in the running, but he declined to name it. He said he hoped to accelerate the process of building the headquarters for his Broad Art Foundation by talking to several cities.

"We don't know which of those sites are going to work out. None of them are without complications," Broad said.

Read the full story here. 

Inglewood hosts arts tour

Inglewood's burgeoning artistic community is opening its doors this weekend for public tours.

On Saturday and Sunday 16 artists with studios in Inglewood are hosting tours replete with a narrated trolley ride and a closing reception inside a former fire station built in the Art Deco style.

The city has provided the trolley and three buses to ferry around visitors. Three park-and-ride stops will be available for art enthusiasts, as well as maps showing each artist's studio.

Renée A. Fox, a painter and an organizer of the event, hopes the tour will promote the city's arts scene, which is developing away from more-established, higher-cost areas nearby such as Venice, Santa Monica and Culver City.

"I love living here; there is not this pretension, which is nice," Fox said. "When you live in a neighborhood that is not expecting you to be a certain way it allows you to be free, to think freely."

Dustin Shuler, a featured artist, is a Pittsburgh native and has created bold, out-sized pieces of public art that meld industrial and organic themes. His works include "End of an Era," in which Shuler ran a 20-foot nail through a 1959 Cadillac and propped it on its side on a quad at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Another one of his works, "The Spindle," became a landmark in the suburban Illinois town of Berwyn after  it was built in the late 1980s.

The tour will also include the more-than-4,000 square foot space of Joan Robey, an assemblage artist who scours Southern California's junkyards to create her sculptures.

-- Alejandro Lazo

Photo: Kenneth Ober and Renee Fox are the husband/wife organizers of the art walk. Credit: Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times

Villaraigosa wants city buildings opened to TV, film production

To stem the outflow of film and other entertainment production jobs from Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa met this morning with representatives from more than 20 city departments to find ways to make it easier for producers to shoot locally.

Villaraigosa has already ordered general managers to appoint film “liaisons" in every department to help production companies cut through the bureaucracy and coordinate production work. Today he also asked them to identify all city buildings, parking lots and other facilities producers could use for films, television, commercials and other projects, according to a spokesman for the mayor.

The agencies include the Los Angeles Zoo, Department of Water and Power, Port of Los Angeles, Department of Transportation and Department of General Services.

According to the California Film Commission, the state’s share of U.S. feature film production fell to 31% in 2008 from 66% in 2003. Most of that drop-off was in the Los Angeles area, where feature filming in 2008 was nearly half what it was at its peak in 1996.

A survey by FilmL.A. Inc., which coordinates permits for location filming, found that only 57% of all TV pilots were shot in the L.A. area this year, down from 81% in 2004.

The City Council is already considering offering tax refunds to production companies and tax credits to building owners who make their sites available for filming. The council also wants to increase the availability of power nodes downtown so filmmakers don’t have to rely on portable generators, saving money and reducing noise levels for downtown residents.

-- Phil Willon at L.A. City Hall

Palm Springs wants to fill vacant storefronts with art

Eager to safeguard its image as an upscale tourist resort, Palm Springs is prescribing art therapy as a partial cure for downtown shops caught up in the economic doldrums.

The city is expected to adopt a plan requiring vacant stores to hang paintings, photographs of old Hollywood movie stars or come up with their own picturesque remedies to head off creeping blight in the city center.

“We have more vacant storefronts than we did in the past,” said City Manager David Ready. “Many are transitioning or looking for new tenants. This program wouldn’t cost the owner anything and would greatly improve the appearance of the buildings.”

Local artists will be invited to showcase their work and the city will finance the installation.

Santa Monica repeals landmark status of former architecture school

The Santa Monica City Council has voted to repeal the landmark designation of a building that once housed the progressive Southern California Institute of Architecture.

The decision was made in response to an appeal filed by developers, who argued that the city Landmarks Commission erred last year in designating the 9,600-square-foot utilitarian building at 3030-3060 Nebraska Ave. an historical landmark.

The building is associated with Ray Kappe, a renowned architect and founder of the institute.

Read more at the Santa Monica Daily Press:

The property served as the home of SCI-Arc from its inception in 1972 to 1992 when it relocated to Marina del Rey.

Bill Delvac, an attorney representing the property owners and appellants, said the building underwent dramatic changes after the school moved out, including replacement of windows and doors and entirely new interiors. "If what occurred inside the building, the education of SCI-Arc, is why the building is significant, then surely the interior should be intact to date for the building to be eligible," Delvac said.

Santa Monica center to showcase art by gang workers

The Pico Youth and Family Center in Santa Monica will hold an exhibition Saturday showcasing the artwork of five gang intervention workers from the Los Angeles area.

More than 40 images, along with poetry and music, will be featured in "Expressions of Gang Violence." The exhibit will be open from 6 to 10 p.m. at the center,  715 Pico Blvd.

Los Angeles has been labeled "the gang capital of the country," said Oscar de la Torre, the center's executive director. "Gang intervention workers have been developing creative strategies to reach youth and create awareness about the trappings of gang culture."

—Martha Groves

Panel recommends revising L.A. cultural heritage law [Updated]

The Los Angeles Planning Commission voted 7 to 1 today to recommend approval of a revised historic preservation ordinance that — for the first time — would grant the city's Cultural Heritage Commission authority to bar the demolition of designated monuments.

Under the current ordinance, demolition of a landmark can be delayed, but not denied.

Owners also would be notified as soon as a property is nominated for historic-cultural monument status so they can participate in all public hearings. Now, owners are not formally notified of nomination and often feel blindsided.

Another change calls for boosting the number of cultural heritage commissioners to seven from five to allow for broader representation and to make it easier to reach a quorum. Two of the seven would be property owners of historic-cultural monuments and at least three would have professional experience in architecture, preservation or related fields. 

If approved by the City Council, the revised ordinance would mark the first major changes in the cultural heritage law since it was enacted in 1962. 

After months of discussion among preservationists and property owners, the city Planning Department's Office of Historic Resources decided to leave intact a provision on proposed alterations to interiors of historic-cultural monuments. As is now the case, the Cultural Heritage Commission would have the ability to delay but not deny a request for alterations to interior spaces.

Ken Bernstein, director of the Office of Historic Resources, said the commission could approve demolition of a historic-cultural monument if the owner demonstrated economic hardship or if the commission found that the benefits of an alternative use of the property significantly outweighed the public benefits of preservation.

Demolition would be allowed if the benefits of an alternative use significantly outweighed the benefits of preservation.

In addition, the revised ordinance would allow an owner to appeal the denial of a demolition permit to the City Council.

[Updated at 7:35 p.m.: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Bernstein said the commission could not, under the proposed revisions, prohibit demolition if the owner demonstrated economic hardship.]

—Martha Groves

Autry National Center withdraws expansion plan

In a move that concedes a measure of victory to long-term opponents, the Autry National Center has bowed out of a protracted battle for a $175-million expansion of its facility in Griffith Park.

City approval of the plan hinged on a recent demand for the Autry to make a legally binding commitment to support the Southwest Museum located in Mt. Washington, as a fully functioning art institution in perpetuity. In a letter delivered to members of the Los Angeles City Council Tuesday, the Autry stated that such a commitment would be irresponsible and that it is withdrawing its proposal.

Read the full story here.

Photo: Entrance to the Autry National Center in Griffith Park. Credit: Lori Shepler / Los Angeles Times

Central Avenue Jazz Festival attracts thousands to South L.A.

Thousands of people were listening today to jazz bands and and the smoking saxophone of Kamasi Washington during the final day of the 14th annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival in South Los Angeles.

“It’s great, it’s mellow, there are lots and lots of people here,” said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry. “Jazz cuts across all lines, ethnic lines, gender lines, all lines. It’s about telling a story.”

The festival began Saturday with acts including the Adonis Puentes Band and Eric Reed Trio. In addition to Washington, Sunday’s lineup included the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and the Jazz on the Latin Side All Stars.

Perry said that, other than the music, festival-goers were savoring peach cobbler and sweet potato fries, Louisiana-style cooking and fresh strawberries and oranges. She said the festival marked an important part of the city’s past.

“It kind of celebrates the history and the roots of jazz here in our city,” she said. “The community comes together.”

-- Ari B. Bloomekatz

EIR process begins on Century Plaza project; Koretz favors cultural designation

The Los Angeles Planning Department on Thursday will hold its first public meeting to consider the possible environmental effects of the proposed redevelopment of the Century Plaza Hotel site in Century City. The meeting will be held from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the third-floor grand ballroom of the Olympic Collection banquet hall and conference center, 11301 Olympic Blvd.

Last week, Councilman Paul Koretz, who represents Century City, submitted a motion to City Council contending that the hotel was historically significant and should be included in the city's list of historic cultural monuments. "The Century Plaza Hotel stimulated the development of Century City and led to its reputation as a world-class destination, having been a gathering place for celebrities, politicians and world dignitaries since its opening day," his letter said.

The curved hotel, which opened in 1966, was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed New York's World Trade Center towers. Once nicknamed the "West Coast White House," the hotel was a favorite of Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Nixon was host for a celebration for the Apollo 11 astronauts; Reagan held two presidential victory celebrations in the ballroom and often conducted business from the hotel's presidential suite.

In this first phase of the process of preparing an environmental impact report, the public can learn about the project and submit comments on potential environmental effects and alternatives that should be considered. 

Michael Rosenfeld, the hotel's owner, wants to demolish the 19-story building and replace it with two 49-story, 570-foot buildings containing residences, offices and a hotel. The buildings would be positioned on the north and south sides of a two-acre plaza area, which would be open to the public, surrounded by ground-level retail shops and restaurants.

Artist unveils sculpture at gateway to North Hollywood

L.A. artist Peter Shire has unveiled a colorful addition to the street art scene on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, where his new public sculpture spells out "NoHo" and will be illuminated at night.

Read the complete story at The Times' blog Culture Monster.

-- David Ng

Korean pop art gets forum at LACMA

"Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists From Korea," opening June 28 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is loaded with surprises for those among the art crowd who haven't paid much attention to Korea. And that includes all too many of us.

Even Lynn Zelevansky, a widely traveled LACMA curator who organized the exhibition with Christine Starkman, curator of Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, says that she was "absolutely not aware" of South Korean contemporary art until she started thinking about a potential show.

"That was one of the things that started to interest me," she says. "I went there for the first time and thought, 'Why have I never thought about this place?' I felt that I was seeing a very credible, small but high-level, sophisticated art world and meeting really good artists."

Read the full story here.

 -- Suzanne Muchnic

Ennis House, a Frank Lloyd Wright landmark in Los Feliz, is for sale

Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, a Los Feliz hilltop masterpiece composed of patterned and smooth concrete blocks that has been mightily threatened by man and Mother Nature, is being offered for sale at $15 million by the private foundation that has been restoring it.

Eric Lloyd Wright, the architect's grandson and a member of the nonprofit Ennis House Foundation's board, said that, given harsh economic realities, private ownership would be the best way to save the house and honor his grandfather's intentions.

Torrential rains had caused a retaining wall to buckle in March 2005, sending several patterned blocks tumbling down the hill. City inspectors briefly red-tagged the estate, spread on half an acre along a ridge with breathtaking views in the Hollywood Hills.

Read the full story here.

-- Martha Groves

Ennis House is located in the 2600 block of Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz. To learn more about the demographics and schools in this community visit Mapping L.A.'s Neighborhoods.

Orange County museum under fire for selling paintings to private collector

The Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach has quietly sold 18 of its 20 California Impressionist paintings to an undisclosed private collector, sparking criticism from two local museum directors who say the secrecy violated the public interest by preventing them from bidding to keep the works in collections open to the public.

The Times learned of the sale after a reader’s tip on Culture Monster. Reached Friday in Zurich, Switzerland, OCMA director Dennis Szakacs said the paintings from the early 1900s fetched a total of $963,000 in late March from a Laguna Beach collector whose identity the museum promised not to disclose. Szakacs defended the transaction.

 “We were exchanging a high level of transparency available in an auction for the desirability of keeping these paintings with a local collector,” he said.

Read the rest of the story at Culture Monster, The Times' arts blog.

-- Mike Boehm

William Wendt's "Spring in the Canyon"

Future of 1927-era East L.A. theater in question

Preservationists and developers are wrangling over the future of an abandoned theater in East Los Angeles that is historically significant and represents a Spanish-baroque style rarely found in the city.

Activists, developers and local business people presented two starkly different visions Wednesday of what could be done with the abandoned Golden Gate Theater near Whittier and Atlantic boulevards.

At a hearing before the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission, some advocated converting the building into a CVS pharmacy, complete with alcohol sales and a drive-through pharmacy window. Others want to return the theater, built in 1927, to its original purpose.

The theater's entrance replicates the portal of the University of Salamanca in Spain and is built in the Churrigueresque style, a Spanish baroque form of architecture. The theater is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Anger over gallery show for notorious L.A. tagger

Given some of the outraged comments Culture Monster has received about our coverage of the transformation of Daniel Ramos, alias Chaka, from a notoriously busy teenage graffiti-tagger to a 36-year-old gone legit with his first art show, we are relieved that paint balls can't be shot over the Internet and out through a computer monitor at the other end.

As it turns out, Chaka has his fans, and we're told by Lucy Beer, a spokeswoman for Mid-City Arts, that more than 700 attended his April 25 opening at the gallery, which is dedicated to graffiti art and street art.

Read the rest at Culture Monster, The Times' culture blog.

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: Images from Chaka's show, "Resurrection." Credit: Mid-City Arts.

First sculpture of black woman in U.S. Capitol is unveiled

First lady Michelle Obama helped unveil Los Angeles artist Artis Lane's new sculpture in Washington, D.C. today. Lane's latest work is a bronze bust of Sojourner Truth, a former slave and women's rights activist that is the first sculpture of a black woman in the U.S. Capitol.

For more on Lane and her work, see: "L.A. Artist's 'Truth' to Be Unveiled."

Photo: Artis Lane holds a small version of the Capitol bust. Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

Artwork from Hearst Castle returned to heirs of Jewish couple

 

The grandchildren of a Jewish couple whose artwork was taken by the Nazis in 1935 received three of the paintings back from the state of California this afternoon at a ceremony in Sacramento attended by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Nazis forced Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer to liquidate their Berlin art gallery. Through various sales, the paintings were eventually purchased by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst and ended up at Hearst Castle, owned by the state parks department since 1972. The family asked for them back in 2007.

 “As soon as we discovered what the true story was behind it … the state acted very quickly, at once, to set things right,” Schwarzenegger said at the cermeony, held at the Leland Stanford Mansion. “But of course a wrong cannot be fully righted when the victims have long since passed away.”

The Oppenheimers fled the Nazis to live in France, where Jakob died in 1941. Rosa died at Auschwitz two years later. One of the paintings, “Venus and Cupid,” by a student of Venetian painter Paris Bordone, will remain at the castle where it will be used to educate visitors.

The other two, portraits by a student of Jacopo Tintoretto and by a Venetian artist thought to be Giovanni Cariani, may be sold by the family. Inge Blackshear of Buenos Aires, Argentina, one of the Oppenheimers’ grandchildren, said her feelings were “very mixed,” but overall, she was pleased.

 “My grandchildren will be able to go to a very good school and I’m so happy and so thankful,” she said. “So I want to thank all of you, the state of California, the people of California. Thank you very much.”

 -- Michael Rothfeld

Photos: "Venus and Cupid," left, by a student of the Venetian painter Paris Bordone; and an unidentified man thought to have been painted by Giovanni Cariani. The paintings had been stolen from Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer in 1935 by the Nazis, and ended up in the Hearst Castle. They were returned to the Oppenheimers' descendants today. Credit: Hearst Castle.

Treasure trove of songs released online

An archive of over 41,000 Spanish-language songs dating back to the early 1900s was released online today by UCLA.

Available at http://frontera.library.ucla.edu, the recordings are from the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings and was released by the university's Chicano Studies Research Center, according to a press release from the university.

Selections include some of the first known recordings of Lydia Mendoza and her family in 1928 and of accordion player Narciso Martinez in 1937. The collection includes music, speeches and comedy skits.

Only 50 seconds of each song in the collection is accessible from most computers off UCLA's campus. Full versions are available through computers at the university and for those that have access to its network, officials said.

The music group Los Tigres del Norte, which donated $500,000 to the university in 2000 that helped digitize about 30,000 recordings made from 1905 to 1955, joined officials on campus in making today's announcement.

The other 11,000 recordings are from 1955 to the 1990s.

-- Ari B. Bloomekatz

Author Raymond Chandler celebrated on anniversary

“The streets were dark with something more than night.”

-- Raymond Chandler, on Los Angeles

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s death.

To celebrate his memory, a small group of fans and scholars gathered at USC on Wednesday night to discuss the works of the author who elevated the detective novel to an art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer, is identified with Los Angeles, a city he loved to hate.

The panelists included Chandler biographer Judith Freeman, Los Angeles Times' film critic Kenneth Turan, critic and author Leo Braudy, and Denise Hamilton, author of the Eve Diamond crime novels.

The discussion ranged from Chandler’s difficulty with plot lines to similarities between the author and detective Philip Marlowe, a loner and failed knight in an increasingly corrupt city.

The panelists touched on Chandler’s rootlessness -- he lived in more than two dozen residences in and around LA -- and its effect on his writing.

There was also some debate over whether his work really qualifies as "noir," which one panelist described as an "elastic genre" that has been rendered all but meaningless.

In one of the best quips of the evening, Braudy related a quote that "the only thing you needed to be noir was for it to rain a lot. It rains more in Chandler than it does in L.A."

Pico-Union historic tour debuts today

More than a century ago, Swedish immigrants landed in Los Angeles and built the historic Angelica Lutheran Church in the city's Pico-Union district. In the 1980s, the church embraced the flood of refugees fleeing chaos and war in El Salvador and elsewhere as part of a citywide sanctuary movement, offering housing dozens families at one point.

Reflecting its diverse demographics, the church today still offers a Swedish Christmas service known as Julotta, along with Spanish-language services and a ministry for members of the Korean community, who are increasingly opening businesses in the neighborhood.

The church's rich social and architectural history will be featured in a new self-guided walking tour of the Pico-Union district that starts today and is hosted by the Los Angeles Conservancy, a historic preservation organization.

The tour, Pico-Union: Layers of History, departs at 11 a.m. from the Pico Union Branch Library, 1030 S. Alvarado St. in Los Angeles. In addition, a community fair throughout the day will offer neighborhood residents resources and information about various services.

The tour exemplifies a pressing preservation challenge faced by many Los Angeles neighborhoods: How to maintain the character of historic neighborhoods as new communities enter and reshape them. In the Pico-Union neighborhood, for instance, residents today are 92% Latino, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.

"Pico-Union is a prime example of how historic neighborhoods can, and should, continue to serve new communities," said Linda Dishman, the conservancy's executive director.

-- Teresa Watanabe

Stacy Keach has a mild stroke; speech and mobility intact

Actor Stacy Keach suffered a "very mild stroke" that resulted in "no impairment whatsoever" to his speech or ability to move, according to a statement from his media representatives. He remains hospitalized for a second day "for observation and routine precautionary procedures" at an undisclosed Los Angeles hospital, the announcement says.

Keach, 67, is starring as Richard Nixon in the touring production of "Frost/Nixon." The show's producers said they "look forward to his speedy recovery and to his return to the show as soon as he is able."

Read the rest of the story here.

How L.A. nurtures contemporary artists (with cheap studios)

All artists inhabit worlds of their own making, writes Times freelancer Sharon Mizota. (And in L.A. it helps that they can house those worlds in an inexpensive studio space. ...)

“There’s both a critical engagement with the stuff of the world and a fantastical retreat or projection,” says Los Angeles writer and critic Jan Tumlir. He curated an exhibition last year at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery that drew a link between the region’s wide-open vistas and themes of illusion, utopia and apocalypse. “This kind of thinking — about whole new worlds rising from the ashes — is helped along by the landscape.” 

According to curator Ali Subotnick, the city’s sprawl also exerts a more practical influence. Upon moving here from New York in 2006 to join the Hammer Museum’s staff, she was struck by L.A.’s relatively plentiful and inexpensive studio spaces. “These artists can have these huge spaces and don’t have to work nonstop, 9-to-5, in order to supplement their income,” she says. “They can actually take the time to really get into their work.”