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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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."
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.
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."
“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.”
Authorities today arrested a fugitive living under an alias in Las Vegas, a decade after he allegedly stole more than a quarter of a million dollars' worth of art from Laguna Beach galleries, officials said.
Joseph Michael Killebrew, 50, was charged with four counts of grand theft and faces a maximum of eight years and four months in prison.
At Corona del Mar High School, the show will go on.
After a flap that raised the ire of the gay community and ruffled feathers on the Newport Beach campus, drama students will be allowed to stage a production of "Rent," a musical about bohemians living in New York City.
"I never had a problem with the play selected by Mr. Martin," said Corona del Mar High School Principal Fal Asrani, in a statement released by the school district. "The selection of our drama productions is his call. I just requested the opportunity to review the script before it was final. [The school ]administration received parent concerns from a previous play and I wanted to be able to ensure my commitment to the concerned parents as well as show my support of the student production without any reservation.”
Vietnamese American activists plan to protest an art exhibit at Cypress College on Wednesday that shows a photograph they said is disrespectful to their experiences as political refugees.
The offending photo, by Vietnamese American artist Brian Doan, shows a young woman wearing a red tank top with a yellow star -– the color of Vietnam's official flag -- sitting next to a small bust of former communist leader Ho Chi Minh.
Doan said the work is a commentary on the youth of Vietnam who grew up there after the Vietnam War.
But the communist symbols in the piece enraged many Vietnamese Americans. Hundreds protested when the photograph was shown in a Santa Ana exhibit in January.
Drama students at Corona del Mar High School in Newport Beach were excited to push the envelope with a spring production of the Bohemian love story "Rent."
But the school's drama teacher said the principal told him to cancel the show because she disapproved of the gay characters in the musical. Fal Asrani, the school's principal, disputes that she pulled the plug on the production, saying that she only asked to review the script.
Now, amid growing backlash and consternation from students and members of the gay community, the actors at Corona del Mar High are grudgingly preparing for a very different show: "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."
The drama teacher said it's a safer choice, and one sure to pass muster with his boss.
A dispute between an artist and her sponsor over whether some of the painter's abstract images of breasts could be viewed as “sexually overt artwork" ended today with the cancellation of the downtown Long Beach public exhibition titled “4 Chambers.”
The display of more than 70 works opened last Saturday and was originally scheduled to run through April. It was sponsored by Phantom Galleries LA, a for-profit community outreach program.
The trouble started after program Executive Director Liza Simone said two of the paintings could be viewed as offensive and they were removed from the exhibit, which is her prerogative as curator, she said. The artist, who goes by her first name, Christiana, demanded that the exhibit of her works be an all-oar-nothing display.
If the paintings with breast images — abstract orange and blue ellipses — were not returned to the exhibit walls at the commercial space along a trendy stretch of Pine Avenue, she would cancel the entire show of her work. In an earlier interview, Simone said her program specializes in work that she believes would be “appropriate for all ages. Anything that could potentially offend somebody we don’t show.”
Christiana, 40, a physical trainer and artist based in Laguna Beach, vehemently denied that there was anything obscene or pornographic about the paintings, which she called expressions of human emotion and form.
Today, as friends helped her dismantle the presentation, Christiana shook her head and said: “I’m still feeling a little confused about what happened here, but I’m glad that this chapter is ending peacefully.”
“At this point,” she added, “I just want to get my work and move on.”
First came REDCAT. (OK, it’s technically the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater at Walt Disney Concert Hall, but who actually calls it that?) Now the cutting-edge arts school is looking into the jaws of the Wild Beast, a new music pavilion soon to open on the school’s Valencia campus.
CalArts recently announced a gift of $500,000 from the S. Mark Taper Foundation that will help close the funding gap for the facility, which has an estimated cost of $4 million and was designed by Culver City’s Hodgetts + Fung architecture firm. The school has about $600,000 left to raise toward the ongoing construction. CalArts President Steven D. Lavine said the building will have a “soft” opening for students and staff in late March, with a grand opening planned for fall. The performers are yet to be announced.
Hip-hop artist will.i.am is not a fan of the schools in underprivileged neighborhoods and believes there needs to be alternatives for students. So the member of the Black Eyed Peas is announcing today that two new film programs will open in the Bay Area and he hopes to open one in East L.A.
“I don’t know why ... it just seems that all these areas ... the education,” is not good, said will.i.am, who performed in a pre-inauguration concert for President Barack Obama.
Kids in those areas instead seek other outlets, mostly crime, sports or music, he said. That inspired the Peas’ Peapod Foundation music and arts academy in Watts that opened a year ago. The Boyle Heights native credits music with saving his life.
Gustavo Dudamel will begin his first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the Hollywood Bowl. And as a gift to the city, all 18,000 tickets to a daylong program Oct. 3 culminating with the performance, called "Bienvenido Gustavo," will be free.
The details of the 2009-10 season were to be revealed at a Walt Disney Concert Hall news conference today with Dudamel in attendance. They have been a matter of much speculation, given how rapidly the young Venezuelan conductor, who will turn 28 on Monday, has achieved an international superstar status not only within the classical music world but also, increasingly, outside it.
Three Southern California art fairs in January, two of them in one weekend? In this economy? It may defy logic, but business is business.
As conceived when the financial outlook was rosier, Photo LA, an annual marketplace for a kaleidoscopic range of photography, will begin tonight with a gala preview and continue through the weekend at Santa Monica Airport's Barker Hangar. Art LA, a showcase and sales venue for edgy new work, is gearing up for its Jan. 23-25 gig, also at Barker Hangar. And the Los Angeles Art Show, offering an eclectic survey of art from the last two centuries, is sticking with its plan to leave Barker for the much larger L.A. Convention Center, where it will appear Jan. 22-25. "We have confidence that art is still a good buy," says L.A. photography dealer Stephen Cohen, who founded Photo LA in 1992 and launched Art LA in 2005. "It's a buyer's market. We expect a big turnout, but it might be that a lot of people are looking, holding on to their money or getting an idea of what to buy when they have some to spend."
You might not think of Bellflower when you think of cutting-edge urbanism. But city officials have worked hard in the last few years to turn their old downtown strip into a central shopping district and meeting place (including new eateries, streetlights and storefronts). Now, the town is getting some big national recognition, according to the Press-Telegram:
American City & County magazine has recognized Bellflower as one of the nation's top 10 standout cities for its extensive downtown revitalization. The trade publication's annual Crown Communities Award recognizes innovative local government projects. Bellflower was chosen for 2008 because of the city's redevelopment projects along Bellflower Boulevard, many of which were completed last year. Mayor Randy Bomgaars said the award is a sign of good things to come in a city short on financial revenue. "I think the sleeping giant is awakened and people are going to continue to be surprised at what we're doing," the mayor said. "Even in these tough economic times, we're moving forward and providing opportunities for new business and investment."
A small woman selling sizzling gorditas passed Ernesto de la Loza as he dabbed Liquid Shield on the cracked wall where his mural “Resurrection of the Green Planet” stretched out like a jeweled bird. Even with the aroma of fresh food wafting by, his gaze never left the injured surface.
For a quarter of a century, De la Loza, 59, has created murals in Los Angeles — 40 in all. But this one, which adorns a convenience store on the corner of Cesar E. Chavez Avenue and Breed Street in Boyle Heights, is among only eight that still exist. The others were painted over or simply ravaged by neglect.
Now “Resurrection” faces a similar fate. In November, the owner of the building received a notice from the city informing him that he had 90 days to remove the graffiti defacing the 1991 mural or face a $450 fine.
Full restoration would cost between $40,000 and $50,000, a sum that neither De la Loza nor owner Raymond Ahn could afford.
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