Over the last 100 years or so, Uptown Whittier has developed an atmosphere of refined California funk, and the occasion of art gallery/community center Casita del Pueblo's annual Día de los Muertos Art and Music Festival should further enhance the district's slightly offbeat tone. The... More >>

When Google took over the former Chiat/Day building on Main Street in Venice Beach (you know, the one with the giant Claes Oldenburg binoculars out front), locals figured that would be fine. A fairly progressive company (or at least one that wants to be seen that way), the tech giant attempted... More >>

You can be a pedestrian but you don't have to actually be pedestrian -- that's the moral of the Los Angeles Walks-presented Beverly Hills Architecture, Art and Alleys Walk. A 2-mile, all-ages triptych of architecture, public art and secret alleys in Beverly Hills led by renowned street-beater... More >>

If there is one secret to financial success that restaurateur Michael Chow and outgoing MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch probably would agree on, it's the power of quality eyewear. The bespectacled lightning rods have left quite a mark on the art scene. Mr. Chow (of the eponymous restaurant)... More >>

Just when you thought you'd figured out what art really is, Levitated Mass by Michael Heizer is where modern art and the Protestant work ethic weirdly intersect, which is to say that a 340-ton granite megalith painstakingly transported over two weeks from Riverside sits in a 456-foot-long slot,... More >>

When designer Halston partnered with JC Penney early in the 1980s, it was something of a first: a couture name making clothes for the masses. The ads for the match all said, "You're Looking Smarter Than Ever." One showed a lady in bold pink pantyhose, a matching pink dress and white hat... More >>

Ivan Morley's A True Tale paintings were painted onto cracked glass, then peeled off and affixed to aluminum, but it might not matter much whether you know this or not. You'll still get that sense of a shattered surface when you looked at them, and the twisty shapes and colors that vaguely... More >>

Some of the collaged-together paintings in Devon Troy Strother's show "Look at all my shit," on view at Richard Heller Gallery, have mouthfuls for titles. One of the longest belongs to the painting in which pitch-black figures with afros ride tangerine-colored cheetahs among multiple layers of... More >>

From the late 1950s through the '70s, John Mason made monuments that sometimes riffed on the prehistoric, like his 1957 ceramic Vertical Spear form. Or sometimes he made pop products seem prehistoric, like the 1959 ceramic Blue Wall, which looks like petrified blue jeans spread across a wall.... More >>

Susan Silas' found birds series involves, as the title suggests, finding birds on sidewalks, alleys or lots. They've already died by the time Silas takes them home to photograph over a period of time. Often she treats them like sacred specimens, placing them against a white backdrop and... More >>

Ghebaly Gallery, the space run by François Ghebaly, started out in Chinatown, moved into a muffler shop in Culver City in 2009 and now has an impressively big space by the Dames and Games nightclub downtown, adjacent to the space the young-and-growing Night Gallery opened in January.... More >>

From 1900 through the 1960s, Edward Steichen photographed gowns, buildings, artists, actresses and aircraft characters. Usually the images had an air of seriousness, even if they were melodramatic, like the one of sculptor Auguste Rodin staring at (and posed like) his iconic sculpture The... More >>

Late in the 1950s, when David Rockefeller decided Chase Manhattan Bank should have an art program, Sam Francis was one of the first painters the bank enlisted. The abstract expressionist, who had just started to establish himself, painted in primary colors. The shapes he rendered look like... More >>

John Knuth's mural, part of the Sixth Street Mural at the Standard program, shows red-orange smoke billowing out against a black background. It's the photograph of an emergency flare against a night sky, and, seen shooting up out of the desert, or on the side of a road, it probably would have... More >>

The word "power" often connotes bigness -- the tallest buildings, the strongest weapons, the deepest bank accounts. So the smallness of the emblems in "Shaping Power," the debut exhibition in LACMA's newly opened African Art galleries, is striking. The show consists largely of exquisitely... More >>

Has your baby ever uttered the phrase "Don't play games with me!" in the midst of a heated debate? Well, it's time to dump that sad sack and take a new date to IndieCade, the biggest independent game festival in the nation. Arcade games, virtual games, body immersion games, board games,... More >>

"Ragpicker," artist Steve Roden's new show at Susanne Vielmetter Projects, includes a fantastic suite of smallish drawings. They're in the second gallery, on the westernmost wall. Some are long, some square; they're all surreal and precious-feeling despite the fact that their shapes are... More >>

Junipero Serra, the Franciscan friar who founded the first missions in California and famously compelled Native Americans to convert through fervent chest-beating, has been exhumed multiple times since his 1784 death. Once in 1882, a friar distributed threads from Serra's dug-up burial stole.... More >>