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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>

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 >>