Just took a splendid little trip to Los Angeles - drove up yesterday evening, dropping my brother in law off at LAX on the way, to my dear friends R & A in Eagle Rock for dinner, staying over through a beautiful breakfast at seventies relic Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena. Then I met
Suzanna Guzman for coffee, and we got on like a house on fire (somehow, somewhere, something collaborative is going to happen!), before finally wending my way down Arroyo Secco and much of the impressive length of Wilshire Boulevard to meet my friend G, who's just moved from NYC to the City of Angels. We met at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a very pleasant complex of museums, from the 60s Worlds Fair-like Japanese Pavilion to the new building by Renzo Piano for the Broad Collection of contemporary art (which is the opposite of Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum: dully unremarkable as a building but facilitating wonderful exhibition spaces and an impressive collection, including a whole room of giant Cindy Shermans, Mark Tansey's "Forward Retreat," above, and a wonderful double-S by Richard Serra) to Hancock Park, where we heard a concert by Chucho Valdes. LACMA has a bit of everything - in their African collection I was made deliriously happy by El Anatsui's 2007 "Fading Scroll" (woven from recycled aluminum!), below.
LACMA is right next to the
La Brea Tar Pits, which I remember from childhood - tar pits into which hapless woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and the like slipped, drowned and eventually got perfectly fossilized. Sort of an odd neighbor for an art museum, or is it...?
Just took a splendid little trip to Los Angeles - drove up yesterday evening, dropping my brother in law off at LAX on the way, to my dear friends R & A in Eagle Rock for dinner, staying over through a beautiful breakfast at seventies relic Pie 'n Burger in Pasadena. Then I met Suzanna Guzman for coffee, and we got on like a house on fire (somehow, somewhere, something collaborative is going to happen!), before finally wending my way down Arroyo Secco and much of the impressive length of Wilshire Boulevard to meet my friend G, who's just moved from NYC to the City of Angels. We met at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is a very pleasant complex of museums, from the 60s Worlds Fair-like Japanese Pavilion to the new building by Renzo Piano for the Broad Collection of contemporary art (which is the opposite of Libeskind's addition to the Denver Art Museum: dully unremarkable as a building but facilitating wonderful exhibition spaces and an impressive collection, including a whole room of giant Cindy Shermans, Mark Tansey's "Forward Retreat," above, and a wonderful double-S by Richard Serra) to Hancock Park, where we heard a concert by Chucho Valdes. LACMA has a bit of everything - in their African collection I was made deliriously happy by El Anatsui's 2007 "Fading Scroll" (woven from recycled aluminum!), below.
LACMA is right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, which I remember from childhood - tar pits into which hapless woolly mammoths, sabertooth tigers and the like slipped, drowned and eventually got perfectly fossilized. Sort of an odd neighbor for an art museum, or is it...?
