Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
Through January 5th, 2025, Tuesday to Sunday: 1:00 AM–6:00 PM
Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90024
If you’ve never gotten a chance to visit The Ron Finley Project, the renowned “gangsta gardener's" Eden of potted plants engulfing an emptied swimming pool in the backyard of a house in South LA, the next best thing is his pop-up “gangsta garden” at the Hammer Museum (below).
It is part of Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice, some “100 works focused on climate change by a group of intergenerational contemporary artists, scientists, and activists, addressing anthropogenic disasters such as deforestation, ocean acidification, coral reef bleaching, water pollution, extraction, and atmospheric politics.” Representing life bursting forth in a human-made hardscape, Finley’s garden is perhaps the most optimistic work on show (along with Garnett Puett’s sculpture containing live honeybees!).
It also just happens to be located right in front of the Hammer gift store. Bennett Stein says this is "the Best Gift Shop in LA. Period. Because they have the coolest made-by-human-hands kitchenware, the coolest made-by-human-hands jewelry, journal notebooks, pens, pencils, and the coolest street art/street culture/music culture artifacts like vinyl records, music-related Tee-shirts, underground band stickers, music books, and guitar/keyboard effects boxes.”
Click here for details about the exhibition; and here for the store.
Ron Finley's installation at the Hammer Museum. Photo: Frances Anderton
Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design
Through January 5th, 2025, Wednesday–Sunday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM
Craft Contemporary, 5814 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Curators Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu have assembled a deeply researched exhibition of materials that offer hope for future construction processes that might not turbocharge our carbon output, but are in sync with the earth’s embattled resources.
The exhibition is organized around "five material acts," Animating, Disassembling, Feeding, Re-fusing, and Stitching. The curators explain that “these operate as thematic clusters illustrating key events in a material’s production, from the fusion of sedimentary grain such as sand with plastics, to the intentional dismantling of a stone column by the pulling of a single piece of string.”
Take, for example, the elegant Responsive Bimetal (below), by DOSU Studio Architecture, designed as a living, breathing alternative to electric-powered, heating and cooling mechanical systems. Doris Sung has created a"laminated bimetal" of different metal alloys, each with a "distinct coefficient of expansion," that curl as temperatures increase, and block solar heat gain. Watch carefully and you might see them flutter in response to temperature change.
While there, check out the ground floor gift store where, says hubby, you will find, “fairly cool street grade, rebellious artifacts, jewelry, scarfness, shawls, books, trinkets, tchotchkes, prismatic thingees, and probably the hippiest greeting cards/birthday cards/get well cards in the county.”
Click here for information.
DOSU Studio Architecture, Some of the Parts Make a Hole, 2024, installation. Photo: Frances Anderton
Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.)
Through February 23rd, 2025
Getty Research Institute Gallery, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Dr #1100, Los Angeles, CA 90049
The Getty, as the beneficent life-giver behind the PST ART series, provides funding for R&D to numerous institutions as well as marketing and other support. It also has several Art & Science Collide shows on its premises — some dealing with the early experiments with light and photography like Lumen: The Art & Science of Light, Abstracted Light: Experimental Photography, Sculpting with Light: Contemporary Artists and Holography. At the Getty Research Institute you can find E.A.T., or Experiments in Art and Technology.
This manageably scaled, handsomely installed exhibition explores the experimental happenings created by E.A.T., a group founded by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, along with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. The idea was to bridge the gap between avant-garde artists and engineers who were “pioneering the kinds of technologies that would define the information age: lasers, computers, electronic sound… encouraging innovation and new forms of creative expression.”
The gift store is inside the Getty's skylit entrance hall, and it shines, says connoisseur Bennett Stein, “when it has available cool loot that is thematically linked to specific exhibits: Blake, History of Light, Muybridge, History of Photography, etc.”
Click here for all the Getty PST ART shows.
Pepsi-Cola Pavilion exterior with Floats, 1970, photography by Harry Shunk (German, 1924-2006) and János Kender (Hungarian, 1938-2009). Getty Research Institute, 2014.R.20. Floats: © Robert Breer/Kate Flax/gb agency, Paris.
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A Veiled Gazelle – Intimations of the Infinite and Eternal
Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232
Open Thursday and Friday, 2:00–8:00 PM, Saturday and Sunday, Noon–6:00 PM
A Veiled Gazelle – Intimations of the Infinite and Eternal – Islamic Geometries of Medieval al-Andalus is a long name for a jewel of a show at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the cabinet of curiosities in a small storefront on Venice Boulevard in Culver City.
Founder David Wilson and his team have spent four years transforming a wing of the building into a delightful homage to the architecture of Al-Andalus (the Muslim kingdom in Southern Spain), with its decorative patterns and structures derived from complex geometries.
In addition, points out hubby, The Museum of Jurassic Technology has an "OUTSTANDING gift shop that caters to the occult and the underground. They have the best curated outre/forbidden and wondrously strange fiction (novels) offerings, and magic and spiritual ritual aids and accessories, pyramidal, ocular, otherworldly, transgressive. What a feast!"
Click here for timed entry tickets.
Build a Better Santa Monica!
Santa Monica History Museum
1350 7th Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401
Saturday, December 7th, 2:00–4:00 PM
Gotta problem with Santa Monica? If so, come bring your ideas and your friends and family to a free, hands-on interactive workshop at the Santa Monica History Museum, "that enables people of all ages to imagine and build their own small-scale Santa Monica of their dreams."
This will be led by the always inspirational urban planning facilitators James Rojas and John Kamp, of Place It! and Prairieform. It is in conjunction with the museum’s current exhibition, Un|Housed: A History of Housing in Santa Monica, and, unlike the slick, box-checking public outreach that sometimes accompanies development projects, Rojas and Kamp have a highly creative, hands-on and deeply felt approach to community engagement. I will introduce the workshop.
The museum, by the way, also has a gift shop, selling some serious history books, as well as beach-themed goods like early photos of Muscle Beach, and eco-versions of the bendy straw invented in Santa Monica.
Click here for details.
A section of Rojas and Kamp's model of 14 blocks of Santa Monica. Image courtesy Santa Monica History Museum
Psychic Salon
Thursday, December 5th, 6:00 PM–7:30 PM
Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Rd West Hollywood, CA 90069
Attendees at last week’s Architecture and Design Film Festival got to immerse themselves in the world of Rudolph (RM) Schindler and his wife Pauline, in Schindler Space Architect. This film by Valentina Galena draws from rich archival material to show how the Schindlers were at the heart of LA Modern architecture and an experimental lifestyle, amidst a fascinating circle of avantgarde designers, artists, and thinkers.
Pauline Schindler was drawn also to “theosophists, psychics, and believers in another ‘plane’ of knowledge,” say Renée Petropoulos and Krystyn Lambert, creators of an upcoming “Psychic Salon,” an evening organized “as a tribute to Pauline Schindler and her gatherings where questions are answered and dreams are divined.”
As for gifts, The MAK Center bookstore at the Schindler House boasts a fine collection of publications on Modernist and contemporary art and architecture.
Click here for details.
3D rendering of an "aerial screw," conceived by Leonardo da Vinci. Image courtesy 
