‘Because You Suffer…’

Published on March 7, 2013

There was a moment that took place last week in this community that, if you didn’t witness it, you need to hear about it.

Who owns a horror?

By Susan Freudenheim
Published on November 22, 2011

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art right now, in the ground-level hall of the Art of the Americas building, right off the main courtyard, a life-sized, lifelike sculptural installation shows a black man being castrated by a group of five white men wearing cartoonish masks.

Meeting Tim Burton:  From My House to His Art Show

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on May 31, 2011

From our house to Burton Exhibit: Why the Museum of Modern Art’s curators wanted to meet my husband

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on May 31, 2011

When the curators from Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) came calling two years ago, my husband, Ron Magid, had prepared for them a veritable smorgasbord of art by the gothic filmmaker Tim Burton. Among the fare sprawled across our dining room table was a pointy-eared cowl from “Batman,” Jack Skellington storyboards from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and puppets from “The Corpse Bride,” whose ghoulishly charming heroine sprouts a maggot from her eye.

LACMA gets contemporary

By Tom Teicholz
Published on December 27, 2007

In February, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will unveil the first phase of its renovation and expansion, including the opening of a new building devoted to contemporary art -- the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (that's Broad as in Eli and Edythe Broad, our local Medicis) or, as the acronymists at LACMA have dubbed it, BCAM.

A Search for Intellectual L.A.

By Tom Teicholz
Published on December 4, 2003

It's a Friday night and an overflow crowd is jammed into the penthouse of the former May Co. store on Wilshire Boulevard -- now Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) West -- to hear a conversation between French journalist and philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy and The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik.

Presiding over this abundance of intelligence is Paul Holdengräber, the founder and director of LACMA's Institute for Art and Cultures (IAC). Holdengräber is erudite, worldly, self-deprecating and all the more charming for being so, equal parts Joel Grey in "Cabaret," and Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca."
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The Art of Giving

By Rob Eshman
Published on January 2, 2003

Call me short-sighted and atavistic, but I believe one of the most encouraging bits of news I heard last week was the decision by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to suspend its renovation.

The bad news is Los Angeles will have to wait indefinitely to have a splashier namesake art museum, a Getty-by-the-Tar Pits. The good news is the major donors, many of whom are Jewish, now might be swayed to move some of that museum money over into other communal needs.

Just over one year ago, the museum unveiled a bold plan to overhaul and expand the Wilshire Boulevard institution, according to an architectural design by Rem Koolhaas of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The renovation, which would have involved a downstairs plaza and redesigned upstairs galleries under a tent-like roof, was expected to cost upwards of $400 million.

L.A. Culture: Alive and Well

By Lori Schneide
Published on May 27, 1999

What is going on at the LA County Museum of Art? The museum's new Institute for Art and Cultures, which convenes painters, poets, artists and performers, writers and thinkers to "address critical issues in the visual arts and culture through rigorous and playful discussions, performances and debates," has landed in our midst and overnight become a central presence. The Institute also happens to be reminding the rest of us that LA Culture exits.

Image Playing

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on May 20, 1999

In Eleanor Antin's filmic art installation, "Vilna Nights," ghostly images flicker in the ruined courtyard of a Jewish ghetto. In one window, a woman burns a passel of love letters; in another, a tailor sobs while mending the clothing of murdered children; in a third, hungry children gape as a Chanukah feast materializes, then disappears.

Haunting Visages

By Naomi Pfefferman
Published on September 24, 1998

The show is the artist's first major West Coast exhibit in three decades.