Courtesy Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND)

One of Liz Craft's "hairy guys" in West Hollywood Park

This week, two artists dance with hula-hoops, another uses graffiti to obscure paintings of high-heeled, made-up models and a third installs hairy bronze statues in WeHo.

5. Just say no
In 1962, Judson Dance Theater started at the Judson Church in Greenwich Village. Programming was informal; writers and artists contributed as much as dancers and choreographers did. Trisha Brown worked at Judson, as did Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, who developed her No Manifesto there. ("No to spectacle. No to virtuosity," it started, then continued to list all the tropes of performance Rainer wished to reject.) Rainer and Forti will be at the Hammer this weekend, along with a number of other artists, dancers, theorists and historians, talking about where the dance world and art world meet. 10899 Wilshire Blvd.; Fri., April 26, 5-9 p.m.; Sat., April 27, 10-2 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

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Nanette Gonzales

Lisa Adams and her eclipse at CB1

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*Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Is This 500-Year-Old African Sculpture Worth $1 Million?

For three days last summer, as the August heat rose across Los Angeles, Lisa Adams saw nothing in her right eye but black. What she felt was pain: her swollen forehead, pressed down on the edge of the desk in front of her, her bones sore from the weight of her head — her neck and back muscles wrecked from the weird position.

But even as she grew more disoriented from sleep deprivation, she would not forget what her doctor had told her: "Keep your head down," he had said, "parallel to the ground." And so she'd do it, even as she'd trudge to the bathroom, wading through Vicodin.

Eating meant a plate was put on a box below her, at the height of her knees, and she would lower a fork to it, then bring it up, concentrating more on not moving her head than on the taste. The food was tangential — a way of keeping her eye alive.

It was her eyes that had always kept her alive. Lisa Adams is a painter.

The pain was at its worst in her right one. The one that had been cut open for surgery. The one in which a surgeon had reattached her retina. What had happened was this: It had torn in the months after a simple cataract surgery and detached from the base of her eye.

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Courtesy the artist

A still from Kelly Sears's film Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise (2011)

This week, haunting films about cold-war America play for 15 hours straight on Alvarado and an artist sells cellphone holders that make your phone as unwieldy as one from landline days.

5. Holes in the walls
Urs Fischer, the Swiss artist who stuck a fake tongue out of a hole in the New Museum's wall five years ago, does iconoclastic things in an almost-too-smooth way. He will cut into the Geffen Contemporary's walls for his new show at MOCA and display rough clay sculptures made onsite with the help of about 1,000 local volunteers. The show's opening day will be a multipart affair. Curator Jessica Morgan will speak about working with Fischer, KCHUNG radio will broadcast live and artist Morrisa Maltz, a kind of smooth iconoclast herself, will invite people to have "Mofone Emotional Moments." She'll let them call family or friends using her "Mofones," smartphone holders that look like old-school rotary phone handsets, seashells or tree trunks. 152 N. Central Ave.; Sunday, April 21, noon-5 p.m. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Photo: Liz Ohanesian All art: ©2013 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

"Arhat" by Takashi Murakami opens at Blum & Poe

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*Takashi Murakami Premiered His Very Weird First Feature Film at LACMA Last Night
*Shibuya Girls Pop: Cute Rebellion

Takashi Murakami is no stranger to Los Angeles. Just last week, his first feature film, Jellyfish Eyes, premiered at LACMA. Back in 2008, the traveling show "© Murakami" landed at MOCA -- the largest and most-hyped of his numerous shows in L.A.

He's certainly a familiar figure at Blum & Poe. Saturday night saw the opening of "Arhat," the famed Japanese artist's sixth solo show at the Culver City gallery.

As recognizable as Murakami is, there is still a sense of mystery evident when entering the show. Part of that is by design. Once you walk inside Blum & Poe, you have to head down a stark white corridor that seems longer than it might actually be. It can be a lonely trek. On Saturday night, I thought I had wandered into the wrong building. The walls were empty, the hallway was largely free of people. All that changed when I hit the first of four rooms that housed the collection.

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Making ideals reality can take a frustratingly long time, especially for organizations in need of funding. Grant-writing and paperwork often come first, followed by waiting. That's part of what's exciting about My LA2050, the $1 million challenge that the Goldhirsh Foundation, a philanthropic outfit with a young, energetic vibe, launched last month. It's fast.

Organizations had until March 28 to submit their "dream of the most innovative...ways to tackle" L.A. problems. These dreams, which had to be feasible, could belong to one of eight "indicators": arts & cultural vitality, education, environmental quality, health, housing, income & employment, public safety and social connectedness.

By April 2, all of the legit proposals were live on the My LA2050 website and public voting continues through noon on Wed., April 17. The organization with the most votes in each indicator will receive $100,000, all of which must be spent by December of this year. The foundation will also choose two additional projects to grant $100,000. The money comes from the Goldhirsh's endowment and the idea for the challenge resulted from the LA2050 report the foundation commissioned last year, which found, among other things, that L.A. had more arts organizations per capita than other major cities, but less funding.

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Courtesy Night Gallery

"Made in Space" at Night Gallery

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, the painter who pushed for a "superflat" aesthetic brings his formerly 2-D monsters to the big screen, three artists clean an alt space from floor to ceiling, and a group show makes Night Gallery's big new space feel maze-like in a good way.

5. Mr. Clean as a conceptualist
Starting the morning of April 5, Human Resources, the vintage Chinatown theater-turned-art space, will be cleaned. The designated cleaners, who will use designated cleaning supplies (the press release mentions Mr. Clean), include Hailey Loman, whose wearable sculpture includes a blanket with a plastic sleeping compartment in the middle of it. Sleeping "wearers" of this sculpture look shrink-wrapped, safe in a sterile way. Cleaners also include Gaea Woods, who photographs objects of beauty, and Lucy Campana, who appeared in Opening Ceremony's ethereally clean "Spa Heaven" videos. Cleaning has been an art act before, but often to bring attention to labor hierarchies or gender roles. This time, the primary subject is the elusiveness of being perfectly clean. You can come to watch or help. 410 Cottage Home St.; Sat., April 5-7, starting 11 a.m.; free. (213) 290-4752; humanresourcesla.com.

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Eva Recinos

Diane Arbus' photo of a couple in the park

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*Catherine Opie Discusses Her Three L.A. Art Exhibits
*Five Artsy Things to Do in L.A. this week, Including '90s Flashbacks
*A Set of Andy Warhol's Polaroids, Revealed for the First Time

New York-born photographer Diane Arbus did not foresee the fame she would garner after her signature style cemented her as one of the most important figures in American photography.

In fact, most reports describe the photographer as shying away from fame. She preferred shooting photographs by herself, lugging multiple cameras and equipment around the city. Not one to draw boundaries, she possessed a knack for gaining her subjects' trust and taking intimate photos of them in their homes. She even stripped down to take photos at nudist camps and beaches.

This attitude gave her portraits a genuine quality that is still relevant today. Decades after she began photographing, her work keeps her name well-known. On Thursday, Fahey/Klein Gallery here in L.A. launched an exhibit of a few of her pieces never seen by the public. The rare photographs can from two private collectors, some signed by Arbus' daughter Doon.

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Courtesy of LACMA

View into the second gallery of "Ends and Exits"

This week, it's all about looking back: One artist revisits 1993 L.A., another borrows the palette of teen pop from 20-some years ago and a museum show features graphically bold, grittily political art of the '80s.

5. What art even is
When the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston changed its name from Institute of Modern Art in 1948, controversy erupted. One publication said the name change signaled the institute's rejection of the "cult of bewilderment" that abstract modernism represented. A group of artists, the iconic Jackson Pollock among them, went to New York to protest the institute soon after. Art historian Richard Meyer tells this story and others about the birth of "contemporary art," a designation no less bewildering than "modern art" ever was, in his new book What Was Contemporary Art? He'll talk about the book and that question with MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch in the museum's Ahmanson Auditorium. 250 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Sat., March 30, 3 p.m.; free. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Liz Ohanesian

Orleans by Van Arno

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*Bulbous Noses and Painted Grins: Clowns! at Corey Helford Gallery
*Eric Joyner's Vintage Robots Travel to Thailand in Paintings at Corey Helford
*Natalia Fabia Looks Towards Lolita Fashion and Domo in 'Fashionable Aftertaste Without End"

Since 2006, Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City has been at the center of worldwide pop surrealist explosion. Shag has shown here. So have Paul Frank and Tokidoki. Locals like Natalia Fabia and Luke Chueh made their mark, in part, thanks to their solo exhibitions at the gallery. On Saturday night, those artists and over 50 more graced the walls of Corey Helford and neighboring CHG Circa for the group show "Art Collector Starter Kit."

Some of the artists included in the show have been working with Corey Helford since the beginning. Others were more recent discoveries by co-founder Jan Corey Helford. The only thing most of the pieces had in common was size. With few exceptions, the contributions to "Art Collector Starter Kit" were a uniform 12" x 12". That's petite for this crop of artists, but the small pieces served a purpose. Gallery co-owner Bruce Helford explained that this was a chance to offer work from some of their hottest artists at a lower price point. "New collectors and people on a limited budget can begin their collection with an original," he explains.

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Carol Cheh

Olga Koumoundouros' "Possessed by Glint and Dreams," now on view at Susanne Vielmetter Projects.

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
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Back in October, we told you about artist Olga Koumoundouros' A Notorious Possession project, in which she took over a foreclosed home across the street from where she lived and filled it with art that paid tribute to its former residents and meditated on the changing nature of home ownership. The intervention, which touched a populist nerve, went viral. The abandoned house instantly became a hub for art, performance and community organizing around the housing crisis. Although excitement was building, however, everyone involved knew that the project's future was uncertain, given that the artist had no legal ties to the property, whose status was unknown at that time.

Two weeks ago, Koumoundouros opened a new solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in Culver City. Titled "Possessed by Glint and Dreams," the show is composed of the artwork that Koumoundouros made in and around the foreclosed home in Glassell Park, along with some new additions and embellishments.

The show loosely recreates the site and continues the narratives that the artist found there. It also represents the culmination of this particular project, which did not come without a bit of a struggle.

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