Yung Jake

Although half of Los Angeles will decamp this weekend to the snowy hillsides of Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, not everyone is going for the movies. Starry-eyed attendees relish access to the suits, the skiing and the swag, but what about the art?

Shari Frilot has curated Sundance's experimental New Frontier films and exhibitions for the past seven years, and this year, rather than pushing anyone to see James Franco's film Interior. Leather Bar, (hint: it involves sexually explicit gay BDSM), Frilot is encouraging us to notice Yung Jake, whose work blurs the lines between memes, hip hop and video art.

"He's young, green and pretty hot," Frilot said. After all, not many visual artists would mention a dislike of rapper-turned-actor Ludacris and race-conscious silhouette artist Kara Walker in the same breath. I want to know more, to talk to Yung Jake himself, but he's back in New York for the holidays. He doesn't want to talk on the phone, and he doesn't want to Skype; he says it's too impersonal. He wants to talk over text.

Well, okay.

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In recent weeks, a baffling teaser ad that has been running in print and on the sides of Metro buses around town has been provoking "Wtf!?" bewilderment from readers of the Los Angeles Times and traffic-mired drivers alike.

In a variation recently spotted on the front page of the Sunday LAT's Art's & Book section, a boldface banner headline in a sky-blue box announces that "THIS IS HERE FOR A REASON. ARE YOU?"

At first glance, the slogan appears to be something devised by the ad agency J.P. Sartre & Associates on behalf of the Church of Scientology. Under closer examination, however, the fine print turns up clues such as a familiar soap bubble logo, the name "Freud" and a URL for the Broad Stage, a theater in Santa Monica, that together suggests the mystifying message has more to do with Thespis than Dianetics.

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Hammer Museum

Anthony Burrill's "Oil & Water Do Not Mix"

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

Graphic design isn't just about a poster with pretty colors. In today's world of visual media, it affects way we choose our clothes and what food we eat.

The Hammer brings out everything from modern gadgets (lots of Mac products) to old-school methods (markers!) in its new exhibit "Graphic Design: Now in Production," which presents graphic design and it's influence on various genres: posters, magazines, books, information design, branding, typography, storefronts and film and television titles.

The exhibit is organized by the Walker Art Center and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and features work dating back to 2000 that helps define exactly what graphic design means.

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Photo by Gregory Bojorquez

Justin Van Hoy

On Nov. 14, Los Angeles' art community lost Justin Van Hoy, 31, to a long bout with cancer. Van Hoy was an artist, designer, curator, a husband and most recently, published author. He was nicknamed the "Dutch Giant" because he towered over most people at a height of 6'5, punctuated by a shock of crazy ginger hair.

Justin loved art, basketball, good food and orange cats. He designed grafitti books for Roger Gastman, Swindle Magazine illustrations for Shepard Fairey, logos for RVCA, Vans and the Oinkster, answered the phone for Mark the Cobrasnake and even helped us out here at LA Weekly when we asked nice.

Most recently he co-founded THIS gallery in Highland Park, staging shows like the series of monumental group exhibits called "These Friends," which included hundreds of works of art that hung from floor to ceiling, and got himself the job curating the bathrooms at Gagosian in Beverly Hills (currently displaying installations by Sage Vaughn).

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Skirball Cultural Center

This year's election has the public voting for everyone from Roseanne Barr to Hello Kitty, with Mitt Romney's Binders of Women the projected costume-winner for Halloween.

While the 2012 presidential election is the biggest reason people are hitting the polls, we all know that local campaigns can be just as important, and here in Los Angeles, that means the ballot itself is a lot more interesting, compared to those in other parts of the country. Given the recent syphilis outbreak in the adult-entertainment industry, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is urging us to bring condoms back to porn by voting "yes" on Measure B. Meanwhile, local artists such as Mia Doi Todd, Frohawk Two Feathers and Om'Mas Keith are going out of their way to tell Californians to vote "yes" on Prop 37, which would place labels on genetically engineered foods.

With so much responsibility in our hands, it's easy to be overwhelmed, so why not exercise our right to take part in a little culture? From politically-themed theater and environmentally-minded art to exhibitions we can visit from the safety of the couch, here are 10 shows that get our vote.

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Tanja M. Laden

Left to right: April Greiman, Deborah Sussman, Judith Hendler, Marilyn Kay Austin, Gere Kavanaugh and Bill Stern

Among a healthy-sized group of reporters, photographers and other members of the press, five fashionable female artists turned up for the media preview of "California's Designing Women, 1896-1986" at the Autry National Center last Wednesday. Even though everyone had nametags, the lady designers didn't need any -- their artful accessories and youthful exuberance were enough to let us know they were there for their designs.

Marilyn Kay Austin, Gere Kavanaugh, Judith Hendler, Deborah Sussman and April Greiman are among the 46 artists whose work is featured in "California's Designing Women," curated by Bill Stern, executive director at the Museum of California Design. Dressed in a relaxed linen ecru suit with a desert-motif tie and butterscotch saddle shoes, Stern himself was the picture of elegance, making the rest of us long for the days when people made some kind of effort to look good before leaving the house. The group reminded us of the West Coast version of Advanced Style, a fashion blog focusing on the older generation.

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Illustrations by Paul Rogers

A series of drawings depicting The Darjeeling Limited

Paul Rogers is a Pasadena-based illustrator and graphic designer who has worked on everything from USPS stamp lines to posters for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He also has illustrated children's books such as Bob Dylan's Forever Young.

His new book, Name That Movie, features 100 sets of six drawings apiece. Each set depicts a different movie but isn't obvious about it -- depending on how big a fan you are, it might take some keen powers of observation to figure out what movie it is.

We have three different sets of drawings, each showing a different movie for you to guess. Answers are on the last page.

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Aaron Frank

Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood doesn't have the slightest objection to the term "commercial artist." Often considered the sixth member of the band Radiohead, the 44-year-old Essex native is responsible for all of the band's artwork since 1994 and has the commercial marketplace to thank, in part, for his success. "It's better than graphic designer," says Donwood, lounging in a leather chair at Subliminal Projects, which is scheduled to host the British artist's first exhibition in Los Angeles. Titled "Lost Angeles," the exhibition showcases Donwood's latest piece, an 18-foot-long panorama landscape of the city flooding and engulfed in flames.

Donwood began collaborating with Radiohead on their first hit record, The Bends, and has worked closely alongside the band ever since, authoring several books, holding gallery exhibitions and selling screenprints in between albums. Thumbing through stacks of vinyl as a teen, he was struck by the artwork of punk bands like the Dead Kennedys and Crass. "The record store was like the most democratic art gallery there was," Donwood explained. "There was all this artwork and it was all treated the same."

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California Arts Council

You've likely noticed this sun setting behind an iconic row of palms as it darted in front of you on the 405. But unless you've got one of these specialty plates screwed on your own Prius, it's unlikely you knew that it supports the state's art funding. "I had lived in California my whole life, and I am an artist, and I had seen it everywhere," says Malissa Feruzzi Shriver, chair of the California Arts Council. "I had no clue it was an arts plate."

The potential of that plate was on Shriver's mind when she joined the California Arts Council's board and began to understand the deplorable state of California's arts funding. In 2000 the California Arts Council's budget was $32.2 million; by 2009 it had dropped to $5.4 million. Federal and state monies had dried up, yet a small but steady stream of donations continued to trickle in due to drivers choosing the plate. "Two-thirds of our budget was coming from a license plate that no one knew about," she says. "We were skating by on the fact that some people liked the image and picked it for the palm trees."

A new campaign spearheaded by Shriver called "Create a State" hopes to raise awareness about the connection between the plate and the arts -- enough awareness to get 1 million California drivers to switch to the new plate. If a million people put this plate on their car instead of the standard-issue California plate, says Shriver, it would funnel more than $40 million into the state's arts education funds, put the California Arts Council back on track financially, and dramatically ease the arts funding crisis currently facing the state's public schools.

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Alissa Walker

Crazy Hook

At the center of the city, there is a 100-foot-long ocean liner dry-docked in a parking lot. It would seem out of place in many if not most L.A. neighborhoods. Except here. Landlocked Koreatown is bobbing with nautical-themed restaurants, and you can't walk the length of a plank without stumbling into a pirate reference. Which, on a recent Sunday night, arrrrrr-med with a sailor's tolerance and 10 mateys, was exactly what I aimed to do.

We focused on three ports of call within a one-mile radius: the H.M.S. Bounty, a gloriously divey institution anchored with tall ships; Crazy Hook, a zany, pirate-populated theme restaurant; and Café Jack, the giant ocean liner in the parking lot. There are others: a deli named Café Mermaid; R Bar, which is only abstractly boatlike (but has epic karaoke nights); beer den Hite Kwang-Jang, which has a big anchor and other ocean paraphernalia, plus a sign for Moby Dick beer; and, at Eighth and Western, a brand-new building that looks like a giant steamboat tugging the chicken joint Pollo a la Brasa in its wake. Why the porthole windows and coiled rope decor, 12 miles from the Pacific?

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