BLU at Tou Scene, Nuart 2010

In Stavanger, Norway, every September for the past 12 years, Nuart, one of the largest street art festivals in the world, transpires. Closeted in the beautiful Fijords, Stavanger is a quaint, oil-rich community with a high standard of living, sometimes making the list as most expensive in all of Europe. However, it is not easy to get to, rains 20 hours out of every day (at least in the fall) and has a zero tolerance law when it comes to tagging and graffiti. A perfect spot to host preeminent street art and its artists?

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Courtesy LACMA, © Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe

Robert Mapplethorpe's photo Jim, Sausalito (1977)

This week, flowers and fetish photos hang one on top of the other at LACMA, the Getty throws a party for an 80-year-old mural and an artist shadows a possibly imaginary former classmate.

5. Nine-year-long sci-fi opera
Kathleen Johnson's Brainchild, a performance in nine parts set to unfold over nine years (the first performance was last held in 2011), tells the story of a girl named Brainchild who happens upon the ruins of an ancient race. This race, it seems, knew about space travel eons before we did. Composer Gregory Lenczycki arranged the hypnotic soundtrack for Brainchild II, which premieres at Human Resources this weekend. Actress-dancer Dominique Cox plays the lead, and two performers with opera in their backgrounds, Bianca G. Marrero and Juliette Dwyer, make up the chorus. The show will stream live on kchungradio.org. 410 Cottage Home St.; Nov. 3, 8 p.m. (213) 290-4752, humanresourcesla.com.

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ART IN THE STREETS, THE GEFFEN CONTEMPORARY AT MOCA, PHOTOS BY GREGORY BOJORQUEZ, COURTESY OF MOCA

L.A.'s Mister Cartoon works on his exhibit at MOCA's landmark street art exhibit in 2011

This piece is part of our package on L.A.'s war on street art, including:
*Los Angeles' War on Street Artists
*The Secrets of L.A. Street Art: Bumblebee, Sharktoof and Linelinedot Discuss Their Work

More stories on street art from L.A. Weekly:
*Our cover story on MOCA's "Art in the Streets" exhibit
*Harry Gamboa on Asco, the Legendary L.A. Performance Group
*Photos of lowriders at a Mister Cartoon signing

Some were amused when Los Angeles filmmaker Jon Reiss' timely, 2007 documentary about the reignition of hipster interest in global street art, Bomb It, identified New York in the 1960s and '70s as the genre's ground zero.

Sure, the likes of Taki 183, Cornbread and, later, Futura 2000 helped pioneer and popularize street art via their subway tags and bulbous spray-can trips. All hail that, indeed.

But Mexican-American youths were glorifying their names and neighborhoods decades before that, in letters just as large and fantastic -- and they were doing it in Los Angeles.
It's no coincidence that L.A. is the art form's new capital. It was the old one, too. Here, Eastside street gangs dating at least to the 1930s, including White Fence and Maravilla, marked their turf with corresponding graffiti.

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Boris Kievsky

Janna Fisher, far left, shows off Christina Schlesinger's homage to Marc Chagall at Venice Beach.

Most Angelenos wouldn't associate Jews with spray paint and wheat-paste, but what about murals? Twenty years ago, before the city began a war on street art and pushed murals and graffiti underground, targeting artists with lawsuits and jail time, the city's diverse communities embraced a flourishing mural culture, often under the influence of current UCLA professor Judith Baca and her organization SPARC (Social Political Arts Resource Center).

As an undergrad at Colorado State, Janna Fisher became interested in the black and Chicano mural movements, which originated in 1970s Chicago, but when researching topics to focus on for her master's thesis, she was shocked and pleased to discover that Jews had created street art of their own.

"I was like, you're kidding me. No way!" she recalled. "You usually think of [murals] as from less privileged communities."

This past Sunday, Fisher, 26, clad in bold geometric red jewelry and a yellow tweed dress, shared her expertise with forty curious young Jews on the Los Angeles Jewish Murals Tour, an event organized by BINA, a Woodland Hills-based group that encourages intellectual engagement and community among Jewish and Israeli professionals aged 25-45.

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Tanja M. Laden

Wilshire Boulevard Temple

If you've ever cruised along Wilshire Boulevard between Western and Vermont, you've probably noticed a massive, domed structure at Hobart Avenue, kitty-corner to an indoor golf driving-range. That building is the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, aka the Best Jewish Reform Synagogue Built by Hollywood, according to our 2011 Best of L.A. issue.

You might have also noticed that, these days, the temple is covered in scaffolding -- signs the 1929 landmark is in the middle of a multimillion-dollar renovation. The large-scale extended project includes a cleaning and restoration of the Warner Murals, commissioned by none other than Jack, Harry and Albert Warner, otherwise known as the Warner Bros. The artist, Hugo Ballin, would have been a whopping 133 years old today, so what better time to revisit his work than the present?

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University of Washington Press

LA Xicano catalogue

The outdoor balcony on the north end of UCLA's Haines Hall was a fitting place for the informal pizza party last week concluding a series of Pacific Standard Time exhibitions loosely gathered under the "L.A. Xicano" heading. The campus building houses the Chicano Studies Research Center as well as the brain trust behind the curatorial vision that spawned what The New York Times lauded as one of the most engaging aspects of the behemoth L.A. art survey represented by the ambitious PST project.

For UCLA professor Chon Noriega and his team of art historians-cum-curators, PST represented an opportunity to de-shroud the historical record and posit the legacy of Mexican-American cultural and artistic production in this city as a viable, significant part of what makes L.A. an art capital.

Beginning last fall with "Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective,1972-1987," a LACMA show that offered the first major look at the '80s conceptual and performance art collective that called itself "nausea" in Spanish, L.A.'s oft-overlooked Chicano art legacy is finally being acknowledged. While not one of the five "L.A. Xicano" exhiitions, the Asco show was an officially sanctioned part of PST, and it handily anticipated what could best be described as a banner season for Chicano art, with about 80 artists exhibiting their work across L.A. in some of its most prestigious institutions.

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