Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Trust

Stahl House (Case Study House #22), Hollywood Hills, Julius Shulman, 1960.

Jewish history in turn-of-the-century America usually conjures up images of deeply religious East Coast garment district workers or greased-back, penny-pinching Old Hollywood studio moguls.

The Autry National Center attempts to break down this second stereotype with its latest exhibit, "Jews in the Los Angeles Mosaic."

"This was not primarily, in certain respects, an immigrant community," says W. Richard West, Jr., president and CEO of the Autry National Center. "It was a settlement community who came from elsewhere ready to roll once they hit the city. And they did. What this exhibit is about is ... an effort to figure out how those who comprise the Jewish community here in Los Angeles touched other communities and touched the great diversity of other communities here in Los Angeles."

The exhibit wouldn't be accurate without the inevitable tributes to Hollywood and includes mementos like Billy Wilder's Oscars and a "Scroll of Fame" with signatures of guests who came to the 1935 grand opening of Max Factor's cosmetic studio (Judy Garland and "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd among them). But it also highlights less-glorified or forgotten Jewish people and families who influenced the city, such as:

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MAK Center

Curator Sylvia Lavin introduces her exhibition to a packed Schindler House

This is the third installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, tracking modern architecture happenings all over the city. Check out our previous entries:
*The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture
*SCI-Arc's Gala and a Concert at Jackie Treehorn's House

High temperatures might be bad for art, but they're great for museums. The past week's blistering heat wave drove many an Angeleno into the air-conditioned respite of their local cultural institution -- I spotted Getty curator Christopher Alexander leading a particularly large tour through "Overdrive" on a steamy Saturday. Even when it's not serving as an escape from the heat, the show is an excellent destination, and a few hours wandering the exhibition filled me with a renewed sense of civic pride. In fact, I had a hard time seeing the "thoroughgoing urban mess" as described by one bitter East Coast reviewer in his description of the show (or maybe L.A. in general?) last week.

On another night, it was the promise of warm spring air -- and not a lick of air conditioning -- that packed the Schindler House for the MAK Center's "Everything Loose Will Land" opening. The al fresco vibe extended to the art: Sylvia Lavin -- in a snappy molecular-looking statement necklace -- admitted that she rather enjoyed curating an exhibition outside of a traditional museum, even though mounting a show in the drafty duplex is "pretty much like installing an exhibition outdoors."

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Courtesy Michael Benevento

A still from Wu Tsang and Alexandro Segade's Mishima in Mexico (2012)

This week, an artist makes deadpan jokes in vintage photographs, whistlers convene in Glendale and a Japanese novelist's tragedy of frustrated love is re-staged in Mexico.

5. Crowd of copycats
It's not yet certain how many people will participate in artist Sara Roberts' Clump and Whistle, a group performance at Glendale's Civic Center, but it shouldn't be more than 100, the number Roberts chose as her cut-off point. Clump and Whistle will work in the way the wave works at a football game, only with whistles. One person blows out a quick tune on one of the multitone whistles Roberts has provided, then the person next to him or her mimics the tune and so on until this tune has spread -- like a wave -- through the crowd. Two rehearsals precede this weekend's event, which means the effect will be at least slightly honed. Glendale Civic Center Plaza, Broadway and Glendale Boulevard; Sun., May 19, 1 p.m.; RSVP requested. machineproject.org.

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Kevin Scanlon

Rita Gonzalez

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Five months after a 340-ton rock officially became part of Michael Heizer's massive Levitated Mass sculpture on the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curator Rita Gonzalez installed the much smaller Lost Line sculpture on the third floor of the museum's Broad Contemporary building.

Made by artist Gabriel Orozco out of string and Plasticine, a claylike material that never completely dries, the sculpture was a gray, small, imperfectly shaped ball set in a corner, an antidote to Heizer's boulder. Gonzalez also titled the exhibition it appeared in "Lost Line" and installed other artworks from LACMA's collection that made similarly modest gestures. In Analia Saban's painting Erosion, the canvas looks like it's delicately decaying. In Amalia Pica's photocopied self-portrait, the artist looks out at a landscape much bigger than herself.

"We were thinking, what's the opposite of monumentalism?" says Gonzalez, the only curator in LACMA's contemporary art department who worked at the museum prior to the 2006 appointment of game-changing director Michael Govan.

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
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Copyright Nan Goldin, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Nan Goldin's paired photographs, called Chimera (2013)

This week, an alien-inspired concert/party happens at an iconic bowling alley, and two artists make intricate renderings of mystery plants.

5. The art star with the bloody head
In Happy Song for You, the short film made by artists Stanya Kahn and Llyn Foulkes in 2011, Foulkes appears with blood dripping down his face and a bandage over his eyes, like the gory figures in the paintings he made in the 1970s and '80s. The camera also lingers over craggy rocks, dirt and funny toys, all things that might appear in a Foulkes artwork. This will screen along with other films, such as a 1959 short starring Foulkes as a deranged, eccentric artist, when the Hammer continues its months-long series of Foulkes programming with a "Starring Llyn" night. 10899 Wilshire Blvd.; Tues., May 14, 7:30 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

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Photo by Robert Wedemeyer, courtesy of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Shana Lutker's sculpture A very tiny evening (2013) at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

This week, an Yves Saint Laurent suit hangs in an elementary school, Marilyn Monroe sings in a Century City bathroom, and a group of writers revises a 1980s tome on looking your best.

5. OK, kids, get ready for fancy dresses!
Artist Shinique Smith traveled from New York to Los Angeles a few times this winter and spring to meet with students at Charles White Elementary School, to talk to them about her work and to invite them to help her make one of her hanging sculptures: fabrics mashed together, then suspended to look like unwieldy creatures. LACMA's education department spearheaded this effort, called "Firsthand," and the best thing about it is that work Smith picked out from LACMA's collection -- a bold, red and pink women's suit by Yves Saint Laurent, a ruffle-top evening dress by Bill Blass -- has been on view at the elementary school's gallery along with collages by students there since February. 2401 Wilshire Blvd.; through July 19. (213) 487-9172, lacma.org.

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Yesssss! MOCA Gala 2013, David X Prutting/BFAnyc.com

Wolfgang Puck, Eli Broad and Antonio Villaraigosa party down

Right now, Swiss artist Urs Fischer's Skinny Afternoon, a life-size sculpture of a skeleton bending over to get close to a mirror, is installed in the courtyard above MOCA's Grand Avenue building. The mirror, permanently fogged where the skeleton's mouth nearly touches it, is attached to a dresser with ill-fitted drawers half falling out. All of this sits on top of an awkwardly shaped patch of sod. People who chose to stand near that sod Saturday night, during the early stages of MOCA's 2013 Gala, a semi-annual fundraiser where guest and sponsors pay for tables, had an ideal view.

They could lean over the railing that separates the courtyard from the two-story drop down to the museum's entrance and see cars arriving-the far right lane of Grand Avenue had been closed to better accommodate valeting. They could see guests going to the check-in table to receive an itinerary for the evening from a group of staff members wearing lab coats and Einstein-inspired mad scientist wigs.

They could also see guests such as model Stephanie Seymour and actress Ellen Pompeo being ushered either past the red carpet toward the museum entrance or across the red carpet, in front of a line of lights and cameras. Then they could see who lingered for cocktails outside the main doors and who went right into Urs Fischer's show. Since most lingered, those who went directly in had a near-private viewing for a while.

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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 by Stefanie Keenan

LACMA Director Michael Govan and members of the Collectors Committee look at Mother and Child Figure, a sculpture from Mali that's around 500 years old

See also:
*LACMA Collectors Committee's Battle Royale
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

The Resnick Pavilion, the newest building and the only single-story one on the Los Angeles County Museum's campus, was closed to the public this weekend. But if you looked in the window, you would have seen 30 gray monuments, some thigh-high, some as tall as two people, all roughly obelisk-shaped like the Washington monument. They were arranged in straight lines and striking. People kept trying to go in, even though a sign outside the Resnick told them they couldn't.

Artist Sam Durant made these gray obelisks as part of his 2005 project, Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington D.C., basing his shapes on those of actual monuments scattered across the U.S., marking spots where Native Americans and white settlers died as the result of bloody battles and massacres from the time of colonization onward. Durant proposes moving these to the National Mall, and has built a balsa wood model showing what that might look like.

The reason you couldn't walk in and around Durant's monuments was that LACMA did not own them yet. The Collectors Committee, a group of 77 dues-paying members, had not yet decided whether they would foot the bill.

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Purchased with funds provided by the Contemporary Art Acquisitions Fund and the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art Deaccession Fund

Raúl Lozza, Untitled, 1953, relief and paint on wood

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week

Born in Mexico City, Ilona Katzew came to L.A. 13 years ago to assume a role at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as an associate curator of Latin American art. At the time, Latin American art was a component of a larger museum department that also included Modern and Contemporary Art.

While training at New York University's Fine Arts Institute, she bolstered her academic pursuits with curatorial work that focused on a broad swath of art history, and Latin American art history in particular. According to her, Pre-colombian societies and their highly developed art forms did not end with the Spanish conquest. The general notion that Aztec and Inca civilizations were dead or over didn't really reflect the truth, she says. An exhibition entitled "New World Orders: Casta Painting and Colonial Latin America," which she curated at the Americas Art Society Gallery in 1996 got her noticed by the New York Times. Her book on the subject of "casta" or "race heirarchy" paintings was later published by the University of Texas.

In her rather well-informed opinion--as a native of one of this hemisphere's preeminent pre-Colombian capitols and as a widely published art historian -- the onset of a Spanish preeminence precipitated a process of negotiation, accommodation and subtle, subversive resistance. The older cultures blended with the new both physically and in the art that was produced, while adopting and adapting the techniques and forms imposed by European standards.

L.A.'s formidable status as a nexus for Chicano art is simply one manifestation, she says, of that still on-going blurring of identity and a process that is part of a living, breathing culture that surrounds us. Religious art and religious iconography are further examples of this artistic marriage. It is no secret that many Catholic icons have origins in Pre-Colombian symbols, beginning with the Virgen of Guadalupe.

A significant part of her work, now as curator and co-department head of LACMA's Latin American Art department, a department established formally in 2006, has been to "tease out" those underlying connections across the ages with exhibitions and acquisitions. This month, LACMA celebrates the soft opening, or "re-installation" of its Latin American art galleries as a way to quietly introduce Angelinos to a vision that has, at its root, a dynamic understanding of the city's demographic shift.

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