Courtesy Honor Fraser, photo by Josh White/JWPictures

Alexis Smith's Strangelove (2004)

This week, music videos get higher-art treatment, quirky paintings hang in Koreatown and a straight-shooting L.A. artist has a debut show at her new gallery.

5. Finding artistry on MTV
"We believe music videos are the most universal, accessible and entertaining art form in the world," says the Los Angeles Music Video Festival's "about us" page. They've also been vehicles for the weirdest collaborations between visual artists, musicians and filmmakers -- think of Bjork's Mutual Core, a collaboration with digital artist and programmer John F. Simon, or David Lynch's images for Interpol. On Friday, LAMVF curators will show two hours' worth of music videos they deem new and edgy at the Armory Center for the Arts.145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Fri., June 21, 8 p.m. (626) 792-5101, armoryarts.org.

More »

Film by David Finster.

Still from The Florida Room by Asher Hartman.

See also:
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying
*10 L.A. Art Spaces That Change Our Idea of What an Art Space Is

This week, a man becomes a god in a play set in a midcentury landmark and an artist builds an adults-only dollhouse.

5. Sculpting the president
Sculptor Robert Merrell Gage announces, "We know what Lincoln looked like," early on in the 1955 documentary The Face of Lincoln, then proceeds to describe the different curves in the 16th president's face. As the film continues, Gage talks about Lincoln's life while sculpting a portrait of him. The film screens at the Fischer Museum at USC, where Gage taught when the film was made. 823 Exposition Blvd.; Sat., June 8, 1 p.m.; $15. (213) 740-4561, fisher.usc.edu.

More »

Photo by Fredrik Nilsen, Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery and Fredericks & Freiser

John Wesley's painting Untitled (Woman with Glasses) (2004)

This week, an artist turns two galleries and a storage unit into pseudo-sets for a remake of a Western, and 29 L.A. painters show in a former downtown bank.

5. Finally finished
"Little Ellie, what have I told you about self-expression? ... It goes nowhere," Stalin tells artist Eleanor Antin in Antin's new memoir, Conversations With Stalin. She has routine, imaginary encounters with the dictator throughout this book about growing up in New York, the child of Jewish communists. Antin began giving wry, colorful readings from the book a few years before she finished it. And why not? Refining and rehashing have been part of her art for decades (in the '70s, she aggressively dieted for 36 days to sculpt herself into an ideal figure, and in the '80s she periodically appeared in the guise of struggling African-American ballerina Eleanora Antinova). Now the book is finally done and she will read from it again at LACMA before signing copies. 5905 Wilshire Blvd.; Sun., June 2, 1 p.m.; free. (323) 857-6010, lacma.org.

More »

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.

More »

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.

More »

Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art

Dan Finsel's E-thay Inward-Yay Ourney-Jay

See also:
*Getty's Pacific Standard Time Series on L.A. Architecture: A Preview
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a panel of architects and a performance at a science fiction conference imagine a high-tech future L.A. and an artist uses Pig Latin to title the work in his half-biographical, half-fantastical show.

5. Home for a wayward shopping cart
The lot on Traction between Third and Fourth Street, in Little Tokyo, used to be a gas station. Recently, it has become a pop-up art spot for street artists. Right now, there's a reshaped shopping cart angling up off a concrete slab at the center of the triangle and an eagle at the top of a found-object totem pole along the outskirts. Traction Avenue, between Third and Fourth streets.

More »

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.

More »

YouTube/HarajukuMonae

A performance at Burn Club

See also:
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

The L.A. fire artist known as Tedward saw police lights flashing out of the corner of his eye just before filling his mouth with fuel. Police cruise Culver City Park after dark sometimes and flash their lights to make their presence known, so he didn't think much of it. But then he heard voices warning him not to move. He turned to see two cops with guns drawn — rookies whose superiors had neglected to tell them to expect fire on the park's basketball courts.

Tedward had a full mouth, fuel in one hand and a torch in the other. He couldn't speak, so he stood staring for a drawn-out moment. Bystanders tried to explain, but the cops didn't understand. So Tedward made an executive decision: He turned around and breathed out a rush of flames.

"Do it again!" one rookie exclaimed.

When Tedward tells this story, he's quick to point out it happened a long time ago and that it's not indicative of a strained relationship between Burn Club, the group he started in 2004 for fire practice, and Culver City law enforcement. They're on good terms, actually, and Tedward meets with L.A. fire marshals routinely.

More »

Courtesy Roberts & Tilton

A view of Noah Davis' Stacked Cubicles (2013)

This week, another painted portrait of Kate Middleton debuts, an aesthetic terroist talks about fashion and tea time happens ten days in a row in Chinatown.

5. Man and the machine
Llyn Foulkes, the rash, visceral artist who has a solo show at the Hammer Museum now, also plays what he calls The Machine. It's a multi-part instrument that surrounds him when he performs, sitting amidst bass drum, symbols, xylophone and other brass and rubber horns. Filmmakers Tamar Halpern and Christopher Quilty have been making a documentary about Foulkes called One Man Band, a name inspired by the artist's Machine. They'll screen it as a work-in-progress at the Hammer and answer questions afterward. 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Wstwd.; Thurs., March 21, 7:30 p.m. (310) 443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.

More »

Courtesy OCMA

Richard Jackson's Blue Room (2011)

This week, one artist makes paintings that smear and explode while another makes an ancient monument look lively and a third installs a Dutch living room in a storefront.

5. The better to hear you with
Elana Mann, who has spent the last few years thinking about how to make listening and hearing more active than passive, built three outdoor acoustic sculptures that look loosely like horns. They will be part of "Listening as (a) Movement," on view for the next two months at Sidestreet Projects, an art space run out of a bus that's typically parked in a vacant Pasadena lot. This week, composer Allison Johnson uses Mann's sculpture to perform Decay/Decode, an ensemble piece that also involves Morse code and sign language. It sounds strange and a little elusive, but it probably won't feel that way. Mann's good at making big ideas welcoming. 730 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena; Fri., March 8, 6-10 p.m. (323) 225-0911, sidestreet.org.

More »