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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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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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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Courtesy Overduin and Kite

Will Benedict, 1 800 Bad Drug (2013)

See also:
*Asshole Festival 2013: Artists Yell at the Assholes of Los Angeles From a Street Corner in Chinatown
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a designer explains happiness in West Hollywood, a fact-blurring foreign correspondent's office opens in Highland Park and a single tear rolls down one cheek in Culver City.

5. High-tech domesticity
T. Kelly Mason's Typology of Glasses shows a line of casual-looking glassware painted against a baby blue background. The painting is inside a light box, backlit by gels and covered with glass. Above that glass, Mason has outlined his glassware in marker, so that the drawing begins to seem almost dimensional. This mix of high-tech and low recurs throughout his current show at Cherry and Martin gallery, and makes idiosyncratic domestic scenes flashy in a funny way. 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through April 27. (310) 559-0100, cherryandmartin.com.

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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.

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Neyda Paredes

La Ribot's Laughing Hole performed in 2007

See also:
*L.A. Art History Lessons on Twitter, in Emoji Form
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, an array of icons -- cowboys, the president, an unforgettable AIDS activist -- appear in art on view and three performers laugh all afternoon at LACMA.

5. Art detective
Victoria Reed is curator for provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which means she tracks down the origins of suspicious artworks. She has investigated lost, smuggled or looted masterpieces; brushed art for Nazi fingerprints; and recently returned art stolen half a century or more ago to a family in Poland and a museum in Trento in Italy. She'll talk about her work at the Getty. 1200 Getty Center Drive; Thurs., Feb. 28, 7 p.m.; free, reservations recommended. (310) 440-7300, getty.edu.

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Courtesy Young Projects

Still from Ulu Braun's The Park (2011)

See also:
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a new gallery debuts on Melrose, a film by and about a lover of life screens in West Adams and a light show plays out in a corner in Culver City.

5. Mind games
When artist James Turrell rented out Ocean Park's old Mendota Hotel in 1966, he famously turned the rooms into perfect, white boxes with no outside light sources. Then he started experimenting, projecting different colored lights and trying to change the way the space felt. Some of his experiments resulted in his Cross-Corner Projection series, where he would project two planes of light into a corner in such a way that it would look like there was a solid shape in the room with you, or it would look like there was an opening you could fall into. The effect would change as you moved around. Sometimes, the light seemed to be inside the room and sometimes it seemed to be shining in from some mysterious portal to the outside. One early Cross-Corner Projection, a pinkish-orange one shaped like tetrahedron, is on view now at Nye+Brown in Culver City. 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through Feb. 23. (310) 559-5215, nyeplusbrown.com.

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Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Carol Bove's The Foamy Saliva of a Horse (2011)

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

This week, a Eurasian collective tells uncanny histories, artists take on maintenance work and a sculptor builds an uncomfortably large minimalist tableau.

5. Keeping the old
When Tom Gilmore moved to L.A. from New York in the late '80s and asked people where to hang out, no one suggested downtown; some didn't even know where downtown was. He ventured downtown anyway, and found architecture that excited him. Gilmore, who now runs the development firm Gilmore & Associates, helped get the Adaptive Reuse Ordinance passed in 1999, allowing builders who wanted to "reuse" historic buildings to bypass certain prohibitive codes. Then he started renovating the Old Bank District. But property costs have risen since then, and building from scratch has again started to seem easier than reviving the old. Gilmore speaks about his work and vision for L.A. at SCI-Arc. 960 E. Third St., dwntwn.; Wed., Feb. 13, 7 p.m. (213) 613-2200, sci-arc.edu.

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Courtesy of the artists and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles

Eben Goff + Rowan Wood, Burn (2012)

This week, an artist stages a tiny exhibition at Central Library and a century-old Rodin sculpture plays a part in an afternoon-long performance.

5. J.J. Abrams inspires an art book
The Lost Issue , the catalog for the "Lost (in L.A.)" exhibition at Barnsdall Park, a show of work by French and Angeleno artists loosely named after the hit TV show Lost, has a disclaimer at the beginning: "This is not a catalog in the way you expect." It includes a partly fictionalized conversation between filmmaker Michel Gondry and artist Alexandre Singh, in which Picasso and Stanley Kubrick make appearances, and reading it feels like reading a screenplay, with notes and illustrations inserted. Lauren Mackler, who runs the alt art space Public Fiction and put together The Lost Issue, will guide anyone curious through the catalog and its making process this week, and talk about artist-made publications in general. 800 Hollywood Blvd.; Fri., Jan. 18, 7 p.m. (323) 644-6269, lostinla.com.

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Ghebaly Gallery

Andra Ursuta, Natural Born Artist, 2012

This week, a gorilla guards an oversized balloon sculpture, LACMA screens work by a pioneer in animation, and the swing set takes on new, psychological dimensions.

5. Power to destroy
Sculptor Sterling Ruby's ceramic basins look like miniature wastelands, full of destroyed, melted artifacts and burned body parts. His tall, stalagmite sculptures often are blood-red and messy, with drips of resin rolling down their sides. This work, and the fact that he's thought a lot about what it means to equate destruction with freedom and to live in America during our weird 21st-century wars, makes him the perfect candidate to pull MOCA's current "Destroy the Picture" exhibition of post-WWII art into the present. Ruby likely will do just that when he speaks at MOCA this week. 250 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn.; Thurs., Sept. 13, 7 p.m.; free. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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