There was always something remotely hip-hop about Sesame Street. Elmo, Big Bird, the Count, Oscar the Grouch -- especially Oscar the Grouch -- looked like they'd really seen some shit in their eternal youth. They swaggered through life lessons with a knowing limp, putting some soul into the ABCs of every square kid everywhere.

Which makes their new partnership with L.A.'s biggest and bestest graffiti collective, the Seventh Letter Crew -- with Neff Headwear on the bill, too, for some sweet Grouch beanies -- an easy transition. An exhibit of Seventh Letter artists' interpretations of the famed kids show ran for two nights only this past weekend at Known Gallery.

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Shannon Cottrell

Zes

Zes, aka Zeser, aka Zes AWR/MSK, is a Los Angeles graffiti artist with a feral stare that you might only notice in serial killers or creative geniuses. He has been one of L.A.'s most prolific taggers for many years. If you look up every now and again, you may have noticed his burners in back alleys or on the ledges of buildings in Echo Park, but until very recently, you wouldn't see his work in a gallery. And, if he had had his way, you weren't going to.

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Morgan's Last Supper, a work by Ron English

Morgan Spurlock is best known for his documentary Super Size Me, but is also a prolific creator of other works, such as his reality TV show A Day in the Life. When I spoke to him on a recent Friday morning, Spurlock was wrapping up a busy week of press junkets for his new documentary Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope, about the famed San Diego fan fest, before he jumps into Tribeca Film Fest mode with a new project named Mansome. But movies and TV are not really what this phone call is about.

Spurlock is happy and excited and talking a mile a minute about art, as he is now adding "curator" to his list of professional interests. Opening Saturday, April 28, at Thinkspace gallery, the show "New Blood" reflects Spurlock's passion for art and collecting. Spurlock jumped at the chance to curate his own show when offered by Thinkspace's Andrew Hosner, and "New Blood" revolves around work from established art stars like Camille Rose Garcia, Shepard Fairey, the Date Farmers, Saber, Elizabeth McGrath and their hand-picked protégés that the artists themselves have chosen as ones to watch.

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Diego, 10, plays the piano near LACMA

On a sunny but breezy Saturday, 10-year-old Diego Grijalva of Gabriella Charter School in Echo Park found himself at 5900 Wilshire Blvd., seated at a piano designed by local artist Evan Skrederstu. Diego, who has played on his school's piano, was intrigued by the street piano and was playing a simple tune.

The piano, strategically placed adjacent to a line of food trucks across from LACMA is one of about 30 currently ensconced all over Los Angeles as part of the international public art installation "Play Me, I'm Yours."

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Aerial produced by Interconnected.is in collaboration with Air Evidence, GOOD, Spectral Q.

Volunteers made this formation on the event space's rooftop to kick off the day.

[Note: The previous headline in this story said that the event raised cash for Occupy L.A. It actually raised cash for activist Van Jones' nonprofit organization Rebuild the Dream]

It rained just a little bit last Saturday afternoon, but that didn't stop several hundred people from showing up at the ACE Museum on Fourth and La Brea for All in for the 99%, a mammoth art show, with readings, video, music, activism workshops and calls to action on behalf of the Occupy movement, set to re-emerge with the return of springtime and the onset of election season in earnest.

The show featured nearly 100 painters, sculptors, photographers, printmakers, neon artists, performance artists and installation artists involved -- with names as big as Retna, Shepard Fairey, Skullphone, the Clayton Brothers and Jill Greenberg hanging right alongside the work of unknowns and newcomers.

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Courtesy of the artists and Prism

Os Gêmeos: The Artist

The concrete swaths of Sunset and Wilshire don't readily conjure images of abundant nature, lush dreamscapes and feminist activism. Yet these boulevards certainly have seen their share of otherworldly goings-on, and this month they prove to be fertile ground for two ambitious exhibitions -- Os Gêmeos' "Miss You," at Prism Gallery, and "In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States," at LACMA -- that wind their way luxuriously through the anything-goes terrain of surrealism.

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Shannon Cottrell

It's a bright crisp day on the Sunset strip and LA Weekly's at Prism Gallery waiting for our turn to meet Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, Brazilian brothers who are known in the contemporary art and graffiti worlds simply as "the twins," or "Os Gêmeos" in Portuguese.

The brothers are here in L.A. for their sparkling, surrealist "Miss You" solo show, their first here since 2003, when they staged a tiny yet groundbreaking exhibit in a 300 square foot space -- the original New Image Art gallery, then a little house on Fairfax.

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Shannon Cottrell

For more photos check out our slideshow, How + Nosm Paint the L.A. Weekly Building

The L.A. Weekly celebrated Valentine's Day 2012 like no one else could, with a new red, black and white façade painted by artists Raoul and Davide Perre, known as How & Nosm.

In October, during our interview with How & Nosm about their show at Known Gallery, we half-jokingly asked if they'd want to paint the L.A. Weekly building, but we never imagined they'd say yes and actually set a date. The concept is, loosely, "messages in a bottle," representing perhaps those the newspaper delivers every week, yet conveyed via familiar surrealist How & Nosm imagery: fish, hands, faces, hearts and brains, plus secret visuals we may never decipher.

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Nanette Gonzales

Mr. Brainwash, left, still has his fans

In the 2010 documentary Exit Through The Gift Shop, Mr. Brainwash hires a team of artists to create his art for him and becomes a millionaire after just one hugely successful Los Angeles show, despite the fact that other artists in the film think he's a hack and possibly mentally ill. It's not exactly a flattering portrayal.

"That's why at the end of the film, when people said 'Oh you're not this, you're not an artist,' I said, 'Time will tell,'" Mr. Brainwash told LA Weekly in an interview on the closing day of his recent "Art Show 2011" on Sunday. "You'll follow me through time and you'll see who I am."

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photo by Nanette Gonzales

Mr. Brainwash's "Art Show 2011"

Update: Show has been extended, and will be open one more day, on Jan. 8. Doors open at 2 p.m. Location is 960 N. La Brea Ave.

At "Art Show 2011," equivocal street artist Mr. Brainwash's 80,000 square-foot feat, Mr. Brainwash sat at a table in a driveway outside the La Brea warehouse he'd acquired for the show, meeting fans, signing posters and signing stuffed animals. There were more stuffed animals in line than posters, actually, and people walking through the multi-story building carried dolls and animals as well.

A woman in heels held a life-size Raggedy Anne look-alike by the neck, a tall man in dress pants held a stuffed Elmo doll, a guy in a hoody had Buzz Lightyear and three or four others in his backpack. The dolls and animals had all come from the top floor, where a big pile of them filled a corner with the words "Take One" sprayed painted above. The rest of the room had messages about love sprayed on its walls -- love is forever, respect others, follow your heart.

Since Thierry Guetta turned into Mr. Brainwash, hosted his first L.A. mega-show, "Life is Beautiful," in 2008 and became the protagonist/antagonist of Banksy's Oscar-nominated documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop," too much attention has been on whether Mr. Brainwash is even real. Could his whole "career" be an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by Banksy, to question what art is and expose taste as gullibility?

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