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.

Clare Brown

Dream Time Dancing

Clare Brown says she might be the first artist ever to coordinate specific color hues into all of her paintings. It's a bold claim, but the Topanga transplant knows a thing or two about color. As a 10-year-old growing up in the late '60s, Brown spent her days immersed in giant plastic colored eggs. The zany cocoons of color were the invention of color theorist and healer Theo Gimbel, who worked with Brown's mother, who was blind, in his Gloucestershire, England laboratory. "They were massive -- say about 10 feet by 10 feet," recalls Brown. "You walked into it and sat down on the seat and it was like, boom! Yellow. You couldn't see anything else but yellow. I'd stay in there for ages."

"My mother's blindness really influenced me in the sense of, she made me see more, in a way," Brown says, before admitting how odd it must sound.

Courtesy FLAX

Jim Shaw's Didactic Art installation in the show "Lost (in L.A.)"

This week, artist Jim Shaw pops up in two places, a TV phenomenon loosely inspires an exhibition and a playwright known for breaking the fourth wall breaks it before finishing his new play.

5. Be like an ant
"Just be like an ant carry something this way, carry something back," says filmmaker Mike Plante's uncle Paul in the film Be Like an Ant. Plante made the film for and about his uncle, who bought a trailer to live in with his family after moving back from Vietnam and then began building it out, and kept building for 20 years, until it turned into a free-form house with more than 100 windows and a shape entirely its own. This film and others by Plante screen at the Armory Center for the Arts this weekend. 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Sat., Dec. 8, 7:30 p.m.; (626) 792-5101, armoryarts.org.

Courtesy of The Cinefamily

Švankmajer's most recent feature, Surviving Life

If surrealism -- or, more specifically the freakish, fucked up and fantastic kind -- is your thing, then your September is about to get a whole lot better thanks to Cinefamily.

This month, they're hosting a full retrospective featuring the works of Jan Švankmajer, a Czech filmmaker, born in 1934, who's known for his stop-motion animations and for influencing the likes of Terry Gilliam and the Brothers Quay.

Jancar Gallery

A view inside Tricia Lawless Murray's Solar Annulus (2012)

There are a few great tributes to vintage artists on this week's list. And Chinatown's fourth performance festival, always a wild card and always worth visiting for just that reason, happens this Saturday.

5. Slam poetry with Slanguage
"One hundred thousand dollars can be stretched a long way down in the ghetto," says artist Mario Ybarra Jr. in a video he made the first week of July. His group, Slanguage Studio, is a finalist for the $100,000 Mohn Prize that will be awarded as part of the Hammer Museum's "Made in L.A." after visitors vote for their favorite candidate. By "the ghetto" he means Wilmington, the harbor town where he and his collaborators work, offering classes and doing community art projects. This week, Slanguage hosts World's Worst Words, a night of poetry, experimental music and spoken-word performances at LAXART in Culver City. 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., Fri., July 20, 7 p.m.; free. (310) 559-0166, laxart.org.

Photo by Rick Escueta

Fire Walk With Me title wall, featuring An Old Woman and Her Grandson by Josh Agle (aka Shag)

Twenty years ago auteur filmmaker David Lynch elicited delight and (mostly) rancor from fans by making a film based on his critically successful TV series Twin Peaks called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Only the staunchest of Twin Peaks fans seemed to appreciate the way the film amplified the TV series' elements of surrealism and supernatural horror while painting it a darker shade and removing much of the show's humor.

That said, there was nothing about the Saturday opening of the Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me 20th anniversary art show at pop surrealist hub Copro Gallery to suggest that only hard-core FWWM fans were in attendance. It seems that a Lynch-head is a Lynch-head, whether your preference lies only with Blue Velvet and Eraserhead or whether it spans Lynch's entire body of artistic work to include Crazy Clown Time, Dune and his early AFI short films.