ARTE: THE COSMIC BALL

Shafiq Husayn and Dove Society will be here tonight for there COSMIC BALL Art Party and Jam Session! 9pm-12am and suggested donation is $15!

ARTE: TED TALKS PAPER TOWELS

Every since we heard Joe Smith break it down on the proper way to dry your hands our paper towel usage has forever and permanetly been changed!

ARTE: A Brief History of John Baldessari

Narrated by Tom Waits.
Commissioned by LACMA for their first annual "Art + Film Gala" honoring John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood.

directed by Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman

ARTE: Architecture for Humanity LA

AFH:LA will be holding there 5th public meeting for 2012, May 22 @ 7PM in Santa Monica at O'breien's Irish Pub 2226 Wilshire Blvd.

ARTE: Kehinde Wiley's Economy of Grace

Kehinde premiered his new work at Sean Kelly Gallery "Economy of Grace" is up until mid June and is the first time the NY based artist has done portraits of women.  We love Kehinde, we love!

 

ARTE: ENDLESS LOVE 4 MEDHI

Shout out to Garth Trinidad for tweeting about this project Endless Love For Medhi we are huge HUGE fans of the late mastermind producer. Below is a photo of artist Futura 2000 wearing a special tee designed to honor DJ Medhi.  Visit the site, download a free record and submit your tribute.

ARTE: ALMA THOMAS

People always ask who my favorite artist is and although it is hard to narrow it down to just one, the first name that always comes out is Alma Thomas. LOVE AND INSPIRED BY HER.

Alma is from DC.  She was an art teacher in the public schools for many years.  Later in her life she began painting and showing full time she was in her 70's.  Alma paints on a grand scale so usually her work is on very large canvases.

 

ARTE: STOP THE PERCEPTIONS HOLLYWOOD!

YES...this is brillant and funny! More information about this project HERE

mamahope.org

ARTE: ROMARE - MEDITATIONS ON AFROCENTRISM

Came across this earlier in the week and wondered what music from a group called ROMARE would sound like.  Using the late great artists technigue of collage the album cover pays homage to Mr. Bearden and the music which seems to be layered and builds up as it plays leaves you wanting more.

Read full review of Meditations On Afrocentrism - ROMARE on Boomkat.com ©

ARTE: Text to Music

Artist Annalisa Swank transcribes a conversation to text and transposes it to music.

ARTE: FREEGUMS

Below is an excerpt from the artists website about this video and project.

Narwhal Art Projects presents IN-BETWEEN a solo exhibition by Alvaro Ilizarbe / Freegums. For this show Alvaro is exploring space, patterns, and the energy that lies in-between. He has painted black and white patterns on amorphous wooden pieces which hang on an identically patterned wallpaper. The wood paintings’ swirling lines blend seamlessly into the background, becoming one. Contrasting line work creates a visual vibration and a tension within the space. Through this, Alvaro is revealing the awareness of spatial energy that lies between oneself and the object.

freegums.com

ARTE: SEVENTH LETTER

Seventh Letter creates artwork for the City of Hope's Department of Pediatrics benefit. Happening today in LA at Known Gallery.

ARTE: Twitter Files PT 6 - @HuffPostLA #LARIOTS

Pretty much the story goes as you see it below! Last night at the Grammy Museum Huffington Post LA tweeted the remarks of a panel discussing the LA RIOTS 20 years later.  This all went down on the same night that Trayvon Martins family was in LA at the West Angeles Church along with Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Stevie Wonder and hundreds of others as a rally was held.

*You might remember last year we hosted Thurzday album/documentary debut. It was the T R S H (The Riot Starts Here) experience which was a concept project chronicling the events that led up to the LA RIOTS.  The album and documentary speak with people who were involved in and witnessed first hand all of the things that were bubbling around the time that led to the Rodney King beating and later the LA RIOTS. 

and my final tweet in reply was "@HuffPostLA @sashabronner @annaalmendrala glad you were tweeting tonight! Communication is key & has to stay open#LARIOTS #Trayvon"

ARTE: Mercedes Helnwein

ELEKTRA II, 2011 Oil pastel on paper 71 x 47inMercedes Helnwein

Mercedes is a writer and a visual artist. She has gallery exhibitions all over the world and is a published author.  The following excerpts are things we found intriguing from her website.

In response to the question, whether she considers herself to be fragile:
No. I’m not sure how I’d survive as an artist if I were fragile.

On why she moved to Los Angeles:
I have no obvious answer for that. LA is a town that should naturally repel me. For some reason it did the opposite. I didn’t know anything about LA at the time, and had no interests in the movie industry, no interest in the California weather, no dreams of becoming a movie star or surfing. But for reasons I don’t really know how to formulate, I was drawn to that town, and I just knew I wanted to go there. Then, of course, I hated it when I got there. Nothing made sense to me, and I couldn’t relate to all the partying and desperate attention to bodies and clothes and fame and money. There is so much substitution of culture with the worst kind of entertainment.

But the idea of moving away was never an option. And about two years into my existence in LA, I suddenly felt at home there. After scraping through layers of “LAness” you come to a creative core of sorts, with a whole universe of strange, like-minded people. And surprisingly enough I found a possibility there to create art with more dignity and honesty than would have been possible in any of the official art centers of the world.

I owe a lot to LA. It’s the fakest place in the world, no doubt about it; but I found some kind of very genuine quality there that was completely unexpected.

Gallery Director Michelle Joan Papillion visited Mercedes at her DTLA studio a few years ago when she was getting ready for a show at the Grammy Museum. 

ARTE: 2 YR RECAP

Photographer Eric Berry took some photos at our anniversary party! Special thanks to Shafiq Husayn and the Dove Society, Johnny Polygon and DJ Nattu for keeping the festivites bubbly!

 

ARTE: KNOW HOW SHOP LA

Knowhow Shop participated in our Earth Day Social with Broccoli City...they brought in the really awesome Garden Table! It was amazing having the table in the space and to learn about all the other things the guys do over at the shop. One of the photos below is a test shot of the Hammock class they are doing with SMMoA be sure to check that on Cinco de Mayo.

Knowhow Shop is a cooperative fabrication laboratory and design studio located in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. We provide design services at all scales, as well as workspace and training for designers and enthusiasts working in furniture, art, and architectural fabrication. We provide one-on-one assistance and frequent classes on both traditional and digital fabrication open to all.

The Garden Table

ARTE: SURFING NORWEGIAN WATERS

This is seriously cool.

Protest takes you on a journey "From here to there" with 5 of their professional surfers, following them on their journey from their personal here to get there, whether it's a search for solitude and empty breaks, winning contests under pressure or simply searching for the perfect wave in imperfect locations.

Lars Musschoot travels his “here to there” through the waters from Norway to Tarifa, Spain, where he hunts down perfect surf with empty line-ups.

ARTE: Dove Society / Jimetta Rose

Jimetta Rose blessed us at the Be Beautiful Project opening by performing a few ballads, she came back with Dove Society to rock it for our 2 year anniversary/Pre Coachella kick off! We love Miss Jimetta Rose!

"my name is jimetta rose and i represent love"

ARTE: Fahamu Pecou

Atlanta based artist Fahamu Pecou is famous!  Taken from the artist website here is is statement about how and what he creates.  We included paintings of a series of magazine covers but Fahamu also works as a performance artist and a digital artist.  Having just successfully funding his kickstarter campaign for a new series If Heaven Had Heights, the artist is preparing for a show in NY and Paris to present this series.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work can be viewed as meditations on contemporary popular culture. I began my career experimenting with practices employed in contemporary branding strategies, particularly as they pertained to hip-hop music. These experiments ultimately led me to question not only the stereotypes that drive consumerism, fame, celebrity-worship etc. but how an unspoken racial and cultural divide often influenced these factors.  I appear in my work not in an autobiographical sense, but as an allegory. My character becomes a stand-in to represent black masculinity and both the realities and fantasies projected from and onto black male bodies. I seek to challenge the expectations around black men and, to a larger extent, society in general. Adopting the traits typically associated with black men in hip hop, I extract them from their more popular associations and distort or exaggerate them by appropriating them within a fine art context. The end result is a parody on our obsession with celebrity, our exploitation of black masculinity and the divide that racial ignorance and stereotypes perpetuate. These ideas are expressed in paintings, videos and live performances. Each medium allows me to articulate various nuances around my themes and further distort the assumptions we tend to make about one another.

ARTE: WERE 2!!!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US!

Its been 2 amazing years here in LA and we could not have done it with out you!!! We look forward to presenting more exhibitions, screenings, preformances, installations, lectures and artists talks through our on going dialogue between us and our audience.  We thank you and you should thank yourselves!

We also share this special day with Elizabeth Catlett, she would have been celebrating her 97th birthday today!