Hi, I’m arts author Deborah Vankin, filling in for Carolina Miranda this week.
A 5-year-old public sculpture, honoring a Persian emperor of two,600 years ago, is now tragically timely.
The 2017 sculpture, “Freedom: A Shared Dream,” sits on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City, featuring gold and silver concentric cylinders manufactured from stainless-steel. It shimmers in the daylight and glows, with LED lights, at night. It’s by British artist Cecil Balmond and was commissioned by the L.A. nonprofit Farhang Foundation, which promotes Iranian art and culture.
The work now serves as a focus for the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement supporting Iranian women and human rights. Artists and others are tying scarves and ribbons to the work, multicolored slips of material that billow and whip within the wind protesting the September death of 22-year-old, Kurdish Iranian Mahsa Amini. She’d been arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police for not wearing her hijab, an Islamic headscarf, properly and died in detention.
Within the wake of mounting protests in Iran, sparked by Amini’s death, and reports of human rights abuses within the country, the Century City sculpture now also stands in solidarity with demonstrators there. Authorities in Iran have cracked down on protesters, and there have been reports of physical and sexual abuse of detainees. (This recent CNN piece a few “full-fledged human rights crisis” in Iran is painful to read.)
“The declaration of human rights is a precious jewel for humanity,” Balmond told me after I interviewed him in 2016, “and I conceived the sculpture as such, a golden treasure [being the inner gold cylinder] buried inside the surface silver, the looks of our lives.”
With international Human Rights Day coming up on Dec. 10 — and the protests in Iran still occurring — the “Women, Life, Freedom” rallying cry is louder than ever. Artists and activists handcuffed themselves to Chris Burden’s “Urban Light” installation at LACMA last month for a demonstration marking 40 days for the reason that Zahedan massacre in southeastern Iran and drawing attention to Amini’s death. Additional “Women, Life, Freedom” artworks are actually popping up around Los Angeles.
The Farhang Foundation launched a billboard campaign within the Westwood area in early October featuring the “Freedom” sculpture — the 2 images will probably be up through the top of the yr. The organization is now putting up latest murals around the town. One, designed by Iranian American Washington D.C.-based artist, Rashin Kheiriyeh, appears on the side of an office constructing in Santa Monica. The mural, at 3325 Pico Blvd., was originally unveiled in July 2021 before Amini’s death; however it spoke to freedom for girls in Iran. It’s since been updated. It depicts a girl with flowing hair manufactured from Persian calligraphy. A line from a Persian poem reads: “restless tresses within the breeze.” “Women, Life, Freedom” appears in English and Persian.
One other Farhang Foundation mural is in-development, planned to look on the side of a downtown L.A. office constructing that currently encompasses a Shepard Fairey mural. The image for the 1031 S. Grand Ave. mural continues to be being worked out. It would either be by Kheiriyeh or Iranian American L.A.-based Farzad Kohan. The mural is supposed to be a everlasting work and can feature the “Women, Life, Freedom” hashtag.
Elsewhere around the town, artists are putting up their very own murals. The outside of a shoe store on Melrose Avenue, within the Fairfax District, now encompasses a nearly 30-foot-tall mural of Amini, clad in black and eyes forged downward with the colours of the Iranian flag flowing through her hair. Silhouettes embedded in her clothing depict Iranian women tossing off their veils and setting them on fire. At the underside, in Persian script, it reads: “Death to the dictatorship.” The 7753 Melrose Ave. mural is by Iranian American L.A.-based artist Cloe Hakakian and L.A. muralist Todd Goodman. It was unveiled in early October and was paid for by the artists, with some community donations.
Hakakian has since began a not-for-profit initiative, Murals for Freedom, which connects artists and wall owners internationally to create awareness across the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.
“I’m Iranian American before the rest, I feel my roots deeply,” she told me. “And I just desired to be the voice for the voiceless.”
Iranian American L.A.-based rapper Shaheen Samadi, an emerging artist, wrote a song supporting the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in collaboration with L.A. musician Dr. Symph (a.k.a. Dr. Mansour Zakhor). He performed it in front of a latest Tarzana mural, by Iranian American L.A.-based artist Keyvan Shovir. It depicts Amini with out a headscarf together with 16-year-old Iranian protestor, Nika Shakarami, who went missing on Sept. 20 and has since been declared dead. Within the mural, at 19449 Ventura Blvd., Shakarami is holding a microphone. The music video appears on Samadi’s social media.
“How can we help from hundreds of miles away,” Samadi wrote on his Instagram post featuring the video. “How can we help defend our people from torture, bullets, from twisted people using religion to cause pain and suffering in our beautiful motherland?”
“I’m a practitioner of this art-form that we call rap music,” he added. “That is my weapon, that is the sword I’ve spent the last 12-13 years sharpening.”
Meanwhile, Roshi Rahnama’s West Hollywood gallery Advocartsy, featuring Iranian contemporary art, debuted a solo exhibition called “Mohammad Barrangi: Dreamscape” on Sept. 22, just days after Amini’s death. “We were in a haze of mourning,” Rahnama told me. “We weren’t able to interact in any festive activities or within the mood to have a good time the exhibition.”
After it closed on Nov. 5, and since the gallery had canceled its annual Holiday Hang community celebration while mourning Amini, Rahnama scrambled to place together a latest show called “Inspired By Woman, Life, Freedom.” It features relevant reverse transfer works from “Dreamscape” in addition to latest mixed media works by Iranian American San Francisco-based artist Ali Dadgar. She asked artists who’d previously shown on the gallery to ship back work to be exhibited. Artists who contributed “returning works” included Iranian American San Francisco-based Shadi Yousefian and Iranian Canadian Toronto-based Simin Keramati. “Inspired By” will probably be up through Dec. 30.
“I used to be attempting to do something responsible with our gallery,” she says. “And this was probably the most effective way we could create a dialogue that might bring more attention to this necessary movement and revolution in Iran. Our language is art. It was a call to motion and I stepped into it.”
That is in no way a comprehensive list — previous “Women, Life, Freedom” billboards have come down and latest murals will undoubtedly go up, for nevertheless long they last. But even the ephemerality is powerful, says Farhang executive director, Alireza Ardekani.
“What’s happening in Iran, the people who find themselves out within the streets fighting for his or her freedom, they appreciate and get energized knowing that other people world wide are supporting their cause, hearing their voice — they aren’t silenced,” he says. “And art is probably the most powerful approach to try this.”
And here’s what else is occurring across the L.A. artscape …
Visual art
The taboo-busting, 73-year-old Alexis Smith stopped making art about six years ago resulting from illness, but a major exhibition on the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego underscores what Times art critic Christopher Knight calls her “pivotal importance.” The show of 51 works, he says, is “a wonderful, long-overdue retrospective of the Los Angeles artist’s exceptional profession.”
Knight also reviews a survey of 27 paintings from the last 21 years by Honolulu-born, Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris on the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. “ In a period when figurative painting with distinct social narratives has been dominant,” he writes, “while facile abstract painting abounds, a nice survey of Morris’ savvy, often unexpected abstractions is very disarming.”
It’s been 20 years since William Kentridge has had a serious exhibition in L.A. Leah Ollman has an interview with the South African artist on the occasion of his Broad exhibition, “William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows.” To Kentridge newbies, Ollman says, the exhibition — which features about 130 works dating from 1975 to 2020 — is “a feast of an introduction.”
An exhibition on the Skirball Cultural Center, “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories” — which debuted on the Museum of High-quality Arts, Boston last yr — goals to reply a fundamental query through the lens of 42 works on view, writes Leigh-Ann Jackson: “What’s the story of America and what parts of it may be told through quilts?”
Frieze Los Angeles is back — or it should be, in February 2023, larger than ever on the Santa Monica Airport. Here’s my report, with details concerning the art fair’s next iteration in L.A.
And for those who haven’t been to the Hammer Museum recently, chances are you’ll not recognize the place. It’s nearing the top of a two-decade expansion and renovation that will probably be unveiled, once and for all, in March. Here’s my interview with museum director Ann Philbin concerning the museum’s transformation and what we are able to expect to see there.
On and off the stage
On the occasion of Tom Stoppard’s “stunning latest play on Broadway,” “Leopoldstadt” — a few Jewish family in Vienna throughout the Holocaust — Times theater critic Charles McNulty interviews creator and San Francisco American Conservatory Theater former artistic director, Carey Perloff. Her “Pinter and Stoppard: a Director’s View” explores the 2 English playwrights’ Jewish identities.
“Infusing her personal knowledge of the artists together with her practical experience of staging their work,” he writes, “Perloff sheds light on what makes “Leopoldstadt” distinctive yet wholly integrated into Stoppard’s oeuvre.”
Margaret Gray has the story on “Clyde’s” on the Center Theatre Group’s Mark Taper Forum. Lynn Nottage’s 2021 Tony-nominated dark comedy is about at a truck stop sandwich shop. “The greasy spoon’s sandwiches are unexpectedly delicious,” Gray writes, “but as a workplace, it’s not healthy; in truth its toxicity is operatic in scope.”
Is laughter the perfect medicine? Comedian Alex Hooper would say so. Arts author Jessica Gelt interviews Hooper, who recently was diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a subject he plumbs for comedic material. He’s performing around L.A. while undergoing chemo.
“With preternatural positivity and boundless amounts of affection for his fellow comedians, his family and his audience,” Gelt writes, “Hooper has managed to show cancer right into a punchline and encourage his fans to understand life in the method.”
And, finally …. A latest adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical, “The Wiz,” will return to Broadway in 2024, entertainment reporter Nardine Saad reports. But first, there will probably be a national tour that debuts in Baltimore next yr.
Classical notes
Did the L.A. Opera’s “Tosca,” a revived production by British director John Caird, move the needle by way of the art form’s evolution? Perhaps not, says Times classical music critic Mark Swed. Nevertheless it was impressively sung; the group was impressively dressed; and Angel Blue, certainly one of the production’s stars, was a formidable draw.
“What struck me Saturday night was the sheer pleasure the audience took in being in an opera house for an opera,” Swed writes, “in being in a world that felt, for 3 hours, like a welcome refuge from the unusual.”
The late, trailblazing composer Florence Price was the primary Black American woman to have her music performed by a serious orchestra. Her work has found latest appreciation within the last two years. The Los Angeles Philharmonic performed Price’s Third Symphony in Nov. as a part of its Rock My Soul Festival — it was a performance “conducted with a vivid, clear-eyed edge by Jeri Lynne Johnson,” Swed says.
“It’s a rating of great beauty, considerable grace and rapt expression,” Swed writes. “Its substance comes from using spirituals and African American dance in a symphonic manner, modeled after Dvorák’s example in his ‘Recent World’ Symphony. To not be moved by the rating and its composer, who rose above the racism and misogyny in classical music, requires a chilly heart.”
Just dance
On the occasion of L.A.’s Banjee Ball celebrating its ninth anniversary, arts reporter Steven Vargas takes a have a look at ballroom culture as its inching into popular culture. “What began underground has gone mainstream,” Vargas writes, “so where does that leave events just like the Banjee Ball, certainly one of Los Angeles’ largest ballroom events?”
Design time
Features author Lisa Boone has the story behind a 700-square-foot ADU, whose exterior was “custom-milled” to match its principal house, a century-old Craftsman in Culver City.
Books
McNulty takes a have a look at two latest books, each “openly entertaining works of theatrical biography.” The primary is “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” which was co-written with Recent York Times chief theater critic Jesse Green. The second is a series of interviews: “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim” by Recent Yorker author D.T. Max.
“The crackle of those books,” McNulty writes, “has every thing to do with the zingy forthrightness of their title characters.”
Meanwhile, Martin Wolk has an interview with “Little Fires In all places” creator Celeste Ng about her latest novel, “Our Missing Hearts.” Ng joins the L.A. Times Book Club on Dec. 8, at 6p.m. for a conversation with Times columnist Patt Morrison. Enroll here.
Essential happenings …
‘Tis the season. Good thing Matt Cooper has a “supersize list” of live holiday entertainment throughout Southern California. It’s got something for everybody, including the Los Angeles Ballet’s “The Nutcracker,” South Coast Rep’s “A Christmas Carol” and Zombie Joe’s “Cabaret Macabre Christmas” — and more.
Cooper’s trusty weekly list of other events includes the national tour of the musical “Annie,” on the Dolby Theatre; drag artist Alaska at the Regent in downtown L.A.; and the Recent Hollywood String Quartet on the South Pasadena Public Library.
Vargas has been busy too. His most up-to-date events roundup includes “Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican” at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. The work within the exhibition of drawings, paintings and sculpture combines, as Vargas says, “Nineteen Eighties Los Angeles, the South Bay punk rock scene and Chicano art, music and politics.” One other event highlight: the bluegrassy variety show, “Watkins Family Hour Christmas” — hosted by Grammy-winning brother-and-sister duo Sean and Sara Watkins — at the Soraya in Northridge.
Want Vargas’ full list of where to go and what to do delivered to your in-box each week? Enroll for his newsletter, L.A. Goes Out. This week’s also includes an inventory of art-walks along top Metro lines for a car-free art outing.
Moves
Longtime American Ballet Theatre Artistic Director, Kevin McKenzie, is retiring after 30 years. But first: the vacations. McKenzie won’t step down until after the run of “The Nutcracker,” Dec. 9 to 16, on the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
McKenzie began Recent York’s ABT Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in 2004, in addition to the college’s subsequent National Training Curriculum. Throughout his profession he’s steered ballet luminaries resembling Ángel Corella, Paloma Herrera and Ethan Stiefel to Gillian Murphy, Stella Abrera, Misty Copeland, David Hallberg and Herman Cornejo.
And speaking of “The Nutcracker,” ABT’s James Whiteside was injured last yr, onstage, during a performance of the vacation classic. He’s made a speedier-than-expected recovery and will probably be returning to perform on this yr’s “Nutcracker” production, the ABT’s seventh at Segerstrom. Whiteside can also be the creator of the 2021 memoir, “Center Center: A Funny, Sexy, Sad Almost-Memoir of a Boy in Ballet,” essays that address his childhood, his coming out and being a person in ballet.
Passages
RIP Songbird. Singer, songwriter and keyboardist Christine McVie, of Fleetwood Mac, passed away after “a brief illness,” her family said. She was 79. McVie brought us the hits “Don’t Stop,” “Songbird” and “You Make Loving Fun,” amongst others.
“Onstage, her regular presence behind the keyboard,” writes Times pop music critic Mikael Wood, “provided an important counterweight to the more dramatic figures cut by [Lindsey] Buckingham and [Stevie] Nicks, whose rocky romantic relationship powered the band’s darkly glamorous legend.”
Artist, designer and promoting man George Lois, who brought us catchphrases and brand names resembling “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” passed away at 91 at his home in Manhattan.
He was, the AP reports, “amongst a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world beyond within the late Fifties and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, willing and capable of offend and was a master of finding just the fitting image or words to capture a moment or create a requirement.”
And last but not least …
Here’s McVie, in her own words, discussing being a girl in rock ‘n’roll, the touring life and her early days as an art student.
“I’ve learned to be humble,” she says. “I don’t think money’s gone to my head. I don’t think being a star’s gone to my head, either. In blunt terms, I’m a star, you already know? But to say those words doesn’t really ring true to my emotions.”