Lynn La Bate, curator, Fullerton Museum Center.*...

Lynn La Bate, curator, Fullerton Museum Center.

* Bargello National Sculpture Museum, Florence, Italy: “The combination of the architecture with the Renaissance sculptures created one of the most aesthetically pleasing environments I’d ever been in. (When I was there,) it wasn’t crowded, and it was white and light and airy and full of arched doorways and curved walls and lots of space for the sculptures to exist.”

* Chan-Chan, a city in northeast Peru built entirely of mud by the indigenous Chimu culture, which existed from the 800s through the middle 15th Century: “The place that just forever sticks in my memory is (a room with) trellised walls (in) an X-shaped pattern. With time, the walls had worn down. . . . (The Chimu people lived) in such integration with nature. . . . The light actually came in through the walls--not through windows--and was integrated into the walls themselves.”

* “Woman Weighing Pearls” by Jan Vermeer, also titled “Woman With Scales,” National Gallery of Art, Washington: “He creates an environment that is something I’d like to enter into. It’s so rich in texture and just sumptuous, and his representation of the quality of light is unequaled.”

* Mexican folk art by anonymous artists, on permanent display at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles: “It’s a genre of work I don’t think I’d live without. (I like it for its) combination of bold color, ingenuity of design, coexistence with nature and facility with material, all combined with an underlying optimism, even though the artists often deal with mortality. . . . There’s a consistency (of style) yet an individuality. For me, the works are so engaging.”

* The collected works of Ana Mendieta, the late Cuban performance artist and also made three-dimensional sculptural pieces out of materials such as mud, candles and dynamite. Catalogue of recent works available through the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. “Her work was very ephemeral and of . . . a very personal, very feminine nature. . . . She used very basic imagery; spirals, mummy imagery, vaginal imagery, and her interpretation of the female spirit combined with the earth creates a sense of power for me.”