Newsletter: Essential Arts & Culture: A new museum on the National Mall, Arthur Miller reimagined, the ‘Vermeer’ of L.A.
New museums. The relevance of August Wilson. And Arthur Miller starkly updated. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, and these are the top arts and culture stories of the week:
The new museum on the National Mall
The David Adjaye-designed National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., will open its doors to the public next weekend. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne describes it as “the most impressive and ambitious public building to go up in Washington in a generation.” And its ornate facade makes a statement. He writes: “The museum’s skin — has that typically benign architectural term ever been more charged? — allows it to stand apart from the Mall’s white-marble monuments like a rebuke.” Los Angeles Times
Inspired by the life of the Georgia-born blues legend, August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” at the Mark Taper Forum captures the fraught ways in which black cultural forms were monetized and exploited in the early 20th century — and it couldn’t be more of the moment. “Blending carefully studied realism with a lyricism that could turn mystical,” writes Times theater critic Charles McNulty, “[Wilson’s] plays set out to reconnect black Americans with the heritage that slavery traumatically severed them from.” Los Angeles Times
McNulty also checks out Robert O’Hara’s ribald comedy “Barbecue,” about an intervention in a family where dysfunction runs rife, which is having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse. It is, he writes, a work where “nobody is exactly who he or she seems.” Los Angeles Times
In an interpretation that Times reporter David Ng describes as “faithful and defamiliarizing,” Belgian director Ivo van Hove has re-made “A View From the Bridge,” Arthur Miller’s 1950s family drama in a stark, new staging that opens at the Ahmanson Theatre next week. The overarching concept, Van Hove tells Ng, was “to turn what Miller wrote into a modern Greek tragedy and not into a naturalistic family drama about immigrants.” Los Angeles Times
Doug Aitken’s sleek solo at MOCA
L.A. artist Doug Aitken — a figure known for his immersive video installations and wild sculptures — has his first North American museum survey on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The show contains some intriguing works, writes Times art critic Christopher Knight, such as “Electric Earth,” from 1999, a video whose jarring figure captures urban isolation. But, he writes, “distended spectacle overtakes much of Aitken’s work from the last decade.” Los Angeles Times
The slow art of L.A.’s ‘Vermeer’
Los Angeles painter Tom Knechtel is known for producing intricately painted scenes that appear to marry the detail of Albrecht Dürer with the bizarre happenings conjured by Hieronymus Bosch. He is also known for being really slow — exhibiting a limited number of works every three to five years. A pair of new shows at Marc Selwyn Fine Art and CB1 Gallery not only bring an unprecedented number of his works into view, they also show an intensely personal side of the artist. “I wanted something that threw the windows open,” he told me of the new pieces. Los Angeles Times
Honoring a patron and art dealer with L.A. roots
Virginia Dwan, the gallerist who made a splash in Los Angeles in the ‘60s showing artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein, is the subject of a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art’s new wing in Washington, D.C. Of the daring artists she showed in her spaces (which also included a later gallery in New York), the NGA’s James Meyer says: “The most adventuresome of her artists had brought the white cube — the pristine, ‘neutral’ aesthetic container — to the brink of irrelevance.” New York Times
A Chinese opera with big ambitions, little nerve
A generation of Chinese opera composers have come of age in the West, making for a new genre that draws from both Eastern and Western operatic traditions. Times classical music critic Mark Swed just checked out the San Francisco Opera’s production of Bright Sheng’s “Dream of the Red Chamber.” The narrative is thin, he writes, but “Sheng has a terrific feel for orchestration,” with pitches that “bend in ways that sound almost acrobatically impossible.” Los Angeles Times
Fresh direction at the Annenberg Center in Beverly Hills
When it opened in 2013, the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts came stocked with two theaters, prop shops and even a sculpture garden. But it didn’t have an artistic director — until April, when Paul Crewes, of the Tony-nominated U.K.-based company Kneehigh Theatre, joined the team. As part of an open house celebration held last week, Crewes spoke with The Times’ Deborah Vankin about his plans for the space: “I have a particular aesthetic and taste and interest, which is really creating theater that is both exciting, challenging and populist.” Los Angeles Times
IN OTHER NEWS…
— Artist Cindy Sherman, French sculptor Annette Messager, Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha and film director Martin Scorsese will receive Japan’s Praemium Imperiale award. Los Angeles Times
— Bye-bye, Gugg? Finland’s three ruling parties have ruled out supporting the Guggenheim Helsinki with government funding. The Guardian
— Plus: Everything you need to know about artist Maurizio Cattelan’s functioning golden toilet sculpture at the Guggenheim in New York. Get ready for some, um, interesting Instagrams. The Guardian
— Actor Alec Baldwin is suing New York art dealer Mary Boone, alleging that he was defrauded when she sold him a later work by artist Ross Bleckner, instead of the 1996 painting he was interested in. New York Times
— Critic Jonathan Jones says Baldwin needs an art history lesson, since Bleckner paints repetitive series of paintings. The Guardian
— Legislation will be taken up by the full U.S. Senate to shield international art loans from seizure while being exhibited in the United States. New York Times
— The Man Booker shortlist for best fiction. Time to get reading. The Atlantic
— The dance performance that marks every 9/11. Remarkable. Newsweek
— Principal dancer Diana Vishneva will give her final performance with American Ballet Theatre. Dance Magazine
— Los Angeles dance finally has its moment — with a series of headlining performances at the Hollywood Bowl featuring L.A. Dance Project, Body Traffic and Ate9. Los Angeles Times
— It may seem like an impossible act to follow Bryan Cranston’s performance as President Lyndon Baines Johnson in Robert Schenkkan’s Tony-winning “All the Way.” But South Coast Rep’s Hugo Armstrong seizes the role and makes it his own, writes reviewer Margaret Gray. Los Angeles Times
— Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” gets a strong new production with a superb cast at Pasadena’s A Noise Within theater company. Los Angeles Times
— Larry Clark’s paintings go on view in Boyle Heights, in the new Hollywood arts space by UTA. ARTnews
— Painter Helen Frankenthaler was one of the few women to emerge from the Abstract Expressionist boys’ club. Curator John Elderfield, formerly of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has organized an exhibition of her late works at Gagosian Gallery that he says reflects her intelligence as a painter. Los Angeles Times
— Speaking of MoMA, the museum will make thousands of historical images available for free online. New York Times
— The Whitney Museum is giving 101-year-old artist Carmen Herrera her due with a solo exhibition that tracks the abstract artist’s important postwar years. New York Times
— New arts institutions are building, others are renovating and expanding, and prominent architects are involved. The state of the global art industrial complex is strong. New York Times
— Plus, the new renderings for LAX, with people mover. This cannot come soon enough. Curbed
CAN’T-MISS SHOW
In a series of wry sculptures on view at Honor Fraser, Ry Rocklen creates detritus-inspired installations that, upon further examination, end up being something else. “It’s like a glimpse into the secret lives of discarded objects — magic hidden in the trash,” writes reviewer Sharon Mizota. Through Oct. 29, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, honorfraser.com. For more fall arts openings, see my Datebook.
AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST…
What the world needs now is a pan-Latin musical track in which actor Gael Garcia Bernal channels Serge Gainsbourg. You’re welcome, Los Angeles. YouTube
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