Art Exhibitions

Sunny Side Up: Los Angeles artist Peter Erskine has installed his solar artwork "Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations, I" in the ancient chambers of Trajan's Markets in Rome. The $300,000 project, designed to show the beauty and the danger of sunlight, was funded by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. Erskine's show (through May 10) is the first in a series of contemporary art exhibitions planned for the historic site.

Super-sized exhibitions are becoming more common in art museums, and the next few months will see several among the notable new shows opening around town. Chronologically, here's a selection of what's coming up in art this spring, including three really big shows: "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath" Annenberg Space for Photography, March 23-June 2 Some war photographs are indelibly printed in America's cultural memory, such as Joe Rosenthal's carefully choreographed 1945 picture of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima or Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut's image of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack in 1972 (both for the Associated Press)

The Watts Summer Festival — rising from the ashes of the riots that devastated the South Los Angeles neighborhood in 1965 — remains one of the longest-running African American cultural festivals in the country. Now in its 44th year, the annual celebration will include live music, theatrical and spoken-word performances, dance, art exhibitions, food booths and a community forum. Ted Watkins Memorial Park, 1335 E. 103rd St., L.A. noon-8 p.m. Fri.-Sun., Free. (323) 789-7304.

An art exhibition in Vienna dedicated to the male nude is reportedly welcoming nudists to experience the galleries au naturel after public hours.  A spokesman for the Leopold Museum in Vienna told Reuters that there was a request by an association from Germany for a nude guided tour. "We thought about it, and decided it would be a good idea to have a special nude viewing open to the public," the spokesman told the news service. "Nackte Manner" -- "Nude Men" -- features depictions of male nudity in art from the 19th century to the present day. The show caused a stir in Vienna with a promotional campaign that featured a photograph titled "Vive La France" depicting three completely naked soccer players, save for their footwear.

The walls of the Charles E. Probst Performing Arts Center in Thousand Oaks will come alive Monday with "Images," the fourth in a series of free exhibitions featuring emerging artists from the Southland. Featured in the show, which will run through November, are painters Patricia Legnon of Ventura, Shelly Herman of Woodland Hills and Bruce Everett of Chatsworth, and Southern California collage artist Joyce Keener.

A traveling show of paintings by J.M.W. Turner, the renowned British landscape artist, has been postponed indefinitely because of the high cost of terrorism insurance. The exhibition of artworks, whose value is estimated at more than $1 billion, was organized by the Tate Gallery in London, which is home to the largest collection of Turner paintings.

Super-sized exhibitions are becoming more common in art museums, and the next few months will see several among the notable new shows opening around town. Chronologically, here's a selection of what's coming up in art this spring, including three really big shows: "War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath" Annenberg Space for Photography, March 23-June 2 Some war photographs are indelibly printed in America's cultural memory, such as Joe Rosenthal's carefully choreographed 1945 picture of the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima or Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut's image of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack in 1972 (both for the Associated Press)

Two days after city parks officials shut down a Brooklyn College exhibition that included sexually explicit images, the school said Saturday that it would move the students' artworks to campus. The exhibition opened Wednesday at the city-owned Brooklyn War Memorial, displaying watercolors depicting gay sex and sculpted male genitalia illuminated in a box. Another work featured a white pet rat.

I feel that I must respond to "Battle for the Masterpieces," by Robert A. Jones (May 22), on the failed donation of the Armand Hammer art collection. The main issue here should be whether the Hammer Collection is open to the public. This can be virtually guaranteed in the affirmative by reviewing Hammer's long record of donations and art exhibitions. Jones states that the collection has been valued at $250 million and that to the relatively new Los Angeles County Museum of Art "the Hammer Collection was very important."

The Northridge earthquake cracked two major freeways, collapsed towering parking structures and turned fragile glassware into so much confetti, but it's difficult to imagine a casualty of the 1994 disaster that has been more sorely missed by the surrounding community than the Boathouse Gallery at Plaza de la Raza.

An art exhibition in Vienna titled "Nude Men" -- "Nackte Manner" in German -- is stimulating considerable media attention in Austria. The show, which opens this week at the Leopold Museum, is dedicated to depictions of male nudity from the 19th century to the present day, and includes paintings, sculpture, photographs and more. The Leopold Museum is offering some of the artwork on its website. (Please note the images may be offensive for some readers.) On its exterior wall, the museum has put up a full-frontal image of a naked man created by Austrian artist Ilse Haider, "Mr. Big. " One of the items in the museum show has already proved controversial.

WASHINGTON - For a hundred years, artists have been using and abusing newspapers as a vital part of their works. Pungent examples include the Spanish painter Salvador Dali creating an absurd newspaper about himself, the German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth making a sausage, complete with gelatin and spices, out of copies of the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the American Jim Hodges coating a Jordanian newspaper entirely in 24 karat gold. Little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by the world's museums in the past.

The late Dee Dee Ramone will receive a posthumous gallery exhibition of his artwork thanks to street artist Shepard Fairey. The punk rock musician's paintings will be on display in a show at Fairey's Subliminal Projects gallery in Echo Park scheduled to run Oct. 26 through Nov. 17. "Dee Dee Ramone: A Memorial Exhibition" will mark the 10th anniversary of the musician's death. Ramone -- who was a founder of the New York punk band the Ramones -- was found dead in 2002 in his L.A. home, the victim of an apparent drug overdose.

The Venice Biennale is arguably the most prestigious and glamorous international exhibition in the world, taking place in Italy every two years. The wryly titled Venice Beach Biennial, which is taking place on boardwalk this weekend and probably won't take place again, has humbler and funkier aspirations. Running Friday through Sunday, it's a free-to-the-public, open-air art exhibition that brings together 87 artists. They include artists who usually show on the boardwalk working alongside, and sometimes in collaboration with, well-known artists (Barbara Kruger, Evan Holloway, Katie Grinnan and Nick Herman, to name a few)

LONDON -- For those who leave modern art exhibitions feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy has yanked the football yet again, take heart. From now until Aug. 5, you can head to the Hayward Gallery in London, plunk down 8 pounds and see absolutely nothing. Mostly. "Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012" is not, according to gallery director Ralph Rugoff, a publicity stunt, but rather a meditation on seeing.  “I often go to museums and see people walking through galleries of great art in a drive-by manner," he said.

A recent art exhibition in Tunisia that some claim was insulting to Muslims has provoked new riots in the streets of the capital city of Tunis this week. The provocative exhibition was the annual Le Printemps des Arts, the Northern African country's largest visual arts show, which took place in the Tunis suburb of La Marsa. The exhibition featured a work that spelled out the word "Allah" with a string of ants, as well as other pieces that depicted the city of Mecca, according to reports from the BBC News and Reuters.

Theater Internationally acclaimed solo artist Danny Hoch, above, performs his edgy work "Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop," bringing to life a gallery of characters, from an angry, heroin-addicted prisoner with AIDS to a white teenager from Montana with a rap star alter ego. The show opens Wednesday at Actors' Gang. Architecture Pasadena Heritage hosts "Rediscovering the Art That Is Life," the seventh annual celebration of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

Aspen, Colo. Sept. 1-4: The Jazz Aspen Labor Day Festival is more rock than jazz, but it's jazzy nonetheless. Performers include LeAnn Rimes and Susan Tedeschi (Sept. 1), Kanye West and Robert Randolph & the Family Band (Sept. 2), Don Henley and Los Lonely Boys (Sept. 3) and Matisyahu and Polyphonic Spree (Sept. 4). Snowmass Town Park, near the intersection of Highway 82 and Brush Creek Road in Snowmass Village. Four-day pass, $150. Friday and Monday, $40 each. Saturday and Sunday, $55 each.

SANTEE, Calif. - Ladonna Maki, an unemployed waitress, stepped off the San Diego trolley on Saturday afternoon and quite unexpectedly encountered the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Celeste Innocenti, artistic director of San Diego-based Chronos Theatre Group, was providing a dramatic reading of one of Poe's best-known works: "I was a child and she was a child In this kingdom by the sea: But we loved with a love that was more...

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art finally has fulfilled the vision it had for its biggest foray into Islamic art - a goal thwarted until now by the government of the Russian Federation. The only problem is that Angelenos would have to travel more than 8,000 miles to see it. In "Gifts of the Sultan: the Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts," now on view in Doha, the capital of Qatar, art that Islamic rulers had sent long ago to the czarist courts are finally on display - courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum and National Library of Russia inSt.