Art Exhibits

When Barkley L. Hendricks began to paint portraits in Philadelphia around 1969, one would have been hard-pressed to find many black faces over the prior five centuries of Western art. "Lawdy Mama," the first work encountered in Hendricks' survey exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art acknowledges as much.

The history of American art has missed the mark, says curator Alexandra Munroe. It has overlooked the profound and pervasive contribution of Asian philosophy and culture to the caldron, and the exhibition she has spent five years organizing, "The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia: 1860-1989," is going to prove her point. Vast and ambitious, the just-opened exhibition at the Solomon R.

It's an image rarely seen in Little Saigon: the red flag of Vietnam. The last time the communist flag was displayed prominently in Orange County's Vietnamese enclave -- when a merchant displayed the banner -- it ignited 53 days of angry street protests. Today, an exhibit commissioned by a Vietnamese American arts group will open in Santa Ana, a display that purposely includes communist symbols, the flag of the fallen country of South Vietnam and artwork that has been banned in Vietnam.

Art history is a messy business. And the urge to clean it up is irresistible, especially in the period of the Cold War in Germany. No surprise, then, that the most common shorthand for art produced in the divided nation goes something like this: East German artists made retrograde figurative work in the service of a repressive government; West Germans produced progressive abstractions under the freedom of democracy.

MADRID -- They were Picasso's own favorites and this is the first time -- and possibly the last -- they will leave Paris together. Making the most of refurbishing work at the Picasso Museum in Paris, Madrid's Reina Sofia art museum has brought together what are considered to be the Spanish artist's own favorites and the monumental "Guernica" in a breathtaking 400-piece show to run until May 5. "It's a show of Picasso's Picassos," said Reina Sofia's new director, Manuel Borja-Villel.

Sisterhood is powerful again. Last spring's "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at MOCA gave rise to an explosion of woman-centered exhibitions throughout the Southland. Now, a new public art initiative takes feminism back to the streets. Cindy Sherman's billboards of herself as a faux B-movie star loom over Hollywood & Highland. Jenny Holzer's grids of neon colored posters plaster quotations from revolutionary leaders all over town.

In terms of sheer scope, there are few artists who can compete with Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Over the last 40 years, they have wrapped the Reichstag in fabric and strung a 24-mile-long fence through Sonoma and Marin counties, incorporating tons of steel, millions of square feet of fabric and untold thousands of man-hours. The six documentaries Albert Maysles has made about the couple's projects are modest by comparison, running a mere six hours in all.

MONTE CARLO -- Mia Hanak couldn't get rid of the prince. Hanak, the founding executive director of the Natural World Museum, was escorting Prince Albert II of Monaco through an art exhibit dealing with global warming at its opening here recently, but the prince wasn't interested in racing through the show. Instead, he took in every photo, video and installation -- 40 artists from 25 countries.

SAN FRANCISCO -- A double-edged joke runs through Zhan Wang's exhibition at the Asian Art Museum here. It's about turning rocks into gold. One of many Chinese contemporary artists who have found global fame and fortune in the post-Mao boom, the Beijing sculptor has struck it rich by making stainless-steel facsimiles of the oddly weathered stones known as scholars' rocks.