Art Exhibits

Originally THE residence of Southern Pacific Railroad heir Henry E. Huntington and his second wife, Arabella, the Huntington Art Gallery, that most genteel Beaux-Arts structure with a Mediterranean twist, first rose up on the Pasadena landscape in 1911. It was an early Southern California foray into domestic grandeur of Rockefellerian proportions.

There's something about Jimi Hendrix's confident grin -- so ingenuous and inviting -- that disarms the observer and plays against stereotype, as do so many of the images in "Hendrix Revealed," a new exhibit of Hendrix photographs that opened May 29 and will continue nearly a month, the largest display of them ever mounted in the U.S. The website Celebrity Vault in Beverly Hills is hosting the collection in association with U.K.-based Raj Prem Fine Art Photography.

TWO OF Cuba's artistic exports -- 20th century Modernist Wifredo Lam and emerging artist Carlos Luna -- have landed side by side at Long Beach's Museum of Latin American Art, in shows offering two variations on the theme of Cuban identity. "The identity of being Cuban is not a one-way road," says painter and sculptor Carlos Luna, via his wife and translator, Claudia.

LOS ANGELES art dealer and curator Patricia Hamilton points to a decadent and colorful two-frame Indian cartoon with English-language text. "It's like a surreal drama," she says of the work of the artist Chitra Ganesh. "She gets a cartoon, photographs it, draws into it and then adds all the text. She adds the drama." It would be easy to label Ganesh the Indian Roy Lichtenstein or Max Ernst. A bit too easy.

When CalArts faculty member Louise Sandhaus pondered West Coast design history for a book proposal five years ago, she theorized that California's freewheeling graphics sensibility might be directly connected to the very ground we stand, slip and slide on.

I'm no fan of public art museums exhibiting private collections. The negatives so far outweigh the positives that such shows hurt, rather than help, a museum's mission. The latest example is "Los Angelenos/Chicano Painters of L.A.: Selections From the Cheech Marin Collection," which opened recently at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The clumsy title is the least of its problems. "Los Angelenos" is a smaller, more focused version of "Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge."

WHAT IS "Jekyll Island"? A reality television series that emphasizes survival skills? A new ride at Six Flags Magic Mountain? Despite evoking any number of pop culture references, "Jekyll Island" is in fact this year's title and theme for the annual summer group show at Honor Fraser gallery on La Cienega. The exhibition, opening Saturday, features 41 pieces, including videos, paintings and drawings by 15 artists.

Despite ALL the well-worn warnings preaching otherwise, how we imagine the world, feel and very worth of a book often has much to do with its cover. The book industry spends millions attempting its own game of clairvoyance, trying to predict what will push certain buttons; what will spur investment of not just money but time. However, what intuitively makes a book the right book, if one only has the cover to go by? What sort of imagery both piques interest and reflects discernment.

AS KORI NEWKIRK stands amid his very mixed-media retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, it's not easy, he confesses, to explain what it all means.

Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca has two dominant character traits. It's a hub of artistic creativity, known for the superlative caliber of its rugs, whimsical carved animals and brittle black pottery. And it's a hotbed of political discontent, a long-oppressed region whose heavily indigenous population chafes under crushing poverty, ethnic discrimination and autocratic political rule.