Art Exhibits

Long the stepchild of a Eurocentric art world, American art is finding new favor at home as a growing number of institutions showcase work from Colonial times to World War II. Today, the Huntington in San Marino will join the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums around the country when it unveils a renovated and expanded gallery devoted to American art.

This year's exhibition of artworks by the winners of the city of Los Angeles' $10,000 Individual Artist Fellowships is better than ever. The sculptures, videos, photographs and one whopper of a painting by nine artists deliver a satisfying mixture of ambition and accomplishment. In nearly all the pieces, these qualities play off each other in ways that make for lively exchanges and leave plenty of room for viewer participation.

Gregorio Luke knows that he can't beat Hollywood. So, in a sense, he's going to join it. During his years as director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, the Mexican-born cultural impresario was forever trying to bring high culture to the broadest possible audience.

Consider the banana. All iconic yellow peel and soft, sweet inside -- you can find it at the nearest Trader Joe's for as little as 19 cents apiece. But how much have you really thought about how it got there? Now the ubiquitous and perishable fruit finds itself the focus of appreciation in two new exhibitions opening this week from Los Angeles-based collective Fallen Fruit. The first, "United Fruit," opened Tuesday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Media executive Dean Valentine began collecting art in the early 1990s and, like many people who develop such an affliction while also in the possession of great wealth, he seems to have acquired a lot of it. It is an unwieldy enterprise, one can well imagine, necessitating large quantities of climate-controlled storage space -- the dreariest sort of purgatory for an up-and-coming artist -- and in 2007 Valentine and his wife, Amy Adelson, had...

Design Loves Art. Say what? For some L.A. art dealers, the contemporary art program opening Thursday at the Pacific Design Center is rent-free space in a different part of town. For those who have lost galleries to the recession, it's a chance to go public again. For artists, it's an opportunity to do something big or be seen by a new audience at the enormous Melrose Avenue building known as the Blue Whale. And for the PDC -- which started the whole thing as part of its new fine arts mission -- the six-month project is an attempt to forge connections between art and design while filling empty spaces intended for the interior design trade.

When a wildfire swept into the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden last May, it left behind a smoldering mountain of debris. Except for one shovel, flames destroyed every tool the gardeners had accumulated over 83 years. Thousands of plants were gone, and thousands of botanical volumes too. A century-old, 9,500-square-foot house, eight of the garden's nine vehicles, the director's home, the split-rail fences lining tranquil paths -- all were turned to cinders. Until a Los Angeles nonprofit, ART from the ashes, saw a transforming opportunity, it was rubble without a cause.

For years, Kim Cho-gang kept her oddball art collection out of sight, hidden away in a basement. She admits hers is a rather unusual assemblage: wood carvings, paintings, puppets and embroidery -- all celebrating the lowly chicken. There are roosters and hens big and small, birds depicted clucking, scratching and crowing. Since 2006, these works have had a public place to roost. Setting aside her lifelong dream of opening a child-care center, the 70-year-old former public health professor runs the Seoul Museum of Chicken Art, a private facility containing all things fowl.

Bifocals resting on his nose, Chris Burden mounted the scrawny Benelli motorcycle and kicked the machine to life. Revving the motor in first gear to make sure the 41-year-old beast would stay awake, he upshifted to second, then third, forcing the rear wheel of the tiny bike to spin faster and faster against the big wheel with which it was making contact. With the motorcycle revved to 50 miles per hour, Burden's graying hair fluttered from the wind generated by the enormous metal flywheel.

If you collect contemporary paintings, the J. Paul Getty Museum just might want to show them. At least, that's the odd conclusion drawn from the Getty's puzzling announcement this week that it has borrowed for three months Lucian Freud's small 1949-50 "Still Life With Aloe" from local collector Michael Lynton, chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, for the third installment of the museum's "Interjections" series. The Freud went on view in the South Pavilion on Tuesday, juxtaposed with a Jean-Simeon Chardin still life from about 1759 and one by Giovanna Garzoni from the late 1640s.