Art Exhibits

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.

You don't have to be queer to be a queer artist. Take Kara Walker. At the UCLA Hammer Museum, her beautifully installed traveling exhibition of drawings, video animations and black-paper-silhouette murals is nothing if not queer. Walker's work gains its captivating power from a cheerfully ferocious deviation from the norms that typically characterize discussion of African American life. Her subject is black experience in a proud nation whose prosperity and might were substantially built on the degrading legacy of black slavery.

AMHERST, Mass. -- They're not the "Mona Lisa" or "Whistler's Mother," but images of the Cat in the Hat, the Very Hungry Caterpillar and other icons of illustrated children's books are gaining respect in highbrow art circles. Once seen as fun but forgettable, the genre is now being featured in mainstream museums and dissected in college art courses. And as respect for children's book art grows, the money follows. Buyers are purchasing the illustrations as investments and philanthropists are stepping up, as in the case of the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, which recently received a $1-million gift, its largest donation since it opened in 2002.

OFF to the side, near the floorboards, rests a freshly cut silhouette. Not yet entirely separated from the whole, this single sheet of paper looks innocent enough: flat black paper, a trail of flowing, eloquent blade cuts sweeping through it. It lies in wait, soon to be set in place, affixed to a gallery wall amid the ordered chaos of preparation -- crates being unpacked, lighting tested, wall text configured and a boom box booming -- just two days...

So, you think it's easy to organize a big show on the history of California video? Just round up a bunch of old tapes and let them roll? Consider "Philo T. Farnsworth Video Obelisk," made in 1970 by Skip Sweeney. Part experimental theater, part political commentary, part tribute to a TV inventor, it's a funky period piece meant to be screened on a tower of seven video monitors stacked on shelves of a rolling cart. And it's one of many troublesome pieces in "California Video," opening this weekend at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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.

MANY artists would envy the kind of exposure Carolyn Castano is receiving this month. The L.A.-based painter and drawer has four large-scale creations featured in "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement" at LACMA. And beginning Saturday, she will unveil a series of video work in a solo show at SB London in Silver Lake. Castano describes her body of work as containing elements of feminist, pop and Latino art. "I've grown up with all of these influences. But I'm not carrying a flag for any one movement," she says.

The "Belles Heures" of the Duke of Berry -- a prime example of French medieval manuscript illumination and a highly prized possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York -- will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from Nov. 18 to Feb. 8. And thanks to the Met's recent publication of a facsimile edition and related conservation work, which required dissembling the sumptuously illustrated prayer book, visitors will be able to see much...