Art Exhibits

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.

Remember perestroika? It's back — in an exhibition of political poster art. "Deconstructing Perestroika: Soviet Ideology and its Discontents," at the Craft and Folk Art Museum through May 6, offers 24 original versions of posters neatly lined up on walls. But the hard-hitting images are unruly blasts from the Soviet past. Mostly made from 1987 to 1991, they reflect the period when Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring)

ART With his instantly recognizable style and near epic status in the art world for many decades running, the return of Chuck Close to Los Angeles is suitably grand. Blum & Poe will mount an exhibition of the acclaimed artist's works — not only his first exhibition with the gallery but also his first one-person show in Los Angeles for nearly 20 years — which will occupy three downstairs gallery spaces and will feature portraits of artists Kara Walker, Laurie Anderson and Zhang Huan, musician Paul Simon and arts patron Agnes Gund, as well as the latest batch of Close self-portraits.

Celebrate life by remembering the dead at the storied Hollywood cemetery's 12th annual Dia de los Muertos festivities. Learn about the ancient tradition of honoring the dead with ceremonial altars through lectures and musical performances. Several art exhibits and more than 100 traditional altars will be on display. Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Noon to midnight Sat. $10, children 6 and younger free. (323) 447-0999. http://www.ladayofthedead.com .

Part of the Pacific Standard Time initiative, the exhibition "The House That Sam Built: Sam Maloof and Art in the Pomona Valley, 1945-1985" presents works spanning more than 25 years of the acclaimed woodworker's career, as he emerged as the front runner of the American studio furniture movement. This major survey includes 30 Maloof pieces in addition to 80 works by his friends and colleagues, among them Millard Sheets, Karl Benjamin, Otto and Gertrud Natzler and Kay Sekimachi. Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino.

A few years before he died in 1988, artist Isamu Noguchi established a 24,000-square-foot museum to house representative samples of his seven-decade-long career: paintings, ceramics, furniture, sculptures, landscaping designs and set designs. Noguchi opted to locate the museum in his adopted hometown, New York City. Here on the West Coast, Southern Californians must rely on individual installations to view Noguchi's work. The Laguna Art Museum offers a chance to see a different perspective on Noguchi's accomplishments with "Noguchi: California Legacy," which devotes three compact galleries to a sampling of his work from 1979 to 1986.

In one corner of the 2,400-square-foot studio, a toddler in a polka-dot dress is making her glittery toy unicorn prance in front of a camera. In another, teenagers are filming themselves break dancing in front of a green screen. Meanwhile, over at the equipment center, a couple is checking out a Canon digital camera for a feature-length project. Museums are normally about exhibiting art, rather than giving patrons the tools to make it. But this summer at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary downtown, a film pop-up workshop is putting all sorts of filmmaking equipment, plus lessons and resource materials, into the hands of the people -- for free.

Few sculptures by Sol LeWitt actually resemble skyscrapers. But by installing 27 works by the artist in City Hall Park, in view of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Public Art Fund has put LeWitt's art into a playful and powerful dialogue with the city's architecture. Here, a pared sculpture of a white cube looks like some sort of building block or else the grid of a window. A pyramid form that might in a museum seem a celebration of art for art's sake seems more like an elegant real-estate solution.

Through June 19 Asian Contemporary Art Where: CENTERpiece Gallery (CityCenter) Highlights: Part of CityCenter's commitment to bringing quality art to Las Vegas, this exhibit features works in various media by leading artists from China, Japan and Korea. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. daily. Info: (702) 739-3314, http://www.centerpiecelv.com Through July 4 Letters to Troops Where: Palazzo Highlights: Among red, white and blue floral displays in the resort's waterfall atrium, guests are encouraged to write a letter to a soldier, to be distributed by the USO. Info: http://www.palazzo.com Through mid-July Storytime in the Square Where: Town Square Park (South Strip)