Art Los Angeles

"COLA: 1998-99 Individual Artists Grants" is the third exhibition of work by the dozen Los Angeles-based artists selected annually as grant recipients by the city's Cultural Affairs Department. (COLA is an acronym for City of L.A.) The $10,000 grants fund the production of new work by a variety of artists selected by peer panels on the basis of merit, while the required group show at the Municipal Art Gallery offers the public a chance to see what the artists have made.

The big stone needed a little rocking. So the homeless man gently nudged it left and right, and then front to back. The basketball-size hunk of granite seesawed for a moment before coming to a stop--perfectly balanced on top of a delicately stacked pile of stones. Fernando Anglero carefully pulled away his hands and slowly stepped back. "It gives me such pleasure when I find the center," he said. "It brings me peace."

Kent Twitchell, standing on a hotel roof, used his left hand to blast scorching hot air on what had been a mysterious-looking grandmother. With his right hand he took a metal spatula and dug in, scraping away paint that had hidden her face for more than a decade. "She's looking better now," he said Saturday, noting the return of a pinkish tone to the face. "It takes a lot of patience, but she'll be back up soon."

Ramiro Salcedo steps onto Broadway between 2nd and 3rd streets downtown. It's the Christmas season, but you sure wouldn't know it. No dancing mechanical toys in storefront windows. Only stereos blasting rap and hip-hop. No "Happy Holidays" greeting up on the old Million Dollar Theater marquee. No Santa anywhere. For sure, it's not like the old days. For a moment, Salcedo thinks back to the Christmases of yesteryear when streetcars clanged down the boulevard, filled with carolers.

Getty Conservation Institute Director Miguel Angel Corzo predicted, in a recent interview, that by the end of the year funding will finally be in place for a long-delayed venture: The $3.5-million conservation of "America Tropical," the controversial Olvera Street mural that was created in 1932 by celebrated Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros.

Some drew the ducks in Echo Park Lake. Others painted images of the neighborhood Pioneer Market. These works, by students from Logan Street, Mayberry and Elysian Park elementary schools, which have no art teachers, hung in a makeshift gallery at El Centro del Pueblo on Lemoyne Avenue during the third annual Echo Park Arts Festival. The show was part of a program Saturday to bring art to students who have no formal art classes in school.

A landlocked cabin cruiser that sits on its nose has set a Los Angeles neighborhood on its ear. The 35-foot onetime luxury boat is balanced precariously on its bow in a vacant lot in Echo Park, a residential area about a mile north of the downtown business district. The empty space has been turned into an evolving outdoor art gallery by established local artists intent on displaying their work to those unlikely to visit conventional gallery and museum exhibitions.

In Los Angeles, the good things often slip away in the night. One morning you head for your favorite breakfast spot only to discover it's been turned into a used-clothing store. No one seems to know why. It's just got switched. When I first came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, I remember walking past the old Sunkist building in downtown and thinking how perfect it seemed.

During some four decades as an increasingly major center for contemporary art, Los Angeles has had its share of talented dealers. Their galleries have provided essential public platforms for artists and their work. This week, the city lost one of the most gifted when Stuart Regen succumbed to the ravages of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Regen was barely 39, but in slightly more than eight years' time his West Hollywood gallery had assumed a critical position in L.A.'s burgeoning art-ecology.