Artists

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.

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.

SRINAGAR, India -- At times it was enough just to stay alive, or to keep from breaking down when friends were dying and soldiers came knocking. Ugliness replaced beauty, and the finer things -- art, music, poetry -- seemed unbearable luxuries, like a rich dessert on an empty stomach.

The MAN in the two-tone Ray-Ban glasses looked familiar, but Lawrence Shapiro couldn't place him. He was cheerfully holding out a box of Italian cookies to anyone walking through the door of Bergamot Station's Track 16 Gallery -- which was where Shapiro happened to find himself -- and his shock of gray hair and youthful bounce twanged something in Shapiro's memory. The cookie bearer introduced himself as Robbie Conal.

When last we left our embattled arts activists at Self Help Graphics, they were on the verge of eviction from their longtime headquarters in East L.A. Even some true believers were ready to count out the struggling community-based institution that has been a beacon for Chicano art for almost four decades. But the group is still alive and kicking as it prepares for its biggest event of the year, the Day of the Dead on Nov. 2, with a display of colorful altars, a procession and a concert.

It has been a tough peace for Ali Salem. His plays don't have a stage. Intellectuals shun him; the writers union refuses to pay his pension. He sits in a cafe window, typing on his laptop and defending his choice long ago to cross the border into Israel and make friends. Egypt and Israel made peace in 1979, but that treaty remains as agitating to Egyptian artists and intellectuals as a sliver of glass beneath the skin.

A North Carolina artist intrigued by the public obsession with celebrity has found herself feeding that obsession with a painting of actress Angelina Jolie as the Virgin Mary hovering over a Wal-Mart checkout line. Kate Kretz has painted for 20 years, but none of her previous work has garnered the attention given "Blessed Art Thou," which showed this weekend at Art Miami, an annual exposition of modern and contemporary art.

HIS T-shirts read "Beautiful Mogadishu," with a hand-painted background of a Somali flag or a camel. Foreigners in this wasted capital buy them as souvenirs, chuckling at the irony. But the man behind the shirt isn't laughing. They call him Happy Arts, and the Mogadishu-born artist said he uses his craft to spread hope in a city that has seen little.

A 450-year-old receipt has provided proof that Michelangelo kept a private room in St. Peter's Basilica while working as the pope's chief architect, Vatican experts said. While going through archives for an exhibit on the basilica's 500th anniversary last year, researchers came across an entry for a key to a chest "in the room in St. Peter's where Master Michelangelo retires."

It's easy to miss La Mano Press, hidden away as it is among the factories and warehouses that line North Main Street just east of the Los Angeles River. And inside the corrugated metal building, it's almost as easy to miss Artemio Rodriguez among the giant gray machines that crowd the studio floor. Rodriguez is not tall. He's 34 but looks younger, despite a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His nervousness peels off a few years. When sitting, his legs bob with agitation.