Artists

Downtown Los Angeles has seen its share of pop-up art galleries and restaurants. On a recent afternoon, it saw its first pop-up burka fitting. "Excuse me, ma'am, I'm working on an art project," said Marie Rim, a soft-spoken 33-year-old artist from Philadelphia. She went table to table at Grand Central Market carrying a flimsy, full-length mirror from Target under one arm and a hand-painted, black-and-yellow sign in the other: "Burka Fitting. See How It Feels to Wear One. All Welcome.

In the spring of 1985, Linda and John Sohus vanished. The bubbly 29-year-old Linda had told friends she and her husband were going on a two-week trip east for an interview John had with the government for a secret job. The couple were never seen again. PHOTOS: Clark Rockefeller investigation Their friends and family were immediately suspicious. They said the couple would never abandon Linda's beloved cats at a pet hotel or leave behind John's elderly mother, whom the young couple were living with in the upscale community of San Marino.

AUSTIN, Texas -- It was the final day of the South by Southwest music festival and conference and Echo Park-based band NO  had just completed its last performance of the week, this one on the rooftop of a grocery store. It was the band's eighth show in five days, or maybe its ninth -- lead singer Bradley Hanan Carter, his voice slightly strained after the performance, had lost count.  NO was just one of about 2,500 bands performing in Austin at this year's festival, hoping to snare the attention of approximately 10,000 registrants who each day had more than 100 stages of music to choose from.

AUSTIN, Texas - As South by Southwest enters its home stretch - the music festival and conference will conclude Saturday evening - the temptations become harder to resist. The event, now in its 27th year, was once a showcase for the unsigned and the independent, but Friday offered opportunities to see Green Day, Depeche Mode, Sleigh Bells and Usher up and close and personal. Arguably even more significant, however, is South by Southwest's enduring ability to offer a glimpse at artists who are not yet celebrities.

Their new home has its own $2-million live theater. So it was fitting that the opening act Wednesday for actors and artists moving into the NoHo Senior Arts Colony was an improvisation. Operators of the 127-unit building had come prepared with a 4-foot-long pair of scissors for their grand opening, but they forgot to order up a ceremonial ribbon. "Do we have a ribbon? Do we have some caution tape? Anything?" asked Tim Carpenter, head of a nonprofit organization called EngAGE that will be in charge of arts classes at the $42-million Magnolia Boulevard development.

AUSTIN, Texas - Tuesday afternoon at South by Southwest was dedicated to electronic mavens and digital gatekeepers, arguably the new rock stars of the music industry in 2013. Spotify founder Daniel Ek was given a space at a 2,400-capacity auditorium at the Long Center for the Performing Arts for an interview, while later, electronic artists Deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin spoke while hundreds were locked out of their panel at the Austin Convention Center. “Your best bet is to watch it when it's online in about a month,” said a SXSW staff member to those of us near the back of the line.

When Laura Owens was looking for a studio that could double as an exhibition space for her first show in L.A. since 2003, she considered a variety of buildings. There was an out-of-business Glidden paint shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and a small defunct church on Melrose nearby. But those spaces seemed too specific or loaded architecturally. So it was something of a revelation when she first visited 356 South Mission Road, a 12,000-square-foot stand-alone industrial building in Boyle Heights that had originally housed a lithography studio in the '40s and later served as storage space for pianos - including Liberace's.

Despite the chicken-in-every-pot hype over consumer-level 3-D printers, the technology still has a long way to go to be usable, or useful, for the average Joe. Designing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional computer screen is no simple task, especially for those unskilled in computer-assisted design or software. And for most people, there's no compelling reason to make a unique object from scratch when mass-produced equivalents are cheaper and simpler. But for some artists, 3-D printing has been a revelation.

MOCA has been known as "the artist's museum" since its founding in 1979 because of hands-on support from its creative community. So what do L.A. artists think about the news of a possible acquisition by LACMA, which would create a combined organization run by LACMA Director Michael Govan? Here are some early reactions. John Baldessari, a former MOCA trustee said: "LACMA is an encyclopedic museum, but they are weak when it comes to contemporary art, and this would make their holdings in contemporary art better than the Metropolitan [Museum of Art in New York]

It is a rare thing to witness the creative process. But in the excellent new documentary "Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters," filmmaker Ben Shapiro gives us fly-on-the-wall access over a 10-year period to an acclaimed artist as he envisions, designs and executes his surreal commentary on small-town American life in the form of an epic photo installation, "Beneath the Roses. " Bit by bit Shapiro uses Crewdson's musings to piece together the way he moves from a jumble of thoughts to the moment he shoots.