Exhibitions

In her first West Coast show, "Explosure," photographer Tierney Gearon is a loving matchmaker of moments. But bringing together compatible images would make for a dull marriage, so she conjoins the unlikeliest of pairs through double exposure. Little girls dancing are superimposed on a background of brown bears from a museum diorama. A woman holds a white peacock, the field where she stands dissolving into the ripples of a beach.

Bump Picasso. Forget Rococo. The Quai Branly Museum, a steel-and-glass palace on the Seine River, has news for the culture world: "Three Little Bops" is art. The Looney Tunes cartoon from 1957 retells the Three Little Pigs as a jazz fable with music by trumpeter Shorty Rogers, a luminary of the West Coast school. The Big Bad Wolf is a lousy trumpeter trying to sit in with a swinging trio of pigs. He gets the bum's rush, blows down two clubs and ends up in hell after a mishap with TNT.

Some of Kent Twitchell's murals are best known because they no longer exist. His "The Old Lady of the Freeway" greeted travelers along the Hollywood Freeway from 1974 until it was painted out by a billboard company in 1986. More recently, "Ed Ruscha Monument," a six-story portrait of artist Ruscha on the side of a government-owned building in downtown L.A., was painted over, in June 2006.

She was acting by the time she was 3 years old. Was there ever a question that Drew Barrymore wouldn't go into the family business? Actually, it's more like a dynasty. Members of her family were performers before the American Revolutionary War. Her Oscar-winning great-aunt was Ethel Barrymore. Academy Award-winning Lionel Barrymore was her great-uncle. Her grandfather was none other than movie and stage great John Barrymore -- a.k.a. the Great Profile.

Over the course of a career that has variously infuriated anti-graffiti task force officers and enthralled Japanese street couture collectors -- meaning winning props from hip-hop superstars Kanye West and Pharrell Williams -- the pop artist KAWS has carved a unique niche for himself. The soft-spoken 34-year-old Jersey City native, born Brian Donnelly, created a new business model that bridges the high-low culture divide in ways that would have made steam come out of Andy Warhol's ears.

The long-awaited golden monkeys from China have some bad news: They're not coming to the Los Angeles Zoo. The arrival of the exotic blue-faced simians was part of a deal struck during a 2002 trade trip to China by former Mayor James K. Hahn. He wanted pandas but was offered the loan of three golden monkeys instead. The deal, however, became mired in the intricacies of global panda politics, something mostly beyond the zoo's control.

It used to be called the Freeway Series and it was as much a part of the Southland sports scene as Rams football and title fights at the Olympic Auditorium. The Rams moved to St. Louis in 1995, however, and the Olympic played host to its final sporting event three years ago. And now the three-game spring training series between the Dodgers and Angels appears ready to fade away as well.

It is a chilling statistic: 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa have been orphaned by AIDS. But the figure alone cannot begin to convey the toll of a pandemic that continues to punish vast swaths of the continent. For that, consider the stories of four children featured in an interactive exhibit -- "World Vision Experience: AIDS" -- at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles' road to the 21st century has been rocky -- and kooky -- according to an unusual exhibition that opened Wednesday at the downtown Central Library. More than 100 maps reflecting changes and growth during the city's existence are being displayed in a colorful exhibit called "L.A. Unfolded." There's the mysterious "Mesmer City," shown in 1924 as prosperously thriving between Culver City and Mar Vista.

It takes piles of money and power to commission projects destined to become pinnacles of art history. Sometimes it also takes a bit of royal boredom. Just listen to Timothy B. Husband, curator of the Cloisters Collection of medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He's providing some background on "The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry," an exhibition opening Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum. "Jean de France, duc de Berry, was son, brother and uncle of successive kings of France.