Exhibits

Construction will begin Wednesday on the $5.7-million, 130,000-square-foot headquarters of The Exhibit Place, a builder of custom trade show exhibits and The Exhibit Pro, a distributor of trade show exhibits. A March completion is scheduled for the project at 12442 Knott Ave., Garden Grove. The architect is Architects Orange, in Orange, and the contractor is Oltmans Construction Co., Whittier.

A change is in store for the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens’ main display of its rare books, manuscripts, drawings, photography and other literary and historical  holdings -- including a Gutenberg Bible from the 1450s, a 1623 First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays and a gigantic first edition copy of John James Audubon’s “Birds of America.

An eclectic collection of rare William Mulholland memorabilia, honoring the engineer who brought Owens Valley water to Los Angeles, is on display through January at Cal State Northridge. The exhibit includes family photos dating back to the 1890s, a hand-painted wooden "Mulholland Drive" sign from the 1920s and the academic hood Mulholland wore when he received an honorary doctorate from UC Berkeley in 1914.

With a last round of roster cuts looming ahead of this summer's London Olympics, U.S. Water Polo Coach Terry Schroeder will get one final look at his team in action when it plays a series of exhibitions in Southern California against Croatia and Hungary, the defending Olympic champion, beginning Saturday at Newport Harbor High School. Schroeder needs to trim three players from a 16-man roster that includes 11 former Olympians, among them three-time Olympians Tony Azevedo, the team captain, and Ryan Bailey.

Starting Sunday and continuing through September it will be reigning cats, and more cats, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. "Cats! Wild to Mild," a new exhibit developed by UCLA biologist and Calabasas resident Blaire Van Valkenburgh, will debut this weekend, offering Los Angeles residents the most comprehensive look at felines ever to be displayed in a museum, officials said. "Everybody has a cat.

Two-foot-high portraits of women ravaged by alcoholism will dot the campus of Cal State Northridge on Monday, dramatically kicking off National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week. Forty-four of San Diego photographer Molly Lowe's works, augmented by handwritten tales of each subject's own battle with alcohol, will make up the show "Women in Recovery," and begin three days of education on the liabilities of heavy drinking.

The Mission San Juan Capistrano is featuring a special exhibit this weekend on the role that President Abraham Lincoln played in the mission's 220-year history. The exhibit includes such artifacts as the mate to John Wilkes Booth's gun, used to assassinate Lincoln; an 1865 newspaper report on the assassination; and original documents signed by Lincoln to deed the mission to the Catholic Church.

Two 1940s wooden barracks in Wyoming will be dismantled and brought to Los Angeles by midweek as part of an exhibit commemorating the wartime internment of Japanese Americans more than 50 years ago. The 60- and 40-foot-long buildings were among those hastily constructed to house up to 10,000 Americans with Japanese ancestry at Heart Mountain Camp--one of 11 run by the government during World War II, said Chris Komai, spokesman for the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo.

A promised $38-million donation to the Smithsonian Institution was withdrawn Monday, forcing the cancellation of a planned new exhibit that critics alleged damaged the institution's integrity. The announcement came less than three weeks after 170 activists and scholars complained that Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small, the institution's chief executive, has commercialized the museums. The Catherine B.

At first glance, the sloping lawn of the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Sepulveda looks as if overnight it had been transformed into a national cemetery. Small white markers, perfectly spaced, stand in long rows on the freshly mowed grass. But they are not gravestones. A closer look reveals not smooth, flat marble, but human forms in plaster. They are torsos of women. Some are healthy and a few are pregnant.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - A third day of jury deliberations in the campaign finance trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards passed without a verdict Tuesday, with the jurors due back in federal court Wednesday morning. The jury of eight men and four women requested two more prosecution exhibits, bringing to more than a dozen the number of exhibits sought by jurors since deliberations began Friday. The documents requested Tuesday were letters to or about Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, now 101, a billionaire heiress and Edwards supporter who gave $725,000 that was used to help hide the candidate's mistress during his failed campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Re "Court takes up bid of illegal immigrant to be attorney," May 17 Sergio Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who passed the State Bar of California exams to practice law, is a perfect example of someone who would benefit from a federal Dream Act. Not only is he a model citizen, he's a smart one too. Why should this young man wait up to 15 years to become legal and then a lawyer? He should be admitted to the bar now, and a certificate of citizenship should be attached.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - The jurors who will decide the fate of former presidential candidate John Edwards deliberated for more than four hours Friday before breaking for the weekend in a trial focused on complex campaign finance laws and lurid details of Edwards' extramarital affair. The jury of eight men and four women must decide whether Edwards knowingly conspired to violate federal election laws as part of a scheme to cover up his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter during his campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Culture Monster will occasionally visit museum exhibits dealing with history, anthropology, science or sociology. The show : "Visions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad Across America, 1840-1880" at theHuntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. The goods : The Huntington archives supply 98% of the exhibits, from the resolutions of eight Eastern states to build it, to a railway worker's letter home to his mother and the ledgers workers signed (one with Chinese characters)

As its 75th birthday fast approaches, the Golden Gate Bridge is getting a little birthday present. Even though about 40 million vehicles cross it each year and visitors come in droves daily to admire and photograph it, the spectacular span has never had a visitor center. That is, until this month. "The bridge experience up to this point has just really been self-guided and a photo opportunity," said David Shaw, vice president of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. "Now there's this bridge pavilion, which is a really nice welcome center.

The signs of penguins in love were unmistakable at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on Monday: puffing their chests, standing on tiptoes while clicking their beaks together, belting out donkey-like brays. The colony of 13 Magellanic penguins, which recently moved from holding pens to a new $1.5-million exhibit that opens to the public Thursday, has seethed with courting rituals since the arrival of breeding season. One pair is already tending to a newly hatched chick.

Did Virginia really have slaves? Is that Lincoln's handwriting? And that sloppy blotch near Abe's signature, is that white-out, perhaps covering up one "thenceforward" too many? The questions came from children huddling in the dimly-lit National Archives rotunda, dwarfed by murals representing the seminal events of America's founding: the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.

A bid by car manufacturers to protect trade secrets during an environmental trial ran into strong resistance from a federal judge in Burlington, Vt. The automakers are suing the state of Vermont over regulations to limit emissions of carbon dioxide from tailpipes. The emissions contribute to global warming. The Vermont law is based on California rules that are the target of an auto industry lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Fresno. Car companies said they needed to protect trade secrets.

"What's the difference between Jewish and Chinese mah jong?" the protagonist of Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" asks her mother about the quintessential Chinese game. Her mother replies, "Entirely different kind of playing.... Jewish mah jong, they watch only for their own tile, play only with their eyes. " "Project Mah Jongg," a colorful exhibition opening Thursday (through Sept. 2) at the Skirball Cultural Center, tells the Jewish side of the story. With vintage photographs, souvenirs, playing guides and other ephemera, and of course examples of the tiles themselves, the exhibition traces how the game was enthusiastically adopted and integrated into the social life of Jewish women in the 20th century.

NEW YORK - "A snake swallowing an elephant" is how the Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong described himself. The snake was the Chinese artist in him, and the elephant was Western art. The stylistic fusion that made him one of China'sleading modern artists is on view at the Asia Society Museum here in "Revolutionary Ink: The Paintings of Wu Guanzhong," which also reflects the artist's long life amid the turmoil of China's 20th century. Wu died in 2010 at 90, and these works from his last decades - depicting nature and architecture, some more naturalistic, others mostly abstract - show his easy cohabitation of two cultural hemispheres.