Folk Art

High and low culture, the sacred and the profane, the esoteric and the pop collide in the works of Einar and Jamex de la Torre, brothers who have collaborated closely as artists for 20 years. Although they started working in glass, shaping figurative work that often borrowed themes from their Mexican roots, they have moved toward larger sculpture and installation work, several of which anchor their retrospective, "Borderlandia: Cultural Topography by Einar and Jamex de la Torre" at the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

When Aaron Kramer was a boy, he would ride his bike through the streets of his Chicago neighborhood on the evening before trash pickup, trawling for interesting discards. "Thursday night was my gold mine night as a kid," he recalls. Settled in Santa Monica for the last dozen years, Kramer, 46, still keeps an eye out for underappreciated treasures, such as the wooden brooms he noticed poking out of garbage cans, their handles worn from repeated use. Whenever he saw one, he'd throw it in the back of his van, and after a while, he'd collected enough to create a headboard out of them.

A concert under the stars stirs up images of picnic dinners and sparkling wines for audiences. But for dancers, outdoor venues are a unique canvas, offering site-specific possibilities and their own set of challenges. Now through October, Los Angeles' two major outdoor theaters — the Ford Amphitheatre and the Hollywood Bowl — will be showcasing 20 different dance companies, each customizing the space to match artistic vision and practicality. The 1,245-seat Ford, with its bi-level performance area, terraced steps and lush trees and vegetation, has proved to be a perfect, well, stomping ground for Kultura Philippine Folk Arts.

It used to be so simple. A book had an author; a film, a screenwriter and director; a piece of music, a composer and performer; a painting or sculpture, an artist; a play, a playwright. You could assume that the work actually erupted more or less full-blown from these folks. In addition, the book, film, musical composition, painting or play was a discrete object or event that existed in time and space. You could hold it in your hands or watch or listen to it in a theater or your living room.

Eastside night crawlers know the work of Cole Gerst: His images of animals in serene, modernist settings are familiar even to people who don't know his name. Birds, deer and expansive trees thrive on his T-shirts, his design for Café de Leche and the York pub, and on witty posters for shows at Club Spaceland. But Gerst's latest work is less overtly cool. The new paintings, prints and mixed media at Ghettogloss Gallery through April 28 depict a more perilous universe: The animals -- particularly birds -- are still there, but the tranquil abstraction is gone.

For Robert M. Place, Tarot scholar and illustrator, the main function of the Tarot is not fortunetelling -- instead, a reading can yield self-knowledge valuable for dealing with the future. "When we're using the cards," he says, "we're allowing our unconscious to communicate with us -- perhaps you would say a higher self." The cards also represent an artistic tradition, and the show he's curated for the Craft and Folk Art Museum, "The Fool's Journey: The History and Symbolism of the Tarot" (opening today)

As children of the Great Depression, Jerome and Evelyn Ackerman had modest dreams: They wanted to own their home and decorate it with beautiful things. In 1952, the couple left Detroit to start a mom-and-pop arts studio in Culver City, and in the decades that followed they produced hundreds of handmade ceramics, tile mosaics, woodcarvings and rugs -- affordable home furnishings that, starting Sunday, will be elevated to museum pieces.

Though it is called Global Bazaar @ CAFAM, the Craft and Folk Art Museum's sale next Friday and April 4 boasts plenty of local talent. Vendors of handmade, fair-trade goods include Pasadena and Westwood ceramists, Marina del Rey glassblower Liz Marx and Venice recycling artist Aaron Kramer, who weaves coffee stirrers into lighting globes. Kramer will also display "Boats," shown here, a sculptural wall installation composed of 33 easy-to-mount wooden vessels forged from thrift-shop salad bowls.

Journalist and photographer Iason Athanasiadis has set out to alter how Westerners perceive Iran with his photo exhibition "Exploring the Other: Contemporary Iran" at L.A.'s Craft and Folk Art Museum, today through March 29. "I wanted to use this opportunity to show how varied Iran is -- what it's really like," said Athanasiadis. "A lot of people don't know that Iran is the birthplace of the most lenient form of Islam." Now based in Tehran, Athanasiadis was born and raised in Athens.

One of Ulysses Davis' granddaughters has said the artist used to sit in front of the television on election night, a block of wood in hand, ready to start carving a bust of the winner once the election was called. Until his death in 1990, Davis added each new president to the collection of 40 busts that has become his best-known work. The works are part of an exhibition called "The Treasure of Ulysses Davis" at Atlanta's High Museum of Art.