Galleries

Six years ago, Tim Blum and Jeff Poe opened a 5,000-square-foot gallery on a forgotten strip of South La Cienega Boulevard. This weekend, the team will launch a 21,000-square-foot complex across the street -- at the hub of what has become a major center of contemporary art galleries in and around Culver City. The new Blum & Poe has transformed a grungy hulk of a building into a pristine showcase with sleek galleries illuminated by dramatic skylights, a slightly rougher project space and lots of back rooms for storage, offices, private viewing and entertaining.

Annie Leibovitz had two goals for a proposed series of her famous celebrity photographs, enlarged to 5 feet tall, at a price of $25,000 each. For starters, "She said she would like to make more money," recalled Fifth Avenue gallery owner Edwynn Houk, who devised the plan with her before she took it to an auction house that staged a London exhibition last year with even higher prices for the jumbo photos -- $33,000. But beyond the bottom line, Leibovitz was intent on solidifying the status of her photos as fine art, Houk said.

In the field of American crafts, Carol Sauvion has just about done it all. A former studio potter and teacher with a college degree in art history, Sauvion opened her L.A. crafts shop, Freehand, in 1980. The 3rd Street emporium expanded into two adjacent storefronts as it became a popular outlet for functional works of clay, glass, wood, fiber and metal and a destination for believers in the power and beauty of the handmade. With a loyal clientele, it specializes in relatively timeless ceramics and jewelry rather than following trends.

Dustin and Lindsay Phillips had no idea they were part of the beginning of the end of the Guggenheim's great Las Vegas adventure, a seven-year gamble that is coming to a close with the museum taking its chips -- its paintings -- back home. The Nashville couple hadn't even known there was a Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian. They'd come to town "just for Las Vegas," spotted the Guggenheim's entrance around the corner from the hotel-casino's check-in desk, then wandered in.

A police report was filed, insurance claims were settled and the "Ship of Oblivion," a sculpture that vanished about three years ago, seemed destined to live up to its name. Hence no one was more astonished than Laura Clemons of the Bill Lowe Gallery in Santa Monica when Peruvian artist Margarita Checa's sculpture -- valued at $95,000, Clemons says -- showed up on the gallery's doorstep last week. "In perfect condition," Clemons said.

Originally THE residence of Southern Pacific Railroad heir Henry E. Huntington and his second wife, Arabella, the Huntington Art Gallery, that most genteel Beaux-Arts structure with a Mediterranean twist, first rose up on the Pasadena landscape in 1911. It was an early Southern California foray into domestic grandeur of Rockefellerian proportions.

Joe AND Etsuko Price are back. Twenty-five years ago, they joined with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to fulfill a dream. The Prices donated $5 million to help construct the Pavilion for Japanese Art and promised a spectacular collection of Japanese paintings to the museum. Five years later, the building was completed: an eye-popping, lotus-like structure on the east end of the museum campus.

About three years ago, Takako Yamaguchi started to strip down to basics. Her compositions became simpler, more reductive. The ornately layered and interlocked motifs of her paintings began to separate and stand freely. It is as if she dialed down from orchestral extravagance to the refined purity of a chamber quartet. Eight recent paintings at Cardwell Jimmerson exemplify the change. They are among the L.A.

AT Jancar Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard, it isn't only the art on the walls that captures visitors' attention -- it's the bird's-eye, cityscape view from the 13th-story windows of the gallery's unusual location: the top floor of a 1929 Art Deco office tower in Koreatown. The gallery, which opened in October with an exhibition of Katy Crowe paintings, marks the return of owner Tom Jancar to L.A.'s art scene.

To many passersby, homemade signs asking for money are works of desperation: "Homeless," "Hungry," "Disabled," "Please Help." But to a Santa Ana couple who run a local gallery, the messages are works of art, and Chela and Joseph Banuelos are snapping them up at $5 and $10 apiece. The Banueloses are using the signs to create a performance art show that will premiere later this year at their Amorviejo gallery and, they hope, put a face on the local homeless problem.