Graphic Arts

The Pasadena Unified School District and local graphic arts firms are set to begin an apprenticeship program to teach graphic arts skills to high school students. The agreement, which is expected to be approved formally by the school board Tuesday, calls for establishing a Graphic Arts Academy at Pasadena High School in September, 1991, said John Porter, director of the district's secondary instruction.

Chicago real estate developer Dwight Cleveland has donated over 1,000 vintage movies posters from his collection to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The posters, documenting the studio era of "B" movie filmmaking from the first half of the 20th century, feature a variety of genres including westerns ("The Revenge Rider" and "Heart of the Golden West"), war films ("Friendly Enemies" and "Somewhere in France") and musicals ("Breakfast in Hollywood" and "Girl From Rio")

If you squinted your eyes, Magoo Boyer looked to be wearing a paisley dress shirt. Upon closer inspection, it was no shirt. It was Boyer's skin, virtually every inch of it tattooed with dragons, flowers and scary faces. Even closer inspection revealed one of the faces to be a snarling dog. This was not a tattoo, however, but Boyer's Chihuahua, Gypsy, who was tucked into the left inside pocket of his leather vest. Still closer inspection revealed a tattoo inside Gypsy's left ear.

Catching up with Ed Fuentes isn't easy. A running start helps. The 52-year-old Fuentes - I call him the human cyclone - moves so fast on so many fronts in any given day that whiplash is possible: photographer, muralist, blogger, modern-day historian, humorist. He briefly touched down in the Arts District last week. But it wasn't that simple, of course. Like one of the Weather Channel's "storm chasers," I tracked him from where he was interviewing a muralist in East Los Angeles to a site just off Alameda Street in downtown L.A., where he had been hired to shoot publicity stills for a local theater company.

A lithograph by Los Angeles artist Marvin Harden has been commissioned by the UCLA Friends of the Graphic Arts to benefit the Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts at UCLA. Harden holds a master of fine arts degree from UCLA and has won awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983 and an artist's fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1972.

When designer April Greiman's poster "Does It Make Sense" appeared in fall 1986, it was alternately hailed as a radical advance in the art of poster design and condemned as pornographic, self-indulgent and inappropriate.

Catching up with Ed Fuentes isn't easy. A running start helps. The 52-year-old Fuentes - I call him the human cyclone - moves so fast on so many fronts in any given day that whiplash is possible: photographer, muralist, blogger, modern-day historian, humorist. He briefly touched down in the Arts District last week. But it wasn't that simple, of course. Like one of the Weather Channel's "storm chasers," I tracked him from where he was interviewing a muralist in East Los Angeles to a site just off Alameda Street in downtown L.A., where he had been hired to shoot publicity stills for a local theater company.

Theater. The West Coast premiere of "Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine," Warren Leight's tale of twin brothers and former big-band musicians who reconcile after 40 years, closes Sunday at the Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Today-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday 2:30 and 8 p.m; Sunday 7:30 p.m. $30-$44. (213) 628-2772. * Theater.

Chicago real estate developer Dwight Cleveland has donated over 1,000 vintage movies posters from his collection to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The posters, documenting the studio era of "B" movie filmmaking from the first half of the 20th century, feature a variety of genres including westerns ("The Revenge Rider" and "Heart of the Golden West"), war films ("Friendly Enemies" and "Somewhere in France") and musicals ("Breakfast in Hollywood" and "Girl From Rio")

Working as a part of Southern California's surf culture means doing business unconventionally. The pin-striped suit is eschewed, and you don't often "do lunch" to cut a deal. And when Thom McElroy schedules a board meeting, he looks to the ocean for a sign. The Costa Mesa graphic artist certainly does not look for some New Age-inspired omen from nature to conduct business. But if the waves are good, McElroy and his clients bring along a primary tool of their trade: surfboards.

Almost every day, my in box fattens with e-mails from America's freelance writers -- adding their voices to those I quoted a couple of weeks ago about the devastating downturn in the writing market. In bemoaning the need for speed, the flight from quality and the persistent decrease in pay, it turns out writers have a lot in common with photographers. And graphic artists. And architects. And musicians. And, well, with just about anyone who sees his creative endeavors being commodified or who is exposed to low-cost foreign competition via the Internet.

Mister Cartoon eyeballed a blank spot on the giant graffiti mural and rattled his can of spray paint. An aerosol hiss filled the air. With a few fluid swipes of his beefy arm, an image began to take shape: a cluster of storm clouds massing above a Windex blue hot rod. "If I knew the cops were coming to bust me, I could probably finish this whole thing in an hour," the street artist joked.

Shepard Fairey is a talented Los Angeles graphic designer who has twice hit the big time with the public. Provocative connections between the two episodes emerge from a survey of Fairey's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art. So do the rather stark limitations of his work. Fairey's first impact was commercial -- "Obey Giant," a 1989 street-art project that grew into a thriving youth-market business in stickers, posters, apparel, notebooks and other retail products. His second was political -- a 2008 poster, made independently to support Barack Obama's presidential aspirations, that was quickly embraced by the candidate and an ever-widening cadre of supporters.

Sitting on Geoff McFetridge's work table in an Atwater Village studio, there's a man holding a trombone that's turning into a chair. A dog's face bursts from the hoodie of a phantom figure. An umbrella shelters a man holding an ice cream cone, a half-circle and triangle forming a spare ink-black silhouette. The caption awaits. In the imaginary landscape where the 36-year-old graphic designer spends much of his time, shapes and words bump against one another on their way toward a solid idea.

DESIGNERS are a dreamy bunch. Where we see chain-link fences, they imagine vistas; where we see letters as utilitarian symbols, they see vectors and human impulses; where we see books, they see experiences. Of course, some designers see their work as practical, physical -- necessary, in the most fundamental sense of the word. Inefficiency is ugly; lack of clarity is debilitating; language, in all its many forms -- aural, visual and print -- is only one way to tell a story.

THEY'RE not Luddites. They stare at computer screens and text their friends and Web surf like most of their peers. But when it comes to crafting quirky graphic design, some L.A.-area college students with a passion for visual experimentation find that nothing beats old-fashioned hard copy.

For collectors interested in printing's history, its associated machinery and the field of graphic arts, the International Museum of Graphic Communication in Buena Park, which opened Oct. 4, appears to hold great promise. The 25,000-square-foot facility contains "the world's largest and finest collection of printing machinery," according to the museum's curator, Daniel Streeter. He wrote that it was his hope that the institution, which includes the Ernest E.

Mister Cartoon eyeballed a blank spot on the giant graffiti mural and rattled his can of spray paint. An aerosol hiss filled the air. With a few fluid swipes of his beefy arm, an image began to take shape: a cluster of storm clouds massing above a Windex blue hot rod. "If I knew the cops were coming to bust me, I could probably finish this whole thing in an hour," the street artist joked.

GOODBYE waxed eyebrows, hello mustache wax? On the runways of the fashion capitals and on the streets of Silver Lake, Venice and Brooklyn, designers and young guns alike are staking out a new frontier: a post-metrosexual ruggedness that's all about woolen vests, chambray shirts, crisp-legged denim and manly man belts. Oh, and sporting the kind of facial hair usually seen on a box of Smith Brothers cough drops. Call it Modern Maverick: Western style rendered as cool rather than as costume.

It's easy to miss La Mano Press, hidden away as it is among the factories and warehouses that line North Main Street just east of the Los Angeles River. And inside the corrugated metal building, it's almost as easy to miss Artemio Rodriguez among the giant gray machines that crowd the studio floor. Rodriguez is not tall. He's 34 but looks younger, despite a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His nervousness peels off a few years. When sitting, his legs bob with agitation.