Lacma

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will introduce its newest VIP today in a Riverside quarry: the 340-ton, 211/2-foot-high granite boulder that will form the centerpiece of Michael Heizer's massive outdoor sculpture, "Levitated Mass. " When the piece is complete, the rock will sit on steel rails at ground level, north of the Wilshire Boulevard museum's Resnick Pavilion. A 456-foot-long, ramp-like slot in the ground, descending to 15 feet deep, will run beneath it. The rock will appear to levitate above people walking through the underground channel.

The civil unrest that devastated Los Angeles in spring 1992 and lighted a fire under the city's police department and political establishment also sounded an alarm to L.A.'s major cultural institutions: They needed to diversify their programming, expand their audiences, and step up their outreach efforts toward a population undergoing rapid demographic change. Over the past 20 years, institutions such as LACMA, the L.A. Phil, the Getty and L.A. Opera have attempted to attract larger audiences, particularly younger ones, from the region's growing Mexican American, Central American, Asian American and other ethnic-minority populations.

Charles and Ray Eames nurtured a design imagination that knew few boundaries, stretching far and wide, but if you were to look for its center - its heart - you might have found it in the living room of their landmark Pacific Palisades house. With its 17-foot-high ceiling, panels of glass opening to the grove of eucalyptus outside, and a vast range of objects collected over a lifetime, the Eames House living room is where two of the most influential designers of the 20th century felt at ease.

Over at the Getty Villa, a fantastic hybrid sculpture is holding court in a powerful exhibition that explores the ancient Mediterranean goddess Aphrodite. Based on a lost Greek original, a 1st century Roman carving of an exquisite hermaphrodite, part man and part woman, seductively writhes in a self-possessed erotic dream. Not to be outdone, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently opened a similarly dazzling show centered on another ancient hybrid being -- this one a plumed serpent.

Severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, 71-year-old painter Pierre- Auguste Renoir agreed in 1912 to one last attempt at walking. But when the doctor lifted him from his wheelchair, Renoir managed to go just a few steps before he told the doctor that to walk would take "all my willpower, and I would have none left for painting. If I have to choose between walking and painting, I'd much rather paint." Renoir never did walk again, filmmaker Jean Renoir recalled in his book, "Renoir, My Father," but he did paint successfully for many more years.

If there's anyone who knows how to tell a spooky story, it's "Nightmare Before Christmas" spielmeister Tim Burton. He and the exhibit of his artwork are the inspiration for this series of nighttime storytelling that lasts throughout the month of July. The first one will feature "Creation Myths and Other Mysteries of Nature" with storyteller Karen Golden. LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. (323) 857-6000. 7 p.m. Fri. and every Fri. in July. http://www.lacma.org

One of the highlights of the Angel City Jazz Festival, the multidisciplinary collaboration Dirty Baby takes its inspiration from Ed Ruscha's "censor strip" paintings and combines them with the music of Nels Cline (of the band Wilco) and the poetry of David Breskin. Cline will lead two music ensembles, Breskin will read his ghazals and Ruscha's images will be projected. A book and album signing will follow. Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Thursday. Free (reservations recommended)

With the film series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art heading into the sunset, this weekend and the next provide a chance to do three good things at once: (1) experience the soon-to-be-empty Leo S. Bing Theater, one of this city's great movie venues, (2) see some wonderful films -- "Being Jewish in France," a compelling documentary, from Friday to Sunday, and "Leon Morin, Priest," a rare Jean-Pierre Melville classic on Aug.

Los Angeles' newest rock star, like so many before her, sleeps by day and rolls on by night, gathering, as they say, no moss. She stops in one town after another - in Ontario, La Palma, Lakewood and Long Beach. In each, she tantalizes and mesmerizes, conjuring a joyful circus, even a few moments of unbridled exuberance that some might regret down the road. Then, just as her star is brightest, she moves on, as if someone had given her the same advice offered by Gypsy Rose Lee's mother: Always leave them wanting more.

The next month will see a welcome explosion of the films of the great humanist director Jean Renoir at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, timed to coincide with a tribute to his painter father. This Saturday features the frolicsome "French Cancan" while March 19 has the unforgettable "La Bête Humaine," starring Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. March 20 brings "The Southerner," with a guest appearance by one of the film's actors, Norman Lloyd. This is one filmmaker for whom there really is no modern equivalent.

I've always been interested in ways that paintings function as anthropological evidence of moments in time, and I'm a fan of the Charles Mackay book from 1840 "Extraordinary Public Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," which traces the history of the Dutch tulip bubble. This painting precedes the collapse of the bubble; it's not a direct comment on tulip mania. But it's a moment when people get really excited about collecting tulips and they start seeking variations in the plant caused by the mosaic virus, which produced the variegated or striped tulips you can see in the painting.

Sometimes bigger is better when buying art by committee. At this year's Collectors Committee weekend, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought $2.5 million worth of artwork to add to its permanent collection, including two larger-than-life works: a 60-foot-long Robert Rauschenberg screenprint that shows a collage of newspaper articles from 1970, bought for $775,000; and a nearly 10-foot-tall elevator surround that Louis Sullivan designed around...

Sometimes bigger is better when buying art by committee. At this year's Collectors Committee weekend, the L.A. County Museum of Art bought $2.5-million worth of artwork to add to its permanent collection, including two larger-than-life works: a 60-foot-long Robert Rauschenberg screenprint that shows a collage of newspaper articles from 1970, bought for $775,000, and a nearly 10-foot-tall elevator surround that Louis Sullivan designed around 1892 for...

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Govan

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art finally has fulfilled the vision it had for its biggest foray into Islamic art - a goal thwarted until now by the government of the Russian Federation. The only problem is that Angelenos would have to travel more than 8,000 miles to see it. In "Gifts of the Sultan: the Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts," now on view in Doha, the capital of Qatar, art that Islamic rulers had sent long ago to the czarist courts are finally on display - courtesy of the State Hermitage Museum and National Library of Russia inSt.

Have you tried to get close enough to paintings at the Getty Museum to investigate individual brush strokes? If you did, a stern security officer probably asked you to step away from the painting. Now, you can get up close and personal with works from the Getty and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art without tripping alarms or being admonished. The two Los Angeles museums are among the 134 museums that recently joined the Google Art Project , bringing their collections to visitors through virtual tours.

With nearly 300 photographs edited and sequenced by the artist himself, this retrospective on the career of Robert Adams, "Robert Adams: The Place We Live" seeks to document his fascination with the changing landscape of his native Colorado, as well as the rest of the West. Starting in the mid-'60s and carrying through to this most recent decade, this show will focus on Adams' photography of the Los Angeles terrain. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Open Sunday through June 3. lacma.org.

Almost everyone falls down a rabbit hole sometime in life. A trapdoor opens under your career, your relationships, your beliefs, and headlong you go, like Alice, into the void. For a few of the 50 female surrealist painters and sculptors represented in LACMA's exhibition "In Wonderland," that descent was a terrifying tumble into mental depression, physical danger, even suicidal despair. But for others it was a subterranean passage to creative fulfillment, erotic liberation and self-discovery, themes that artists such as Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo visited time and again in their works.

Here's one tangible sign of the beneficial effect of Pacific Standard Time, the Getty-sponsored initiative to exhume the mostly under-recognized history of important Los Angeles art in the first generation after World War II: Southern California museums are now competing over the legacy. How high have the stakes quickly become? Let's just say the competition is so eager that it doesn't always mean a fair fight. One museum has publicly announced plans to organize a retrospective of a major but under-sung L.A. painter - even though officials knew that another museum already had the same show in the works for several months.