Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

LACE Director Appointed: Roberto Bedoya, president of the National Assn. of Artists Organizations, has been named the new executive director of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, ending a nationwide search that lasted nearly three months. He replaces Joy Silverman, who resigned Feb. 1 to work nationally on behalf of freedom of expression in the arts.

Kim Schoenstadt was patiently removing a web-like vinyl pattern from a gallery wall at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, better known as LACE, this week. The artist peeled the vinyl tape off slowly and carefully, like you would peel a persistent sticker from a ripe piece of fruit. "I love this moment," says Schoenstadt. "It's definitely the prestige moment, like the big reveal in a magic trick where the woman who has disappeared comes back or the rabbit comes out of the hat. " Yet the forms emerging from this particular reveal were not nearly as recognizable as a rabbit.

"I can't relate to windmills and castles." --Artist Steve Escandon, explaining why the hole that he helped design at the new miniature golf course at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) features a tract home, which makes the sound of falling furniture when a ball enters it.

‘Art Against Empire: Graphic Responses to U.S. Interventions Since World War II' Where: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. When: Through April 15. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Price: Free Contact: (323) 653-4662; http://www.politicalgraphics.org

New Grants: Winners of the Arts Organization Stabilization Initiative grants, a new county-city-state-private program administered by the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission, have been announced. Receiving $50,000 each, plus the possibility of earning another $300,000 each in the future, are Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, Lula Washington Contemporary Dance Foundation, Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) and East West Players.

Theater South Coast Repertory's adaptation of the Dickens classic "A Christmas Carol" closes Sunday at 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Today, 7:30 p.m.; Christmas Eve, noon and 4 p.m.; Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, noon and 4 p.m. $17 to $39. (714) 708-5555. "La Posada Magica," Octavio Solis and Marcos Loya's holiday musical about a young girl's magical journey on Christmas Eve, closes Sunday at South Coast Rep's Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Today, 8 p.m.

Slacker ambitions and designer pretensions collide in an installation by Hendrika Sonnenberg and Chris Hanson at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Aside from revealing how difficult it is for artists to make convincing work by acting as if they couldn't care less, this lackadaisical display demonstrates that such passive-aggressive posturing has become a style all its own--no different from, say, Expressionism or Minimalism, despite being less time-consuming.

Many theater groups describe their work as "experimental." But in "This Theatre Now," Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions has earned the modifier in its best sense. * This fascinating triptych of performance pieces--part of an ongoing series in a Hollywood storefront space--challenges our everyday notions of theater with striking mixtures of sound, movement, text and video. The results are sometimes astonishing, sometimes disturbing and never less than provocative.

Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions is one of 129 visual-artists organizations nationwide to receive part of $1.87 million in grants recently awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts. LACE, given $42,000, joins 20 other California organizations awarded endowment grants for the current federal fiscal year. Others include Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, given $35,000; Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, $25,000; and the Women's Community, also of Los Angeles, $15,000.

Consider the banana. All iconic yellow peel and soft, sweet inside -- you can find it at the nearest Trader Joe's for as little as 19 cents apiece. But how much have you really thought about how it got there? Now the ubiquitous and perishable fruit finds itself the focus of appreciation in two new exhibitions opening this week from Los Angeles-based collective Fallen Fruit. The first, "United Fruit," opened Tuesday at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

On May 2, 1971, about 200 uniformed police surrounded the perimeter of Exposition Park while 30-odd plainclothes officers circulated through the crowd as farm labor leader César Chávez delivered a brief but impassioned speech decrying the Vietnam War at a rally sponsored by the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice.

"What would artists make if they were free to give in to ambition without constraint? If they were not limited by material circumstances, nor by anxiety over their work's reception, nor by their own faculties and resources?" These are the central questions posed by curators Greta Byrum and Annabel Daou in "aporia:aporia," an exhibition of "impossible artworks" -- works conceived without regard for material, technical or cultural limitations -- at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

An elaborate project on view at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions has the feel of a one-man band's traveling case, with an arsenal of objects and visual experiences spilling out of a single crate. It's a far grander display than one might expect from the package, which itself is part of the show. This impressive, playful and smart scatter is actually a two-person show, a collaboration between Toronto-based artist Scott Lyall and New York-based Rachel Harrison.

A trivia question: When could you have first seen Marcel Duchamp's 1912 painting "Nude Descending a Staircase" in Southern California? Perhaps it was the 1963 Duchamp retrospective curated by Walter Hopps for the Pasadena Art Museum. Good guess, but off by a few years. In 1937, thousands viewed it at a Wilshire townhouse annex of the Los Angeles Art Assn.

On a recent morning, artist Ruben Ortiz Torres stands in front of a muffler shop on Whittier Boulevard, waiting for an audience. It's near noon, and the day is getting hotter. Then, almost simultaneously, a dozen women arrive. They have come for a tour of the muffler shop. Still used by mechanics, who on this morning are replacing mufflers, the garage also houses a large, bizarre collection of objects: a "museum of a million things."

"Marking Time," an elegantly cohesive exhibition of film and video at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, is aptly titled: Each of its 12 works approaches the issue of time as if with a pair of calipers, measuring out a particular stretch and exploring the intervening experience of duration. They're spare, concentrated works that speak to the essence of their media and leave a sharper sense of each passing moment. The exhibition is a model of curatorial economy. It was organized by Glenn R.

Heavy-gauge steel bars protect the windows of the homes around Ted Watkins Park in Watts. If you have private space here, you must protect it fiercely from the gangs and poverty that thrive like a cancer. Small bungalows and townhomes dot the area, but public housing sets the tone. Nickerson Gardens, Jordan Downs and Ozie B. Gonzaque Village--some of the most dangerous housing projects in the nation--are home to many of the kids and families who come to the park.