Museum

The California Science Center has received what officials describe as an "extraordinary" financial contribution to the new Air and Space Center that will house the space shuttle Endeavour. The gift, to be announced at a news conference Thursday, comes from a foundation chaired by Lynda Oschin, wife of the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Samuel Oschin, whose name already graces the Griffith Observatory planetarium and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cancer institute stemming from charitable contributions there.

PHILADELPHIA - Saturday the Barnes Foundation opens its new museum here on the busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway. With hundreds of Renoirs, Cézannes, Matisses and Picassos, it's just up the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose officials were instrumental in pulling strings to make it happen. Anticipation has been running high. Eight years ago a local judge granted permission for the incomparable art installation to relocate from its unique home out on the Main Line, available to anyone who wished to visit.

A small wooden cabinet went up for auction on EBay. Inside were two locks of hair, one granite slab, one dried rosebud, one goblet, two wheat pennies, one candlestick and, allegedly, one "dibbuk," a kind of spirit popular in Yiddish folklore. The seller, a Missouri college student named Iosif Nietzke, described the container as a "haunted Jewish wine cabinet box" that had plagued several owners with rotten luck and a spate of bizarre paranormal stunts.

If you're headed anywhere near Jackson , Wyo., this summer, leave open a few hours for the National Museum of Wildlife Art , which turns 25 this month. The museum sits on a butte at the edge of Jackson, overlooking an elk refuge, and its collection includes paintings, sculpture and photography - a great way to glimpse nature in all four seasons, no matter when you're there. I was introduced to the place two years ago. Besides beholding many great images of critters, I learned that the folk artist behind the “Peaceable Kingdom” image (lion, lamb, etc.,  gathered in an idyllic rural setting)

A boy from a poor family makes good, opens the first sex shop in his hometown, wins the mayor's job by a landslide, defies the Kremlin, goes to prison, gets barred from politics and ends up where he started: surrounded by sex toys, including a set of erotic Matryoshka nesting dolls that he delights in showing off. The story of Alexander Donskoy's entrepreneurial and political odyssey, complete with his decision to open Moscow's first sex museum, might...

Now that Bullocks Wilshire is officially closing as a department store, how about recycling it into a museum? The first floor could be for Art Deco and gifts; the rest for folk art and craft, craftsman and Art Nouveau; even the tearoom could have costume fashion shows from the appropriate periods. What a great location and environment for a museum. It even has lots of parking. VIRGINIA KNIGHT Los Angeles

The new anniversary exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art is not only cause for celebrating the financial stabilization of an irreplaceable cultural institution in Los Angeles. It also is part of an important turning point in the modern history of museums -- a renewed focus on permanent collections. With its "Collection: MOCA's First Thirty Years," the museum is the latest to put its own works of art front and center to attract the public rather than rely on traveling art spectacles.

For a look at the future of digital museums, check out the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory's new digital archive composed of thousands of scanned documents from the African leader's life. With the help of a $1.25 million grant from Google, the center digitized thousands of documents and images that illustrate the life and times of South Africa's first black president. But instead of scanning them and dumping them online for scholars to peruse, the center, with Google's support, created a virtual museum experience -- highlighting certain pieces from the archives, putting them in the context of Mandela's life and then enabling a visitor to the site to go deeper if they'd like.

Amelia Earhart, the wispy aviation pioneer who disappeared more than 70 years ago while attempting to fly around the world, would have turned 114 on Sunday. On her birthday, the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor in Honolulu will kick off an exhibition of newly discovered photos of the renowned aviator's stay in Hawaii. "These photographs show Amelia both at work and at play," museum curator Jim Goodall said. Earhart came to Hawaii to relax and to prepare for what would become a record-making solo flight from Honolulu to Oakland in 1935, he said.

Italy's Maxxi museum, which opened just two years ago, has been hard hit by the country's economic problems, which have resulted in widespread cuts in cultural funding. Now the high-profile art museum, designed by architect Zaha Hadid, faces possible closure. As reported this week in Britain's the Guardian, the museum faces a 800,000 euros ($1.1 million) hole in its 2011 accounts. Projected losses could reach 11 million euros in the next three years. Italy's cultural minister has reportedly begun proceedings that could lead to the Maxxi being put under special administration, in effect shutting it down.

The California Science Center has received what officials describe as an "extraordinary" financial contribution to the new Air and Space Center that will house the space shuttle Endeavour. The gift, to be announced at a news conference Thursday, comes from a foundation chaired by Lynda Oschin, wife of the late Los Angeles businessman and philanthropist Samuel Oschin, whose name already graces the Griffith Observatory planetarium and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center cancer institute stemming from charitable contributions there.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

The battleship Iowa, a storied vessel that languished for years in the U.S. Navy's mothball fleet, is about to start its final journey, from San Francisco to its permanent home as a museum in the Port of Los Angeles. Next Sunday, four tugboats will guide the Iowa, among the biggest U.S. battleships ever built, under the Golden Gate Bridge and out of the San Francisco Bay. One of them, the 7,200-horsepower Warrior, will chug down the coast with the massive ship in tow, taking three or four days to reach Southern California.

The pace is picking up on the massive conservation project in process at the Southwest Museum in Mount Washington. The end is almost in sight: Only 36,000 objects to go! In 2003, when the poverty-stricken institution merged with the more affluent Museum of the American West under the umbrella of the Autry National Center in Griffith Park, the first priority was to save the Southwest's collection of about 250,000 Native American artworks and artifacts. Second only to the holdings of the National Museum of the American Indian inWashington, D.C., the collection had been inadequately housed for decades and further damaged by earthquakes, water and insects.

What an appealing slice-of-life California town, an easy day trip by car or train. Come for the history, stay for the food. This restaurant-intensive ranch town is the oldest community in Orange County. If San Juan Capistrano - or SJC - had a dating profile it would say: "Self-deprecating, authentic, still likes a good time. " The bed. Choices here are limited, though a new hotel is on the way. Till then, you have the Residence Inn Marriott, with one- and two-bedroom suites starting at $179 (33711 Camino Capistrano; [949]

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

POP MUSIC Talk about sweethearts of the rodeo. You've got John Doe and Exene, the punk patron saints of our gritty metropolis, plus the sweet, ethereal harmonies of the Living Sisters, a trio of Angeleno performers who've come to reclaim the secret melodies of Laurel Canyon. Wear your best fringed accoutrement, cowboys and -girls. Museum of the American West at Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles. Fri. 7-11 p.m. $22-$30. (323) 667-2000.

John Gray, who rode off into retirement about 16 months ago after 11 years as president of the Autry National Center of the American West, is making an unexpected return astride one of the world's most-visited cultural institutions: He's been named director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History inWashington, D.C. "His passion for American history and scholarship is obvious, and it's what will make him a great leader...

Dragons, graffiti, cartoon heroes. Gajin Fujita is known for mixing Japanese art with L.A. street and pop culture in paintings fueled by his eclectic imagination and experiences as a Japanese American from Boyle Heights. The Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena is spotlighting a major influence on these East-meets-Eastside creations: Fujita's passion for ukiyo-e , the woodblock prints that flourished in 17th- to 19th-century Japan. "Gajin Fujita: Ukiyo-e in Contemporary Painting," which opened in April, is what curator Bridget Bray calls "a focused solo exhibition of five pieces in which you see parallels to the print tradition such as dynamic compositions, martial figures, attention to surface detail and dramatization of the natural and supernatural worlds.