Museum

Long before Ernest Cole became one of South Africa's first black photojournalists, he had dreams of becoming a doctor, a bold aspiration for a young man coming of age during apartheid rule in the 1950s and 1960s. In an unpublished biography from late 1966 Cole wrote that it was a Baldafix folding camera in a drugstore window that caught his attention and set him on another path. A family friend lent him a twin lens reflex camera and he quickly began making money taking snapshots.

Car fans -- especially those interested in pre-World War II French icons -- have a little more time to enjoy some ultra-rare classics in Southern California. The Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard has announced it is extending through June an exhibit of Voisin automobiles and motorcycles. The exhibit was previously scheduled to close in April. "The success the Voisin exhibit experienced over the past six months has been amazing," Peter Mullin, owner of the museum, said in a statement.  “It is with great personal pride that we continue to recognize and showcase such a design visionary and aviation pioneer.

Mexican art and Mexican American art often have treated each other more like strangers or distant cousins than like the fraternal twins they really are. In the United States, apart from in California and the Southwest, many museums and art professionals until relatively recently tended to isolate or ignore Mexico's contributions to global movements such as Modernism or Conceptual and performance art. Similarly, in Mexico, U.S. Chicano art of...

Take a Bank of America card out of your wallet this weekend and museum doors will open to you -- for free. Credit or debit card holders receive free admission at more than 150 museums around the country. This will come in handy for travelers who want to spend two days museum-hopping while on the road. The deal: I've written about the Museums on Us program, but it bears a reminder for cardholders who might not know about this cultural perk. Bank of America and Merrill Lynch cardholders this weekend will receive admission to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (usually $25)

The noise-pop mad-scientist Dan Deacon earned a reputation for chaotic, neon-splattered party punk by playing on the floor and blurring lines between artist and audience. On last year's album "America," however, he showed a more thoughtful, rigorous side of his composing skills. Natural History Museum, 900 Exposition Blvd., L.A. 6 p.m. Fri. $18. nhm.org.

The Musee du Louvre -- the world's most-attended art museum -- has named Jean-Luc Martinez as its new director. Martinez has most recently served as the head of the museum's department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities. He is expected to succeed Henri Loyrette starting April 15. Martinez's appointment, which the Paris museum announced this week, was made by French President Francois Hollande. He beat out two other candidates -- Sylvie Ramond, director of the Musee des beaux-arts de Lyon, and Laurent le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou Metz.  FULL COVERAGE: 2013 Spring arts preview The internal hire signals a search for continuity for the famed art institution.

Over in one corner is a replica of the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer, the world's first piloted powered aircraft. Elsewhere in the former Santa Monica Airport hangar are a 1929 Lockheed Vega and a 1939 Howard DGA-15. But the newest feature at Santa Monica's Museum of Flying takes aim at the future of airline service - what is coming in the next few months to nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and also what airports everywhere could look like 150 years from now. A detailed, 24-foot scale model of the $1.5-billion makeover of LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal will be displayed at the museum through Aug. 25 as part of an exhibition called Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight.

WASHINGTON - It is rare for a museum to lend the heart of its most prized collection to another museum, but the Albertina in Vienna has done just that by shipping almost a hundred watercolors and drawings by Albrecht Dürer to the National Gallery of Art here for an exhibition. Dürer, a German born in Nuremberg in 1471, is the great master of the Northern European Renaissance, akin to Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo of the Italian Renaissance. Dürer's greatness, according to Andrew Robison of the National Gallery, curator of the show, is based on his watercolors, drawings and prints, just as Da Vinci and Raphael are identified with painting and Michelangelo with sculpture.

Tucked away and forgotten for years in a museum storage bin, the small oil painting held a great secret and was just biding its time, waiting for someone to notice it. And then one day someone did. So began the Case of the Curious Curator. It all started in 2000 (actually a couple centuries earlier, but that's getting ahead of the story) when a canvas in dreadful condition called "Venice: The Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco" was bequeathed to the Denver Art Museum from a deceased local collector's foundation.

Donations, the main financial power source for art museums, dropped again in 2011-12 at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, marking declines in each of the first two years of Jeffrey Deitch's tenure as museum director. This time, the fall - a $270,000 decline - wasn't as bad as the $4.5-million drop in 2010-11, the first year at the helm for Deitch. The fundraising figures are part of the audited financial statement MOCA released Friday for the fiscal year that ran from mid-2011 to mid-2012, providing a more up-to-date glimpse of the strained financial conditions that led to the recent swirl of speculation about the downtown museum's future.