Museums Los Angeles

Twelve years after the California Legislature defeated a bill providing $10 million in state funds to establish a Latino museum in Los Angeles, 11 years after the state granted the project a far more modest $300,000 in seed money, five years after a space was found downtown in a former Bank of America building, the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture is up and running. Well, sort of.

All is cool and calm inside the galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where visitors peruse the permanent collection and critically acclaimed exhibitions of Arthur Dove's paintings, the Harlem Renaissance and pictorialist photographs. Outside, however, everything is in a steamy state of upheaval. Hancock Park--which serves as LACMA's backyard and wraps around the George C.

In its latest move to raise its public profile and invigorate its program, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced an exhibition of 90 works by Pablo Picasso from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show of paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints, surveying the career of the 20th century master, will open Sept. 6 and run through Jan.

The previews for the big-shots are over. So when the new California Science Center in Los Angeles opened to the public Saturday, it was time for the little people: kids like 8-year-old twins Brittany and Brandon Pool. With their father, Times staff writer Bob Pool, trying to keep up, two energetic second-graders took the museum on a test drive. * "The mayor? The mayor's here!"

First off, you've got to take into consideration you're talking a Disneyland-jaded generation of SoCal children: E-ticket babies who, even back in the '60s and '70s, were weaned on "animatronics" and something that we could crudely refer to as first-generation "interactive" (pop-up books and help-our-hero by drawing-on-the-TV-screen cartoons like "Winky Dink and You"). So a trip to the Science and Industry museum went head-to-head with all that the land of alternative leisure had to offer.

They figured out how to get the marble from Italian quarries, but the people who run the Getty Center haven't figured out how to get the people to their mountaintop museum. Or rather, they haven't figured out how to do it without a fight. The City Council reluctantly stepped into the fray Tuesday, agreeing to extend nearby street parking restrictions for a year to appease the Getty's Brentwood neighbors, upset over museum visitors who park along their streets.

Personally, I don't believe in angels. (Sorry about that, Roma and Della.) Belief in the existence of supernatural winged messengers from God isn't necessary, though, to thorough enjoyment of the newly opened exhibition "The Invisible Made Visible: Angels From the Vatican." It's enough that the artists who made these 97 disparate works of art believed. Their conviction provided the scaffold on which their art was built.

To create and exhibit--called Tess-curator at the California Science Center in Exposition Park, which opens this week, worked with more than 200 people: a director, a scriptwriter, animators, computer artists, programmers, software and lighting designers and a company specializing in themed entertainment production for parks such as Disneyland and Universal Studios.

Students visiting the Los Angeles Children's museum Tuesday received a lesson in art, basketball and success--all rolled into one. Two representatives of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, including the legendary Curly Neal, demonstrated ball-handling tricks to a group of kindergarten through 4th-graders. He then led the group in the creation of a mural. The students rolled basketballs in red and blue paint and then across a canvas.