Performance Artists

Tai the elephant is no stranger to fame. The 39-year-old female has a long resume: TV commercials, corporate parties and 20 movie credits. "She has such a reputation that people ask for her by name," said Kari Johnson, a co-owner of Have Trunk Will Travel. The company operates a ranch in Perris for nine endangered Asian elephants, which often work in show business. Tai is the most famous, she said. But as with human celebrity, with the spotlight sometimes comes controversy.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Artist Steven Kurtz has never been shy about challenging the establishment, using a blend of performance art and science with his Critical Art Ensemble to stir debate about such things as genetically modified crops and germ warfare. A 2007 performance had CAE members launching, with some fanfare, a harmless strain of bacteria onto volunteers in Leipzig, Germany, to re-create the U.S. military's secret 1950 mock anthrax test on San Francisco.

A performance artist who collected hundreds of postcards from Americans expressing their hopes for the future president has a wish of her own: to meet President-elect Barack Obama and hand over the stack of messages. Sheryl Oring, who traveled around the country typing postcards on street corners for her "I wish to say . . . " project, said she has requested a meeting with Obama to hand over the 530 postcards she collected in 18 cities this year.

To many passersby, homemade signs asking for money are works of desperation: "Homeless," "Hungry," "Disabled," "Please Help." But to a Santa Ana couple who run a local gallery, the messages are works of art, and Chela and Joseph Banuelos are snapping them up at $5 and $10 apiece. The Banueloses are using the signs to create a performance art show that will premiere later this year at their Amorviejo gallery and, they hope, put a face on the local homeless problem.

Scott Kelman, an innovative teacher and key architect of Los Angeles' performance art and theater scene, has died. He was 70. Kelman died Feb. 22 in a Portland, Ore., hospital of complications from pneumonia. He had been in failing health for several years.

The Tuileries garden, usually cloaked in darkness, was ablaze with open flames this weekend like it hasn't been perhaps since extremists burned the palace to the ground in 1871. In the nave of the St. Paul-St. Louis Church in the Marais district, enthralled throngs looked up in apparent reverence at eight large white balloons suspended in the shape of a question mark.

About 200 seventh- and eighth-graders are shushed into a vast auditorium and told to settle down, sit up straight and listen. They are being given an opportunity, Barbara Chanaiwa, the principal of Charles R. Drew Middle School in South Los Angeles, tells them. One false move and they'll be pulled out of the auditorium and be back in class in a heartbeat.

In the finale of a two-month project that took her from the gallery to the streets and then to the sea, a Cal State Long Beach graduate student on Monday pedaled a swan boat from San Pedro to Long Beach, the last of eight human-powered means she employed to get to class. Sierra Brown, 28, launched the performance art project Oct. 1 with a 12-mile swim through Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors, crossing four ship channels in the process.

First a team of workers rolled up to the Skirball Cultural Center and dumped 220 bags of rice. Then the provocative British theater troupe turned up, scoops in hand, sums in mind. Now the Skirball's galleries are crowded with golden rice piles on crisp squares of white paper -- 5.5 tons of unrealized risotto, or potential paella, if you prefer.