Portraits

What, pray tell, was all that trembling, quaking and tearing of the hair about? When the calendar was set to tick over to the year 1000, only those Christians who took their New Testament bibles literally thought the big meltdown was at hand. Their dread, fueled by prophecies in the Book of Revelations, had been growing for a couple centuries--and for naught. If only they'd read their St. Augustine. He had condemned a literal interpretation of John the Evangelist as far back as the 5th century.

Tony Millionaire spends his nights in the garage. That's where you'll find him, in a space built just wide enough for a Model T, bent over his drawing table until 4 a.m., a beer never far from his fingertips. The wife and kids can hear him in there, listening to talk radio or laughing and shouting, with the occasional crash when things are not going well. He is happy this way, a cartoonist left to his own whims and solitude at his 1926 home in Pasadena, drawing his weekly "Maakies" comic strip about a hard-drinking, suicidal crow or his ongoing series of portraits of the famous and infamous for publications such as the Believer and New York Magazine.

Their expressions are solemn, their smiles subtle, their postures proud. One clenches his fists in the air, another stares intently at the Bible. There is a 96-year-old former Thai tennis champion who helped found the Wat Thai Temple in North Hollywood. An 88-year-old Polish woman who helped hide Jews during World War II. An 88-year-old Iranian professor who said, "Tragedy has made my softer skin hide behind a harder one." Their photographs and stories are part of a new exhibit called "Quiet Heroes/Over 80."

The fist-sized rocks looked completely pedestrian, like something one might find in the backyard. The only hint that they might be exceptional was their location in a gallery at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design, resting on pedestals inside individual display cases. In fact, the rocks are anything but ordinary - they're borrowed from the UCLA Meteorite Collection. The university had wanted to loan fancier-looking specimens, but curator Stephen Nowlin deliberately chose the least impressive space debris he could find.

Reporting from Keller, Texas — Angels pitcher Dan Haren wanted a special gift for his wife, Jessica. Something personal and out of the ordinary, but not gaudy or sappy. So, he thought, how about a painting? "It is different," Haren decided, staring at the portrait he commissioned as he stood before his locker in the visiting clubhouse at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington earlier this month. "It's a unique thing to give someone a painting of yourself, your family. Pictures are one thing, but a painting is really interesting.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 384 pp., $28 Edward Curtis was given many names by the native peoples he encountered in his journeys across the North American continent. The Sioux named him for a rock formation, "Pretty Butte. " The Hopi saw him sleep on an air mattress and called him "The Man Who Sleeps on His Breath. " And the Navajo gave him the moniker that was perhaps most apropos to his profession: "Shadow Catcher.

Matthew Rolston packed the cavernous JF Chen gallery in Hollywood on Friday night to introduce L.A. to his latest project, "Talking Heads: The Vent Haven Portraits," a series of photographs featuring all-too-human ventriloquist dummies. Much of the early coverage of the book has focused on the eerie and absurd qualities of the dummies (the Huffington Post declared them "creepy"), but through the 5-by-5-foot portraits on view at JF Chen, Rolston was able to reveal much more. Most evident: The large format of the portraits emphasizes the human hand behind each doll face: the rosy cheeks, the bushy brows, the eyelashes brushed on, one by one. Where skin has cracked, where painted makeup has chipped, where the 24/7 smiles yield to the realities of time, Rolston's subjects feel the most human.

Realism is often ridiculed for going to great lengths to depict what we can see withour bare eyes. Its detractors, who usually prefer the abstract perambulations of Conceptual art or the mesmerizing effects of abstract painting, treat Realism as if it were a unified style. The thought is that it's the work of uninspired artists whose sworn duty it is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. At Koplin Gallery, "Drawings V" dispels such prejudice.

The room is arranged like a gallery, hung with photographs of various sizes and shapes, framed and unframed, surrounding the artist Catherine Opie, who looks pleased as she observes from a rocking chair. This studio built behind her house in West Adams is where so many moments from her art and life have unfolded. Back in 2004, she made a self-portrait here, topless and tattooed, nursing her young son, Oliver, against a vivid red curtain. Across her chest were scars left over from a much earlier picture, a one-word message carved into her skin and still faintly reading, "Pervert.

Given the extraordinary range of Catherine Opie's subject matter over the last 20 years - from Southern California freeways to Minnesota ice houses, the streets of Washington on President Obama's first inauguration to the interior of Elizabeth Taylor 's home, the fierce figure of performance artist Ron Athey to American high school football players - wh at's most striking initially about her recent work at Regen Projects is how closely it...