Public Art

At the dedication of a neighborhood library here recently, with the mayor and other dignitaries looking on, several dozen respectable women quietly raised lollipop-shaped protest signs. "Shame on Us," one sign read. "A Nightmare in Our Dream Building," said another. The women had no quarrel with the library; most of them had twisted aldermanic arms to get it built.

At exactly noon on Thursday, 30 pianists sitting at 30 colorful pianos scattered at public spaces throughout Los Angeles County will simultaneously break into the first prelude of Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier. " The so-called play-in will mark the Southern California debut of a globally oriented public art project called "Play Me, I'm Yours. " But the real fun won't begin until after the opening performances have finished. That's when the pianos - in locations that include L.A. Live and Monterey Park, USC and UCLA, as well as Santa Monica Pier and Old Pasadena - become available to the public, for anyone and everyone to play 24 hours a day for the next three weeks.

Past huge cargo cranes and docked ocean liners, the wind rushes through the Port of Los Angeles on its way to Douglas Hollis' sound and motion sculpture "Telltales." Then the wind speaks. It flows through the sculpture's organ vanes, and an oboe's voice sounds. It brushes on harps; an ethereal choir exhales. It nudges lures. They lift and turn -- up, down, around -- like whales swimming. Hollis' ensemble piece and a series of ceramic tile works installed on concrete benches are part of the Cruise Ship Promenade, a 1,200-foot boardwalk that opened earlier this month at the port's main channel at San Pedro.

ART As part of Pacific Standard Time's Performance and Public Art festival, Eleanor Antin's "Before the Revolution" explores Antin's imaginary character Eleanora Antinova, an African American ballerina trying to make it in a famous Russian ballet company. Performed by actors who manipulate Antin's original life-scale puppets, the production is directed by Antin and Robert Castro. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. 2 and 7 p.m. Sun. Free. (310) 443-7000.

In a move that has shaken the Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park, Edward Leffingwell, director of the gallery and the city's visual arts program for the last four years, appears to have been forced out of his job. He wasn't fired. His position was eliminated as part of a city budgetary squeeze, and he was transferred to a job that he does not want. "As far as I'm concerned, as of today, he is working as the director of public art," Adolfo V.

For decades, Los Angeles was a mecca for muralists. Lush and bold, murals sprouted like indigenous flora from Boyle Heights to the ocean to South Los Angeles. The themes were as compelling as the muralists themselves — including emerging black and Latino artists — and the neighborhoods that nurtured them. Los Angeles became identified with murals and they came to define the city — Highland Park residents immortalized on a building in that neighborhood, a line of children romping along a freeway wall.

Perched outside the Posco steel company office, the jarring 30-foot-tall object looks like the remains of a plane crash — all crushed steel and gnarled parts — because that's what it is. Creator Frank Stella built what he considered a modern work of art and named it "Amabel," in honor of an artist friend's daughter who died in a plane accident. But many passersby for years have considered it to be something else: an eyesore. The work is one of the more avant-garde sculptures in Seoul and the symbol of an art controversy in South Korea.

There seems to be some controversy surrounding plans to develop public art on wetlands that are part of the Ventura sewage treatment plant. I've seen today's art. That's exactly where it belongs, MIKE HANNIN Newbury Park

A meeting to present next year's public art projects will be held Thursday at 5:30 p.m. City public art commissioners, engineers and other staff members will answer questions about the upcoming year's projects, including $529,000 in art pieces planned at the Buenaventura Mall transit center, E.P. Foster Library and Grant Park Reservoir. The meeting will be held in the community meeting room at City Hall. For more information, call 658-4760.

In reviewing Kevin Sherry's article on Moorpark's new public art piece, I have not been able to locate an artist associated with this project. The article states that Moorpark has an ordinance that requires developers to contribute to the city's public art fund. It appears that an initial design put forward by the developer was considered "abstract and silly looking" by members of the City Council and the assistant city manager. The city then went shopping for a design that would fit its safe-and-sane sensibilities.

You can never step in the same river twice, unless you're a performance artist working today. Artists who specialize in the most ephemeral, fleeting and hard-to-preserve visual art form are increasingly trying various ways to resurrect their earlier pieces and bring them to new audiences. And the 11-day Performance and Public Art Festival that starts Thursday in Los Angeles will be a big test of how effective their work can be when brought back to life in a different era. Funded primarily by the Getty as part of Pacific Standard Time — the museum-wide celebration of Southern California art history that started in October and runs into spring — the festival will revisit several memorable works done in the L.A. area in the late 1960s and '70s.

They were bold enough to call it a revolution. Back in the 1970s, when Chicano art was synonymous with East Los Angeles, its storied murals and its art center, Self-Help Graphics, a group of Mexican American artists decided to break away. They headed north, seven miles, to start their own Chicano arts collective in Highland Park, an area that was still mostly white with little presence of Latino art. "Our mission was to transform Highland Park into a super-revolutionary Chicano town," said artist Richard Duardo.

When Shakespeare declared that "all the world's a stage," Nancy Linehan Charles missed the metaphor. She thought he meant it literally. So for the last six months, she's been taking Shakespeare to the streets, malls, buildings and beaches of Los Angeles -- in pseudo-spontaneous, "flash mob"-style performances. But instead of a crowd breaking into "Thriller" on a New York City subway platform, imagine an edited, streetwise version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the Venice Beach boardwalk.

After nearly two years of planning, prodding and debate, a group of Pasadena residents finally got its big wish: The city let them permanently stick their 18-foot fork in the road. "It's not going anywhere," said a triumphant Phil Coombes, who has been part of the so-called Fork in the Road Gang since its inception. Last month, about 10 dedicated friends resurrected the enormous wooden utensil on the median that splits Saint John and Pasadena avenues. With a handful of enthusiastic locals cheering them on, the developers cemented the guerrilla art into "fork plaza" more than a year after the California Transportation Authority forced them to carry it away.

For decades, Los Angeles was a mecca for muralists. Lush and bold, murals sprouted like indigenous flora from Boyle Heights to the ocean to South Los Angeles. The themes were as compelling as the muralists themselves — including emerging black and Latino artists — and the neighborhoods that nurtured them. Los Angeles became identified with murals and they came to define the city — Highland Park residents immortalized on a building in that neighborhood, a line of children romping along a freeway wall.

Perched outside the Posco steel company office, the jarring 30-foot-tall object looks like the remains of a plane crash — all crushed steel and gnarled parts — because that's what it is. Creator Frank Stella built what he considered a modern work of art and named it "Amabel," in honor of an artist friend's daughter who died in a plane accident. But many passersby for years have considered it to be something else: an eyesore. The work is one of the more avant-garde sculptures in Seoul and the symbol of an art controversy in South Korea.

Few sculptures by Sol LeWitt actually resemble skyscrapers. But by installing 27 works by the artist in City Hall Park, in view of the lower Manhattan skyline, the Public Art Fund has put LeWitt's art into a playful and powerful dialogue with the city's architecture. Here, a pared sculpture of a white cube looks like some sort of building block or else the grid of a window. A pyramid form that might in a museum seem a celebration of art for art's sake seems more like an elegant real-estate solution.

The crowd standing in front of the wall-sized artwork looked mesmerized. For a split second, the 32-foot-long piece resembled an abstract painting by Ellsworth Kelly or another artist who works with grids of color. But it didn't stay that way for long. Changing constantly, it plays more like a movie that's about movement itself, generating suspense by developing and disrupting patterns of color instead of building up to car crashes. At one moment, the whole "screen" floods with orange or blue; at another it disintegrates into a field of competing hues.