Public Art

A battle over what constitutes "overtly sexual" art unfolded on Long Beach's trendy main thoroughfare on Monday, with an artist demanding that two of her abstract nudes be put back up on the walls of a public exhibition organized by a program that deemed them offensive.

Some of Kent Twitchell's murals are best known because they no longer exist. His "The Old Lady of the Freeway" greeted travelers along the Hollywood Freeway from 1974 until it was painted out by a billboard company in 1986. More recently, "Ed Ruscha Monument," a six-story portrait of artist Ruscha on the side of a government-owned building in downtown L.A., was painted over, in June 2006.

Sisterhood is powerful again. Last spring's "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution" at MOCA gave rise to an explosion of woman-centered exhibitions throughout the Southland. Now, a new public art initiative takes feminism back to the streets. Cindy Sherman's billboards of herself as a faux B-movie star loom over Hollywood & Highland. Jenny Holzer's grids of neon colored posters plaster quotations from revolutionary leaders all over town.

Drivers who catch a glimpse of the yellow billboard rising above a modest commercial stretch of La Cienega between Venice and Washington boulevards in L.A. may do a double-take at its cryptic one-word message: "Bountiful." No, it isn't obscure product placement. It's the work of Los Angeles-based mixed-media artist Scoli Acosta. Part of a public art program, it complements Acosta's dual installations at the nearby LAXART storefront gallery.

The new Los Angeles County Administration Building rises four stories above Vermont Avenue, between 83rd and 84th streets, its clean lines and green-glass front striking a contrast with the auto body shops and parking lots nearby. But something else also sets the county social services hub apart from the squat concrete structures around it: tile murals inside and outside the building, glazed with digitally manipulated photographs of oak trees to soften the bustle of South Los Angeles.

Kent Twitchell's fabulous six-story mural of artist Ed Ruscha -- whitewashed. My my. Tsk tsk. What a shock. This is L.A., after all, where public artworks get rubbed out all the time. The most famous example? The David Alfaro Siqueiros mural "America Tropical" on Olvera Street, literally whitewashed, for political reasons, 75 years ago and still riling people up today.

LOS ANGELES has long been known for its stars, both corporeal and celestial, but for one night, its oceanfront sibling hopes to shine as the West Coast's own City of Light. Santa Monica, taking a page from Nuit Blanche, an all-night cultural festival that premiered in Paris in 2002 and has since spread to more than a dozen cities around the world, will host the Glow festival, a dusk-to-dawn celebration of temporary public art.

They are the sullen architecture of the "surge," gray armies shrinking the horizon. Baghdad is a city of blast walls, towering maze-like from the Tigris to the battered, seething neighborhoods of Shula and Sadr City. Concrete sentinels of last year's troop buildup, they seal and sequester. They absorb explosions from car bombs, they bottle up bad guys.

Two works of public art proposed for the front of the Pasadena Civic Auditorium have drawn complaints from some residents and preservationists. The sculptures, mixed-media contemporary pieces, are being criticized not so much for their artistic expression, but because of their prospective size and location.