Santa Monica Museum

Jeremy Blake's digital art is painting made animate, color and pattern transformed from stagnant image into slow, liquid, meditative motion. Working initially with ink and gouache drawings (and at times sketching directly onto the computer), Blake manipulates his work into dreamlike DVD animations.

In the lofty main gallery of the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Liga Pang is overseeing the construction of her room-sized installation using bamboo, part of a "New Work" show. While that may suggest a thicket of tall and solid poles, the raw materials of her opus are the twiggy tips of Japanese bamboo, thousands and thousands of them, painstakingly tied together to create a delicate web that hints at the dual essence of bamboo, flexible but strong, simple yet versatile.

The new Edgemar development on Santa Monica's Main Street is more than merely a mini-mall with class. Edgemar is the flagship for a new armada of sophisticated and urbane neighborhood shopping complexes sailing onto the streets of Los Angeles. In the early 1980s, the deluge of poorly planned and crudely designed mini-malls that flooded the city gave the type a bad name. Traffic problems, front-apron parking, garish signage and cheap materials created instant eyesores. Neighboring residents were provoked to lobby City Hall for anti-mini-mall zoning restrictions and building moratoriums.

When Barkley L. Hendricks began to paint portraits in Philadelphia around 1969, one would have been hard-pressed to find many black faces over the prior five centuries of Western art. "Lawdy Mama," the first work encountered in Hendricks' survey exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum of Art acknowledges as much.

There are giants of the art world, and then there are true giants of the art world. Martin Kersels -- sculptor, videographer and performance artist -- stands 6 feet 6 and weighs more than 350 pounds. To say that he is a big man would be a gargantuan understatement. Usually, an artist's physical size bears little if any relationship to his work, but that's not true in Kersels' case. His art is often about scale -- his own girth but, more important, the idea of largeness and how that affects a person's movement through space.

At least 25 major museums around Southern California will be offering free admission on Oct. 2 as part of Pacific Standard Time, the initiative led by the Getty focusing on the history of art in the region from 1945 to 1980. Museums offering free admission on Oct. 2 include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Hammer Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Pacific Standard Time comprises more than 60 participating cultural groups throughout Southern California.

If you're familiar with Exene Cervenka, it's most likely as singer of the legendary L.A. punk act X. Her work as a collage artist, journal keeper and aficionado of cast-off Americana is far less known. But this side of Cervenka recently went on display at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. The first public show of Cervenka's artwork, "America the Beautiful" is a collection of collages she's assembled since the late '90s and journals she's written from when she was 17, using objects she found in L.

A Virginia-based conservative group filed a federal court suit against the National Endowment for the Arts on Wednesday, asking for an order barring the NEA from giving grants for "blasphemous and sacrilegious hate material." The court action, by the Rutherford Institute, based in Charlottesville, Va., revived a controversy over an exhibit of work by New York multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz called "Tongues of Flame."

Leonard Nimoy's latest photography project concerned people's secret selves, so it wasn't hard for officials at the Santa Monica Museum of Art to convince him to help with a fundraiser on that quintessential dress-your-fantasy occasion: Halloween. Besides that, Nimoy said, "I like the Santa Monica Museum." At the Halla Gala, guests were invited to "come as your secret self." For those who bought a $5,000 gala package, the multitalented artist/actor best known as Mr. Spock of "Star Trek" would photograph them as their otherwise hidden identities.

There is a wonderful photograph near the beginning of "Identity Theft: Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman, Suzy Lake, 1972-1978," the Santa Monica Museum of Art's contribution to this season's feminist spectacular. In it, Antin appears dressed as a nurse, lying across the pillows of a bed, surrounded by stuffed animals and paper dolls, biting her thumbnail and smirking like a mischievous 12-year-old.