Arts in LA

While there are plenty of arts happenings in Riverside, some of which I will post about soon, the majority of arts culture in southern California is centered in the LA area. Over the past few months I've been busy traveling to LA to check out the museums. Here's a rundown of my recent trips.

The Getty Center -- February 21

One of the first things I did here in town was visit the Getty but on this day, I was here for a purpose: to see the secret art holdings under the center with my 18th Century English Portraiture class. I was pretty excited about this and was looking forward to the opportunity to spend some time in LA before and after.

Me and Chad started the day off right, with a visit to Jr's Barbeque in South LA. The fact that neither of us remembers what we ate here is not an indictment of the food, but what followed. February 21 was the day before the Oscars, and apparently, that means people come out in swarms. It took 2 hours to drive 2 miles on side streets. I dropped Chad off in on Sunset Strip for the afternoon and headed to the Getty for my tour knowing full well I would never make it in time. Another 2 hours passed stuck in traffic, and sure enough, I was 15 minutes late. The class was locked in the vault without cell phone reception.

Luckily, if you're going to be stranded somewhere, the Getty is a good place. In my previous post, I mentioned that this museum is up on the top of a mountain overlooking the entire city of LA and the ocean beyond. I climbed up to the top of one of the buildings and fought my way through a crowd German and Japanese tourists to take these pictures. This is the main courtyard. Each building contains art from different eras. I think the one on the left is medieval and the one on the right is 18th century.

This is about how far up I was...

Overlooking their famous garden. This is just below the main architecture and continues on down the mountain.

Another view of the garden and what I think is the Getty Research Institute, an expansive art history library I'll probably spend significant time in this summer.

Anyway, the story ends with me catching up with the class, going out for Thai with my classmates Mindy and Elizabeth, driving back to Sunset Boulevard to meet up with Chad, and driving home. I spent 7 hours driving that day and the terrible experience left me with a bad attitude about driving in general. Every trip to LA that's followed has felt like an epic journey.

College Arts Association Conference -- February 25-27

Now that I am a big-shot art history student, it is time that I start attending art history conferences. The CAA conference is one of the most important and this year's happened to be in LA. It was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center next to the Staples Center in downtown LA so it was quite an exciting experience.

This is the lobby where you can see the "Welcome CAA" sign that awaited us. Most people spend the majority of their CAA experience attending lectures and I did have a chance to sit in on a few of them. However, the majority of my time at CAA was spent working as a room monitor -- checking people in and out of mentoring sessions. I got in for free as a result, plus $10/hour!

Since I was scheduled to work at 7 am, there was no way I was willing to commute. Plus, being recently soured on the whole driving-to-LA thing, I eagerly accepted my friend Mindy's offer to share a hotel room. Mindy is the queen of bargain shopping and found us this "fantastic" hotel in Chinatown for only $40/night.

I'm the first to admit the hotel was kind of creepy. The hotel manager could not figure out how to program the room keys for some reason and had to let us in our room each evening. He was very strict about where we parked and eyed us suspiciously when we went on a picture-taking walk through Chinatown. But the place had a nice walk-in closet, free Wi-Fi, and "authentic" Chinese decor. Very awesome. The following are just a few images from our walk... this little mall was just featured in the movie "I Love You Man" with Paul Rudd.

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens -- March 2

I know I already posted about the Huntington, but I spent a good deal of time here so I suppose it's worth mentioning again. Our 18th Century English Portraiture class visited the Huntingon 3 times to look at the museum's extensive collection of portrait paintings and portrait busts. In addition, the Huntington also has a large collection of portrait miniatures -- locket-sized paintings usually worn as devotional objects. On March 2, I went to the Huntington to look at these miniatures up close with a curator so that I could write a paper about them. It was all very exciting and I even got to hold one! This is the miniature I ended up writing my paper about -- it is only about 1" x 2" in size and mounted in a copper locket.

I also spent some time in the gardens. It has been a real treat to have such beautiful weather in the wintertime. Even though it was "cold" by LA standards, I saw things like these huge snapdragons and beautiful camellia plant.

The Getty Villa -- April 12

In an effort to do something other than school, me and four classmates (from left, me, Caitlin, Mindy, Elizabeth, and Juli) took a road trip to Malibu to see the Getty Villa. This museum is a reproduction of an ancient Roman villa and is stocked with ancient Roman art. We visited on Easter Sunday and it was a beautiful day as Easter usually is. Also built on top of a mountain, you could see the ocean from the top and we were all pretty excited for what else we'd see.

All I can say is that I'm glad admission was free. The villa was full of portrait busts! After 3 months in 18th Century British Portraiture, none of us wanted to spend our afternoon looking at portraits. Even wandering out in the picturesque courtyard was unsafe... it was well stocked with creepy reproduction Roman portrait busts.

LA Opera -- April 25

Me and Chad took a trip to LA just a few weekends ago to see a German opera by Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, at the LA Opera. It contains the infamous song "Ride of the Valkyries," which you'll recognize even if you don't recognize the title.

We decided to leave Riverside early so that we could take a walking architecture tour of downtown LA, get something to eat at a nice but moderately priced restaurant, and attend a pre-opera informational lecture so we knew what was going on.

Once we got to downtown LA, we were shocked to learn it isn't anything like downtown Minneapolis. Shops and restaurants line the streets, but nothing is open on the weekends. The architecture we wanted to see was closed for filming, as was the nearby Carl's Jr. I admit, it was fascinating to see the film crews, but overall, we were quite disappointed that our plans wouldn't work. We walked up and down the streets and finally found a place to eat: a convenience store called Famima! Here's what we picked up: lime aid and fancy pop, Japanese cookies and candies, chocolate Chex Mix, fancy potato chips, Krispy Kremes, a steamed BBQ pork bun, salmon lover's sushi, and a tuna rice ball (in the shape of a triangle). It turned out be a lovely meal eaten next to a hidden fountain with timed jets. It was kind of like watching the Bellagio fountains in Vegas.

So next was the opera. This is the grand lecture hall. It had four chandeliers and was full of the most pretentious people I've ever seen, even worse than those at CAA. But it was also quite exciting.

Plácido Domingo was scheduled to play the lead character but he opted to direct some show on the east coast and wasn't there after all. And on top of this, our seats were in the very far back corner of the theater. There was a rail in front of us that blocked most of our view, we were so high up we couldn't see the back of the stage, and we could not see the translation screen without using the binocs. There was only 1 seat behind us and the person who occupied it clapped with hands that must have been made of two-by-fours... his clapping sounded like gunshots. And the opera was 5 hours long! This meant we still couldn't go out for dinner because we weren't getting out of the opera until midnight.

Luckily, we HAD binoculars. (Note the angle of the binocs in the picture... Chad's pointing them almost straight down!) What we could see was fantastic and weird and the music was great. We had leftover candy and chips we ate to get us through. The five hours passed remarkably fast.