Philadelphia: Celebrating 50 Years of City Public Art Funding

Philadelphia: Celebrating 50 Years of City Public Art Funding
by Todd Bressi
PlanPhilly.com 11/2/09
"Hundreds of city, state, and federal agencies have adopted policies that set aside a portion of their capital budgets for artworks—but Philadelphia was first. In 1959, the City Council and the Redevelopment Authority took the trailblazing steps of requiring city capital projects and private developments to include public art. The intent was to 'humanize and mitigate the deficiencies in the urban landscape,' according to Aaron Levy, executive director and curator of the Slought Foundation. Since then, [Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority] and the Convention Center Authority have followed suit, and Philadelphia International Airport has created a program of temporary art exhibitions. Twenty-five years ago, the city launched what has eventually become the Mural Arts Program, which has created more than 3,000 works throughout the city. And before all of this, more than a century ago, the Fairmount Park Art Association began its work creating and caring for artworks in the city’s parks and open spaces." http://bit.ly/dmo9H

A Better Picture for the Arts

by Nicole G. Anderson
Nov 2009
The Gotham Gazette

photo (cc) Barry Yanovitz

During his administration Mayor Michael Bloomberg has encouraged high-profile public art projects such as Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls.

After Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's strained, and often turbulent, relationship with the art community, the arrival of Mayor Michael Bloomberg came as a great relief to many artists and New Yorkers working for the city’s cultural institutions and art nonprofits. Most of their hopes have been realized. In sharp contrast to Giuliani, Bloomberg has been a strong and vocal advocate for the arts, supporting culture in his official capacity and as a philanthropist.

Over the last eight years, his administration has implemented a number of initiatives and programs designed to support small and large art nonprofits, museums, cultural institutions, performing arts groups and individual artists. In partnership with the Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate Levin, Bloomberg has made critical changes to the system of allocating funds to nonprofits and cultural groups, which have ultimately led to a significant rise in the number of organizations that receive funding from the city. While the economic downturn poses a threat to the welfare of the city's cultural institutions and artists, the mayor's office has stepped in and provided essential resources and new programming to ensure that the arts in New York City not only remain intact, but also continue to thrive.

At the same time Bloomberg has rallied for the art community, he also has been responsible for some flashy high profile projects that have received mixed reviews. The Gates, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation in Central Park, won much acclaim and increased tourism and economic activity. Olafur Eliasson's Waterfalls, however, had far less impact on the local economy -- and got decidedly mixed reviews.

If Bloomberg has had a failing in his support of the arts, it comes in arts education, which some experts say has not received the attention it requires. More.

Mayors Make Wager Over Game

By: Peter Crimmins
pcrimmins@whyy.org
Traditionally during championship sporting events, opposing city leaders will make friendly bets on who will win. This year, Cardinal Justin Rigali of the Philadelphia Catholic Diocese has wagered Philly cheesesteaks against the Archbishop of New York, who put up bagels. But the mayors of the two cities have a different kind of wager altogether.

Mayor Nutter's bet with Mayor Bloomberg in New York involves public art. If the Yankees win, Nutter will go to the Bronx and participate in a painting project at a public school. If the Phillies win, Bloomberg will come to Philadelphia to work on a Mural Arts Project at a city recreation center. Mural Arts Project Director Jane Golden.

Golden: I want to commend Nutter for thinking outside the box, not just thinking about something that is cliche or stereotypical like food, but thinking about transforming neighborhoods and beautification.

As a result of the Phillies Pennant win earlier in the post-season, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaragosa will come to Philadelphia at some point to work on a Habitat for Humanity project. He'll bring along Hollywood's famous Pink's Hot Dogs for the volunteers. More.

Public Art Fund Presents "Double Take" a Group Exhibition

Matt Irie and Dominick Talvacchio, Lamppost (rendering), 2009. A project of the Public Art Fund. Image courtesy of the artists.

NEW YORK, NY.- From November 11, 2009, the Public Art Fund presents a group exhibition featuring six emerging artists at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn. "Playful and provocative, Double Take brings fresh momentum to the Public Art Fund tradition of giving today's most exciting young artists the chance to debut new work in our public spaces," said Nicholas Baume, Director and Chief Curator of the Public Art Fund.

Double Take showcases new commissions by Michael DeLucia, Christian de Vietri, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Johannes VanDerBeek, and the collaborative team of Matt Irie and Dominick Talvacchio. Designed with the site's specific conditions in mind, the artists have taken an element of the existing architecture or environment and subjected it to a process of modification or metamorphosis. Each work plays with fantasy and illusion to force a shift in perception, in turn creating a mirage of sorts. Nothing is as it seems: a chain-link fence dissolves into pixels, a bonfire yearns for its flame, outdoors is indoors, a ghost lurks, and a lamppost bends. Double Take celebrates the curious over the comfortable, the strange over the simple, and the mysterious over the mundane. More.

NYC Street Advertising Takeover (Briefly) Reclaims Public Space

Via Gothamist

The advertising company couldn't keep up with all the whitewashing, though-- here artists Serf and Mint put up a piece on a reclaimed billboard. (Jake Dobkin)

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You may have noticed teams of people in orange vests whitewashing advertising billboards in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. They weren't employees of NPA, the company that maintains the billboards. In fact, they were part of a subversive network convened by the Public Art Campaign to take back hundreds of advertising locations that NPA has placed around the city.

We tagged along with one of the whitewashing teams this morning in SoHo, as they took down five billboards. Surprisingly, no one looked twice at them as they walked around with an enormous bucket of paint, brushes, and a wobbly cart. Later, we biked over to LES, where NPA employees had already commenced retaking the whitewashed billboards, less than an hour after they were painted. And still later, we took some shots of the artists the PAC had organized to paint the remaining billboards.

Only time will tell if this protest will call attention to the problem of pervasive, illegal advertising here in New York. So far, the city has been loathe to enforce the existing zoning rules that are supposed to prevent these kinds of ads, and from the complete lack of reaction of the local police officers we saw today, that doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon.

Did you take any good billboard pix today? Send them to us at photos@gothamist.com, or tag them "gothamist" on Flickr, and we'll add them to the gallery.

Update: the Times is reporting that five people were arrested in connection with the protest.

Look out, Paris, Boris plans a ‘Piffle Tower’

Chris Gourlay and Cristina Ruiz for the Sunday Times

It is a building to match his bravado. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, is planning a £15m monument to rival the Eiffel Tower and seal his legacy.

The magnificent edifice will be put up in the capital’s Olympic Park in time for the 2012 Games and will be funded by the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal — Britain’s richest man.

However, as vanity projects go, it is likely to be compared with the “wedding cake” that Mussolini completed in Rome or the 250ft gold statue that Saparmurat Niyazov, a former Turkmen dictator, commissioned to loom over his capital and rotate to face the sun.

Johnson had even pledged to crack down on tall buildings in his mayoral manifesto, describing London’s skyline as “precious”. More.

LAPD's Public Art Has Weathered Storms

Christopher Knight for The Los Angeles Times

When I was writing the other day about Peter Shelton's sculptural ensemble for the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters, I decided to stop by Parker Center, the old police HQ that sparked a huge firestorm over public art when it opened in 1955. (You can read about the earlier ruckus here.) The minute I got there I thought, “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

Bernard “Tony” Rosenthal's abstract bronze wall relief just to the right of the entrance doors is a minor sculpture by a minor artist, produced at a time when painting is where most of postwar Modern art's adventurous action was in America. And at any rate, as I noted in my Shelton review, it wasn't the relative quality of the art that caused the uproar back then -- a dozen years would pass before another abstract sculpture would be commissioned for a downtown public space -- an uproar that seems quaint when faced with Rosenthal's sculpture today.

In fact, there's no getting around how great the ensemble of sculpture and building (by Welton Becket & Associates) looks now, more than 50 years on, especially at the glass-and-ceramic-tile entry. The original golden hue of Rosenthal's relief has gone dark, the shabby garden beneath it needs attention and subsequent construction around Parker Center has altered the light-filled transparency of the setting; but, although some have suggested tearing down the place now that the LAPD is moving out, as a midcentury Modern period piece it's smashing.

“Distance lends enchantment to the view.” The phrase comes from “The Pleasures of Hope” (1799), a long and sentimental Romantic poem in rhyming couplets -- lots of exclamation points and yearning question marks are scattered throughout -- by Scottish writer Thomas Campbell. He was no Wordsworth or Coleridge; but the sentiment expressed in perhaps his most well-known phrase is certainly apt:

At summer eve, when Heaven's ethereal bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering bills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those clifts of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near? —
'T is distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

It's a long journey from here to there. Time's passage always softens perceptions.

A few more photos of the Parker Center ensemble are after the jump.

-- Christopher Knight

Photos: Parker Center. Credit: Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times

Anthony McCall: Projected Column

North West from Arts Council England on Vimeo.

Anthony McCall will create Projected Column, a slender, sinuous, spinning column of cloud rising into the sky from the surface of the water in Birkenhead’s disused Morpeth dock in Merseyside, directly opposite the city of Liverpool. The project will be produced by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology).

A sculptural landmark based on pure energy, Projected Column will echo the dynamism of a city and a region that has recently undergone major cultural and economic development.

Extending upwards as far as the eye can see, and visible on a clear day from up to 100 km away, the column will disappear and re-appear in slow structured sequences, punctuating the skyline whilst connecting it with the city and its docks.

Projected Column will recycle discarded local heat, and, day or night, will operate as a self-sustaining system.

Public Deaccessioning

University College London has a jumbled collection of objects and is asking visitors to vote on what deserves to be kept.

'Agatha Christie Picnic Basket' is among items in the exhibition exploring what should be disposed of from museum collections. Photograph: Martin Godwin
Read More Here.

The Case for Mike McGinn: Part 3

by Brendan Kiley for the Stranger

McGinn portrait by Nat Damm, from a photo by Kyle Johnson. The third in a series by Seattle artists.

To be honest, I'm slightly chagrined to find myself writing the third installment of this Perpetual Adoration of Saint Michael. The Stranger has thrown so much unqualified weight behind the man, it's starting to get a little boring. The contrarian in me had hoped to come out swinging for Joe Mallahan just to break the tedium.

Nevertheless, here I am, endorsing Captain Beardo's culture platform, because—it cannot be denied—it beats Captain Cell Phone's.

Neither candidate had shown a deep interest in arts and culture prior to the election, but there's no shame in that. As writer Jonathan Raban pointed out in an e-mail: "Given their lack of experience on more conventional mayoral issues, that's probably a good thing. One wouldn't want to see either of them ducking early out of city hall for a night at the opera, or whiling away a weekend over Anna Karenina."

We don't need an art critic for mayor. We need a mayor who understands two foundational facts: (1) Culture—music, theater, film, literature, art—is a constituency that generates billions of dollars in sales, tens of thousands of jobs, and over a billion dollars in tax revenue; and (2) culture is not an add-on—it is fundamental to the city's intellectual, aesthetic, and financial health.

Arts funding isn't a handout that disappears into a black hole of elitist erudition. It's a practical investment with high returns. In 2005, Seattle's Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs had a budget of $2.57 million—minus money for public art, which would bring the figure closer to $4 million—and local arts organizations, with the help of OACA, returned $12.3 million in local government revenue. That's not counting state revenue or dollars that went to private businesses (lumber for sets, bar and restaurant revenue, hotel rooms for the people who came to see Der Ring, etc.). At worst, the city tripled its investment; at best, it quintupled it. More.

Peter Shelton's 'sixbeaststwomonkeys'

LA TIMES
Public art review: Peter Shelton's 'sixbeaststwomonkeys'
October 22, 2009 10:56 am
In the annals of art criticism, deriding a sculpture as looking like "some kind of cow splat" is probably not bound for glory.
That was the colorful phrase used by outgoing LAPD Chief William J. Bratton in reaction to "sixbeaststwomonkeys," an ensemble of eight sculptures by Peter Shelton commissioned for the department's new headquarters at First and Spring streets downtown and still being installed as I write. (Dedication is set for Saturday between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.) The rebuke makes for an eye-catching headline. But for reasons I'll get to in a moment, it doesn't even begin to come close to the furor inspired by another benign sculpture commissioned half a century ago for Parker Center, the LAPD's old headquarters a few blocks away.
Neither does Bratton's crack demonstrate that he knows zilch about contemporary sculpture, as one might suspect; it demonstrates instead that he doesn't know much about cow splat. Born and raised in Boston, the chief has lived and worked successfully on police forces there and in New York City and Los Angeles, where encounters with cows are rare. Perhaps he can be forgiven for not knowing what bovine poo actually looks like.
What the sculptural ensemble does look like is a procession of monumental, smartly abstracted animal forms. Some are loosely reminiscent of such brawny beasts as hippos, elephants and bison. Shelton, whose well-known work usually abstracts human body parts, distending them in space in ways that make us supremely self-conscious of our own imperfect, slightly ridiculous assemblages of flesh and bone, has here turned his talents toward powerful animals associated with the untamed wilds of Asia, Africa and the Americas.
Cast in bronze and coated with a rich, black patina, they create a formal promenade along the Spring Street side of the new edifice. Between the sidewalk and the conventional but imposing new building, their mostly rounded shapes soften the hard edges of the street-scape. The corpulent forms are sheltered beneath a freshly planted alley of London plane trees. As it matures, the bower will further cushion the pedestrian space between the busy traffic artery and the swank architecture.
In stark contrast, the procession is flanked at either end by headless creatures atop tall, spindly legs. Their elevated bodies, presumably derived from the monkeys mentioned in the title, twist in space as if scanning their surroundings with bodily sensors rather than eyes. These animated forms begin and end the procession with an image of movement into the central city.
Between them, six limestone plinths positioned between stairs that rise a few steps from the concrete sidewalk to an upper pathway of decomposed granite hold the large, dark, smoothly elephantine forms. Half face north, half face south — which is saying something about the artist's gift for abstraction, given that none of these beasts has a face.
One parades. Another huddles. A third seems to amble. One even appears to have rolled onto its side to wallow playfully for a moment in the sunshine. Each has a distinct personality.
In their own deep ancestry the sculptural forms also harbor memories of Henry Moore (1898-1986), albeit without the British Modern artist's rather grandiose affinity for prehistoric bones and punctured shapes that let views of the landscape into the sculpture's interior. Once upon a time it seemed like any new civic building worth its salt would have a monumental Moore out front, indicating a measure of self-conscious cultural pretension. Shelton's playful bronzes tweak that sober tradition.
Why animals? Partly to put meat on those bones, I suspect.
More importantly, animal sculptures in front of noteworthy civic buildings are also common global fare, whether the imperial lions in front of the New York Public Library or the mythical dragons at entrances to the 9th-century Buddhist temple of Borobudur, nestled in the Indonesian jungle of central Java. In most every culture in most every age, powerful animals have functioned as guardian figures. Finding them now at the site of a police headquarters is hardly a stretch.
Shelton was also smart not to make his procession too literal in its civic symbolism. That error occurred in 1955, when a ludicrous uproar arose over a bronze sculpture commissioned the year before for the then-new police administration building now called Parker Center.
Bernard Rosenthal (1914-2009), the first sculpture professor at UCLA, crafted a 14-foot bronze figural grouping for the facade of the sleek, modern building on N. Los Angeles St., designed by Welton Becket Assoc. and J.E. Stanton. The sculpture, descriptively titled “The Family Protected by the Police,” also abstracts its subjects, here into angular, elongated Cubist forms. (After art school at Cranbrook Academy, Rosenthal trained in Chicago with Ukrainian émigré Alexander Archipenko.) A monumental figure at the rear — the policeman — puts his left arm around a woman holding a child in her arms at his side; meanwhile, his right hand rests on the shoulder of the young man standing slightly in front of him.
Except for their relative sizes, the two male figures are virtually identical. The continuity of a paternal police force composed of citizens is visually conveyed — albeit in limited terms of gender standards common to1950s American society.
Councilman Harold Harby was furious about the sculpture, although not because of any primal feminist leanings. A notorious Red-baiter and hater of Modern art, Harby was certain that the faceless geometric abstractions were meant to symbolize a “one world” philosophy of uniform, Communist-inspired government. (Think of him as the Glenn Beck of his day.) “It is probably the most scandalous satire and caricature of American people I have ever seen,” Harby fumed to the press, in a diatribe not without racist overtones. The brouhaha raged for months.
Harby's efforts to get the sculpture removed from the off-white ceramic facade failed. Subsequent building around Parker Center has somewhat diminished the light-filled, open-air character of the space, which itself was meant to suggest a degree of transparency in a police department darkly shadowed by a troubled past. Together with the original building, the bronze is now part of a near-perfect midcentury Modern ensemble.
And what became of Bernard Rosenthal, the artist whose 1950s sculptures also graced the old Robinson's department store in Beverly Hills, Bullock's in Westwood and a fountain at UCLA? Better known as Tony, Rosenthal decamped to New York in 1960, where he died at 94 in July. “Alamo,” his revolving 1967 steel sculpture in the traffic island at downtown Manhattan 's Astor Place — balanced on point and commonly referred to as simply “the cube” — is among that city's most familiar public sculptures.
Bratton, New York City Police Commissioner in the 1990s, probably saw “the cube” countless times. But no, I confess I don't much wonder about what he thought of it.
-- Christopher Knight

Debating the Role of Public Art: Peter Shelton's work for the Police Administration Building in LA

Peter Shelton's whimsy, all in a row, for the L.A. police HQ

April 26, 2009 | 2:30 pm

Inside an expansive East L.A. studio, a collection of creatures is undergoing a transformation. One is a giant unbaked loaf of white plaster, sanded into smooth curves; another has taken on a yellowish-brown coating, a sealant; a third is covered by thick sheets of red wax. All are headless and rotund yet seem — with their crouched, perched, lolling torsos — to be quite playful. Soon, they will be trucked to a foundry to be cast in bronze.

This summer, Peter Shelton’s sculptural installation called “animaline” will be filing down Spring Street in downtown L.A., on pedestals placed along a sitting area adjoining the new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Six ballooning forms will be held up by two elongated, vaguely quadrupedal creatures on either end. “As is common in my work,” says Shelton, an affable man with frizzy gray hair and round glasses, “I want to develop a contrast in the physicality of the forms from the corporeal and ponderous to the attenuated and light.”

Two years ago, when a selection committee of the Department of Cultural Affairs asked Shelton to submit a proposal, he was a bit dubious — government arbiters of art usually want work that tells a local story or evokes a civic-minded theme. “I don’t tend to work from obvious narrative or rhetoric,” says Shelton, 58. “I’d say my work is somewhere between abstract and recognizable. The main thing is to convey a sense of something animated.”

Explaining the process in his studio, he pulls out some early drawings of the pieces. Later, he made small models to help visualize the forms and mounted photos on a board to give the committee an idea of what the project might evoke: outdoor animal sculptures in India and China and a circus parade from mid-America.

"In some cases they might represent power and authority or are guardians,” he says. “In other cases, they could be our animal alter egos, our most basic selves.”

And though he cautions against reading his work too literally, he admits there are personal references: “When I was a kid in Arizona, my dad would get us up early, and we’d see the elephants unload from the train and parade down the street,” he says. “I loved that.” He also fondly recalls the dancing hippos in the 1940 Disney film “Fantasia.”

The public art budget for the new building was $1 million, split between Shelton’s work and that of Catherine Wagner of San Francisco. (Wagner’s “Ghost Grove” conjures the spirit of orange trees in etched aluminum panels and sandblasted limestone in and around an auditorium on the site)

An alumnus of UCLA’s master of fine arts program, Shelton has had a three-decade career, with works in the permanent collections of three dozen museums, including the Getty, LACMA and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Yet he has completed only a handful of public art projects.

As for his first in L.A., Shelton says, “I’m really excited to have a public work in my hometown.”

— Scarlet Cheng

Caption: Peter Shelton amid the elements of "animaline," a public art project for the grounds of L.A.'s new police headquarters. Credit: Ringo H.W. Chiu

Meet Spring Street's New Public Art

By Eric Richardson
Published: Monday, October 19, 2009, at 10:00PM

Eric Richardson [Flickr]

Cast bronze works by Peter Shelton, installed on the Spring street side of the new Police Administration Building.

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — It's hard to know what to make of the newly installed public art along the Spring street side of the Police Administration Building. Are those large black lumps animals? Are they internal organs? Ink blots?

Well, yes. It's sort of up to you.

Artist Peter Shelton concedes that he conceptualized the pieces as abstract "beasts of burden," but wants to leave it to those passing by to make up their own stories. "What's the point of art if it's all about telling you what it means?" he asked today, while working on some final installation details.

The six large cast bronze works are flanked by a pair of spindly-legged "sentinels." Shelton said that each got a name during its time in the shop, but that the monikers were about utility rather than narrative.

Shelton got the art commission two years ago, and said that fabrication work took 15 months. While the pieces are site-specific, Shelton designed them in the context of a Downtown streetscape, not of the LAPD structure. He wanted to show "animated forms," and compared the line of objects to the circus' animal walk.

On Monday afternoon, it looked like Shelton's works were doing their job at provoking speculation. "Are you the artist?" asked a woman walking down Spring. Pointing at one of the pieces, she asked, "What is that?" She explained that she had decided what each of the others were, but couldn't quite pin down one particularly abstract form.

The Police Administration Building has its grand opening on Saturday, October 24.

Sculptures at LAPD's new home likened to 'cow splat'

The animal sculpture on the the northern end of the grounds looks to some like a pig that has been knocked on its side. It was designed by a Los Angeles artist commissioned by the city Department of Cultural Affairs. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times / October 20, 2009)

By Steve Lopez

October 21, 2009

As luck would have it, the nearly completed LAPD headquarters is right outside my office window, so I've been bird-dogging the project from Day One to make sure taxpayers don't get ripped off. Which brings me to the $500,000 worth of public art that's just been installed on the west side of the building.

The cast-bronze sculptures consist of six large black blobs, with two tall, skinny structures on either side.

I wasn't sure what to make of them, so I went straight to the top: It looks like "some kind of cow splat," said Police Chief William J. Bratton, who sounded as if he were personally insulted by the installation.

Bratton said he first drove past the work and later walked back to see whether "it's as ugly up close as it is when you're driving by."

The answer was yes, and he sounded mad enough to have the artist arrested.

Bratton said he was not alone in his opinion; it was the talk of cops and staffers who already have moved into the new police administration building.

"I don't think anybody can figure out" what the shapes are supposed to be, Bratton said. "Bisons and hippos maybe. I haven't the faintest idea what the two tallest things are on either side."

Nor does he understand what any of this has to do with police administration, if anything. "I don't get it," he said. "It's just a shame."

Myself, I didn't see animals when I first looked at the sculptures. Peering down from my third-floor window, I thought they were giant molars. Not a good idea, I thought, to have a bunch of knocked out teeth on the grounds of the cop shop.

When I went outside for a closer look, I realized the molars were actually the torsos of animals with large rumps. Were the cops trying to tell me and my colleagues what they think of The Times, giving us a bunch of derrieres to look at?

Not clear. But the animal on the northern end looked like a pig that had been knocked on its side. You have to wonder how that's going to sit with the LAPD brass.

On the far side of the building I found a bunch of city employees with clipboards and asked about the sculptures. The first guy said it wasn't his department's jurisdiction, and I should check with the Bureau of Engineering. Then a bureau employee showed up and told me it wasn't her deal; I should call the Cultural Affairs Department and ask for Felicia Filer in the public art division.

It's easy to understand how a $300-million building project ended up costing closer to $450 million.

Filer told me that two artists were selected from roughly two dozen under consideration, and they split $1 million for separate projects at the police headquarters. The other work was a wall of etchings in the new auditorium representing an orange grove. A live orange tree was proposed as well, but police rejected the idea, fearing that citizens would pelt the building with low-hanging fruit.

Despite the city budget crunch and police staffing challenges, more art projects are in store for the new police headquarters because of a city requirement that 1% of any major project's cost be spent on art. Artists for the rest of the works will be chosen the same way the first two were -- by a panel of city officials, artists, neighbors and a civilian member of the LAPD.

Filer said Bratton first squawked about the sculptures when he saw the drawings. Bratton told me he liked the orange grove better because "it has some semblance of what it's supposed to be -- trees and leaves."

I spent a lot of time wandering the new police grounds this week, taking in the building and its surroundings, and I'd say the Parker Center replacement looks pretty good overall. But if Bratton thinks there's cow splat on the west side, wait until he sees all the dog splat on the south-side lawn, which has quickly become an outdoor toilet for neighborhood pets.

As for the sculpture, passersby had mixed reactions.

"That's a lot of butts on display," one woman said.

"It's nice," said another. "But is this a pig, or what is it?" More.

Grocery Store Musical

Graffiti gangs chant: Knit one, purl two

Yarnbomb – verb. To gently fasten knitted and crocheted works to public surfaces as cozy, impermanent graffiti: The kindergarten teacher yarnbombed a pole in the park with a stocking stitch in shades of blue and green.

From Houston to Vancouver, Stockholm to Mexico City, graffiti artists of a softer sort are "tagging" poles, statues, trees and bicycle racks with multicoloured knits. The more ambitious have covered an entire bus, an army tank and piece of the Great Wall of China.

The goal? World yarn domination. Surprising strangers. Promoting an underappreciated craft. Really, it depends on whom you ask. Read more here.

American Figurative Artist and Feminist, Nancy Spero, Dies at 83

NEW YORK, NY.- Nancy Spero, one of the most influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, died Sunday, October 18, 2009, in New York City. For over fifty years, Spero made the female experience central to her art's formal and thematic development. Her radical career encompassed many significant visual and cultural movements from Conceptual Art to Post-Modernism to Feminism.

After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and l'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Spero lived in Italy briefly and then in Paris, where she remained until moving to New York in 1964. In Europe, Spero produced her first significant works, the Black Paintings-somber, figurative works allusive of existential oppositions and emotional turmoil. These works were made at a time when Pop Art and Minimalism were the focuses in the art world, marking Spero's first consistent oppositions to the prevailing conventions in art making.

Nancy Spero's return to the U.S. in 1966 coincided with the height of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. In this charged political climate, her passionate engagement with these issues engendered the groundbreaking aesthetic style and the political and feminist themes for which she is now known. "The War Series" was Spero's first significant body of work on paper, a support she would favor for the majority of her working career. Described by Spero as "broadsides," "The War Series" depicted women and children as victims of war and suffering, a theme that would occupy Spero for the next forty years. Though exhibited rarely in their time, "The War Series" works were more recently exhibited to great acclaim, including in Documenta X in 1997 and in "Nancy Spero: The War Series" at Galerie Lelong in 2003.

Following "The War Series," Spero produced two bodies of work: the "Artaud Paintings" and the "Codex Artaud" series, based on the French poet Antonin Artaud, whom Spero described as the "most extreme writer of the 20th Century." In reading Artaud, Spero coined the term "victimage," making a parallel between Artaud's language and her feeling of the "loss of tongue" as a female artist in a male-dominated art world. One of Spero's great inventions was the fracturing of text and image in the Codex Artaud works, which some critics have described as the first works of Post-Modernism. Following the Artaud series, Spero began work on her pioneering and critically lauded scroll series: "Hours of the Night," 1974 (collection Whitney Museum of American Art), "Notes in Time on Women," 1979 (collection Museum of Modern Art , New York) and "Torture of Women," 1976 (collection National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa).

Earlier this year, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria awarded Spero the Herbert Boeckl Prize and presented her exhibition "Nancy Spero: Woman as Protagonist." In 2008, the Museu d'art Contemporani Barcelona organized a full-scale retrospective, "Nancy Spero: Dissidances," which traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville. The Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris will present a retrospective exhibition of her work in 2010. During her long career, monographic museum exhibitions of Spero's work have been held at de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Frac Haute-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Germany; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; The Power Plant, Toronto; and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among many others.

Nancy Spero was married to the artist Leon Golub (1922-2004) for over fifty years. In 1996, together they received the Hiroshima Art Prize--awarded to contemporary artists for their achievements in promoting world peace--and exhibited at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. A joint retrospective of their works, "War and Memory: Nancy Spero and Leon Golub," was presented by the American Center, Paris in 1994 and traveled to the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia. Spero is survived by her three sons--Stephen Golub of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania; Philip Golub of Paris; and Paul Golub of Paris--six grandchildren; and sister, Carol Neuman of Portland, Oregon.