Los Angeles has cemented its status as a global artistic capital in the past two decades, with the arrival of several new museums, not to mention the long -awaited expansion of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In Also in sight: unique and unexpected museums of the Grand Los Angeles (2024), Todd Lerew maintains that the cultural force of the region is not only In these high-level cultural institutions, but also in our local, offbeat and often sub-reported museums. Indeed, by the LEREW count, Greater has more than 750 museums (which the author said Everymuseum.The), more than any other American city and tied with artistic hubs like London and Paris. As he writes in the front of the book: “The commercial art market and the presence and activities of traditional museums can often be misinterpreted as for culture more broadly.”
LEREW largely defines museums, and the 64 institutions that it profiles are located in high schools, restaurants, state parks, a tattoo lounge and, in fashion True la, the shopping centers. He also has an extensive vision of Los Angeles himself, notably the counties of, Orange and Riverside, as well as parts of the inner empire.
There is a good dose of fantasy here, but the book is the most impactful to draw attention to the ways in which museums are increasing The communities stories that have historically been excluded from traditional cultural institutions, despite the rich diasporical tissue of the region. The Ararat-Eskijian museum, for its part, has celebrated Armenian-American culture for a quarter of a century for its location within a higher care establishment. Founded in 1985 By Luther Eskijian, survivor of the Armenian genocide, his participations include paintings by André “Darvish” Sevrugian and Jirayr Zorthian, the artist whose artist whose artist whose artist whose artist whose artist whose artist The famous ranch was almost completely destroyed in the recent Eaton fireAnd a memorial featuring fragments of bone victims of unknown genocide. Meanwhile, the mobile African-American miniature museum presents the work of Karen Collins, which created around 50 shadow boxes Debting scenes from black life and history, notably Martin Luther King Jr. Preaching, Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 and Kendrick Lamar.
Lerew also visits other organizations by focusing on the physical environment of the region, including the Valley Relick Museum, a Wonderland of Pop culture of neon signs and ephemerals filling two hangars at Van Nuys airport; The Street Light Museum, which presents some of the more than four hundred conceptions of different lamps which illuminate the streets of the city; And the Southern California Railway Museum, which houses the largest existing collection of Pacific Electric Red Carts, “the largest electric railroad system in the world in the 1920s” which has spread in the front of the automobile. It was notably Henry Huntington – whose old collection of houses and art constitutes the heart of the Huntington library, the art museum and botanical gardens – which owned the Los Angeles tram system, one of the numerous connection sons between the city's cultural institutions.
As much as they tell the communities and places, many of these museums reflect obsessions, and often eccentricities, individuals who have helped shape the Los Angeles cultural landscape. Some of them are like temporal capsules kept in Amber, while others have been updated and transformed over the years, reflecting several identities. These go from El Alisal, the former residence of the castle of the journalist and ethnographer Charles Lummis, at the Ojai house of “Mama of Dada” Beatrice Wood and the Echo Park parsonage of the legendary evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
The collection includes contemporary examples which could be considered as living works themselves, such as Velaslavasay Panorama, a converted theater founded by Sara Velas which revives the artistic form panorama of the 19th century with a large painting in the round increased by sculptural elements, sound and lights. The Museum of Jurassic Technology is an original idea of the winner of MacArthur “Genius Grant”, David Wilson, who founded the impressive labyrinthine curiosity cabinet in the early 1980s. Created with impeccable know-how, exhibitions mix facts and fiction, science and art, and reveal as much on museology and the history individual subjects, medieval bestiaries with Russian space dogs to Islamic design in medieval Spain.
Lerew calls “the most unique and most underestimated museum in southern California”, such as the historic park of the state of state of antelope Valley Indian Museum, which confronts its own controversial collection of collection. The museum started with native artefacts collected by the artist Howard Arden Edwards at the beginning of the 20th century through Means who were too common at the time, like the serious shutters. Recently, however, the museum began to reconsider how to approach this heritage. In 2023, He began to repatrify objects to
The San Nicolas, San Miguel and San Clemente Islands, plan to consult the local tribes on the creation of new exhibitions.
At a time when the almost identical art fairs bounce from the continent to the continent, and the cities try to surpass their neighbors with artistic benchmarks designed by stars, Also in sight Located in hyper -local as a crucial element of a robust cultural ecosystem – not in an oppositional relationship with these larger institutions, but in a symbiotic relationship. “These objects would not have meaning under the same roof, could not receive equal attention by a single institution,” writes Lerew, “and it is better to the left, whenever possible, to the place from which they come or with the people they represent directly.”
Also in sight: unique and unexpected museums of the Grand Los Angeles (2024) by Todd Lerew with the photography of Ryan Schude is published by Angel City Press at the Los Angeles Public Library and is available online and via independent booksellers.
