Tag: modern art

LACMA Day!

Last Sunday, Ed & I finally made it up to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to see two exhibits we were both really excited about. I wanted to catch the Vanity Fair Portrait exhibition, and Ed was really excited about the Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures exhibit.

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The Two Germanys exhibit was really great.  Basically, it compared and contrasted East & West German art & culture from after WWII up until the wall came down.  You know how obsessed Ed is with all things German and history related, so you know this was right up his alley!  I thought the exhibition was incredible.  To look back and have this visual documentation of how different these two parts of the same country were, both emotionally & culturally, was just mind-blowing.  Big kudos to the curator on this one.

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The other really neat thing about this exhibit was that it is inside the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM).  That’s right folks, LACMA’s got a “contemporary” building now – watch out!  This is great news, because we love us some Contemporary art.  We are very happy about the new direction LACMA is going in and can’t wait to see what they have next!  The above photo is a picture of the giant elevator inside the building.  The elevator was done by Barbara Kruger, who is one of the most intriguing artists to me as of late.  Of course, she does have a graphic design background and her work is done in red, black and white … so I suppose it all makes sense!  At any rate, the new BCAM building houses a ton of 3-D works, including a bunch by Jeff Koons, some Warhol, Ruscha, Lichtenstein and other modern art heavy-hitters.

Outside BCAM is a really cool installation of a ton of different lampposts!  It looks awesome in person, and it is tough to really capture it, but we tried:

(Be sure to check out our album to see all of the photos!)

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On to the Vanity Fair exhibit … so exciting!  I could look at photos all day – and when you add photos that appeared in magazines to the mix, I am all over it!  For those of you familiar with Vanity Fair, you know about all of the artistic, editorial and culturally significant work that has graced their pages.  We saw everything – a photo of Frieda Kahlo & Diego Rivera way back in the ’30s, to Demi Moore’s controversial naked-preggo shot in the ’90s!  There were many more photos of course, the exhibit spanned from 1913-present.  Did you know that Vanity Fair existed from 1913-1936 and then merged with Vogue?  It came back in 1983 separate from Vogue again.  I didn’t know that!  Anyway, the exhibit was fascinating!


Finally, an added bonus was that LACMA is temporarily housing 4 BMW Art Cars. Basically, over the years, BMW has given cars to various artists to do with what they wish. The 4 cars on display were done by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol. Of course, we had to see them! They were only in town for two weeks, and they have been traveling the world showing in Korea, India and Russia. Even though the two of us are huge Warhol fans, we actually were the least impressed by his car:

We actually thought Rauschenberg’s car was the most interesting, and it was cool to see how his collage-style translated in paint all over a vehicle!

All in all, it was a fantastic day. Do yourself a favor and get out to LACMA soon! We can’t wait to see what they have in store for us over the next year! Click on the thumbnail below to check out the album. More fun pics of art cars & lampposts! :)

LACMA – Vanity Fair/Two Germanys

Museum Day!

It started off as a rainy day in Buenos Aires this morning, so we figured it would be a perfect time to check out Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires). 


First of all, the building is beautiful.  Once we walked inside, it was exhilarating – big, bright and definitely bustling.  The art was VERY modern – lots of bright colors of course, and all different sorts of mediums.  We tried to take some pics, but kinda got busted by an undercover museum employee!  We made sure to say lo siento and put the camera away, but we caught a few snaps:


The guy walking towards us in this picture is who busted us … oops.

This was one of the temporary exhibits, “Mercado”.  It was really small, but so inspiring!  Just using simple imagery displaying foods from the market – the green you see above are a whole bunch of heads of lettuce!  The giant broccoli to the left was cool too – very pop – and made all of tile.  There were also intricately carved melons that were gorgeous too – and a very modern display of a giant pile of dirty dishes.  It was way better than we’re making it sound …


Another highlight was an exhibition of Felix Gonzales-Torres‘ work. It was shocking because throughout the exhibition, there were giant stacks of prints that people were just picking up and taking.  We watched for awhile, and then finally we asked if we really could take some. Yes, it was true, we could!  We absolutely fell in love with two prints – two simple, stark white sheets of paper with tiny black type.  One simply reads “Somewhere better than this place” and the other reads “Nowhere better than this place”.  The art spoke to us because we both are always thinking, planning and dreaming of the next place we’ll travel to, but we are always proclaiming to others how much we love our Long Beach “hometown” and how content we are to be in the LBC forever.  We can’t wait to get them framed and displayed once we get back!


After Malba, we headed over to San Telmo, one of the oldest & “most authentic” neighborhoods in the city. We saw tango in the streets and lots of street vendors and performers, but it was crazy crowded.  We decided we’d tackle San Telmo later this week without carrying art prints among the sea of people in the streets!

It just keeps getting better…and better…

So after a lovely afternoon of unwinding at the Viceroy, could the trip get any more fulfilling? Well…yes. Our friends Mary and Lewis happened to also be in Palm Springs that weekend, staying with their friends Mick and Andy. Anyways, we made plans to meet them for dinner and drinks that night, and instead found this at our doorstep:

Yep, Mick and Andy decided that they wanted to get a limo so that everyone could drink and travel in style. WOW. And before dinner, the limo whisked us off to two art openings, the second of which was particularly awesome. It was at M Modern Gallery, which we had been to previously for two different Shag openings. It was quite the scene there:

We ended up actually buying a piece of art that both Ed and Carrie (and especially Ed) was drooling over. We bought a print of Chris Reccardi’s Ops 2, seen here:

After that was an amazing dinner at Copley’s with the gang (which also included two more people we hadn’t previously met – the hilarious Tim and Kevin), where Ed had an amazing lobster pot pie and Carrie had a delectable salmon.

Afterwards, it was back to Mick and Andy’s house to chill around the backyard firepit to digest. What a night…



A Day in Little Tokyo

Today was a fun filled day of art and Japanese wackiness. We headed up to Little Tokyo to catch the amazing Murakami exhibit at MOCA and then on to the Giant Robot retrospective at the Japanese American National Museum. Both were fantastic and made us want to reach our goal to visit Japan sooner than later!


First things first – Murakami. Nothing can be wackier, and nothing made us happier than to see this work being featured at MOCA. The trademark Japanese anime style has infiltrated our culture and shaken things up as much today as all of the big time artists in the pop art movement did in the ’60s. Murakami’s world is a different world alright, and we like it. You feel like a child, but at times the subject matter is very adult. You can’t take pictures in the museum, but we managed to find a few out there on the good ol’ world wide web.




The space was so transformed into this crazy land that the walls in some areas were covered in eyeballs – or flowers – and bright splashes of color were everywhere. Then of course there were the sculpture pieces that looked like space age plastic cartoon characters that were adorable and disturbing all at the same time.

We loved it!

After taking in all of the Murakami madness, we decided to stop by Starbucks – after all, the red cups are here, and Carrie couldn’t be happier!

Next up was the Japanese American National Museum (JANM). We hadn’t been there before, and were glad to finally visit. Giant Robot is a magazine that we’re both big fans of. Basically, it’s an artsy magazine featuring work by edgy artists and art school students that features hip pop culture references and tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s super cool and pure eye candy to look at.

The art was awesome and we were excited that they let us take a few pictures inside.



JANM also has another really interesting exhibit going on at the moment called Common Ground and it has tons of photos, posters and objects telling the story of 130 years of Japanese American history. It was pretty amazing and we both were pretty moved by it.

As it turns out, the museum also has a super cool gift store and we know that one day in the future when there is a cool little baby Kim, we will have to buy this shirt:

All in all, it was an inspiring day – and we say if you haven’t gone out and caught an art exhibition lately – get out there and see something!

Pretty Smart!

Ed’s loved the little Smart car that’s been available in Europe for years and has been extremely excited about the Smart finally coming to the US soon. Anyways, the day draws nearer and they’ve set up a temporary space in Venice that showcases the car in this amazing modern house on Abbot Kinney. We don’t know what blew us away more…the house or the car!


The Smart House is located at 1319 Abbot-Kinney. It’s three stories, very modern and very open. There was a Smart downstairs (and ones you could actually drive out in back…more on that later). We were both dying over the honeycomb screen and chairs.

The next two floors included the main living room and kitchen, as well as additional chill areas. All in white!

And finally, the best looking espresso machine ever…

The space is being used as a Smart art gallery as well. Lots of cool and witty pieces, mostly Smart related.

However – on to the car itself. It’s tiny and meant for really congested urban areas. You see them everywhere in European cities. It’s no “toy” car though…Smart is a sub-brand of Mercedes-Benz and is meant to survive crashes as well as any normal-sized car. Anyways, it was smart (knee slapper, we know) to locate this temporary Smart space in Venice on Abbot Kinney…one of the most congested and hip areas of LA.

The Smart is not only efficient (averages well over 40mpg), but it’s a very fashionable and stylish little piece, with body panels that are removable should you want to change colors on a whim. And inside, you’re met with cool shapes and fabric patterns, and it’s huge given the tiny exterior. Basically, this is a car as a fashion accessory as much as it’s a mode of transportation.

Driving it shows it’s a real car…it doesn’t feel unsafe and in fact feels particularly solid. Here’s Ed about to take it for a spin.

Anyways, we hope this car does well. We like everything the car stands for – the efficiency, frugality, and high style. Heck, it’s the only car that has a permanent place in MoMA’s collection for its design! And props to the Smart House too – the presentation of it all totally successfully communicated the Smart “lifestyle”. For more modern greatness, see the pics here.

And, another draw is you might even have a celebrity sighting while you’re there like we did…Jessica Biel was there today checking out the Smart House with a few sidekicks. Go check it out!