Philippe Vergne and the MOCA challenge; John Hwang's loving portraits of his friends on Skid Row; a Modest Proposal to eliminate Scratchers litter; an actually new Frida Kahlo exhibit
LA artists Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst debut at the Whitney Biennial in New York
Just last month, the Whitney Biennial opened in New York City. It's one of the nation's oldest regular museum exhibitions for new, emerging artists. Artists like Georgia O'Keefe and Jeff Koons have gotten their starts in part thanks to the Whitney Biennial.
This year, Zachary Drucker and Rhys Ernst — a transgender LA couple — make their Whitney debut. Ernst has a background in filmmaking, while Drucker has worked in fine art for years. They've started collaborating in recent years, making photo and video projects.
Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Drucker and Ernst at their Cypress Park studio.
"I guess we found out in May," said Drucker, about discovering that she and Ernst would be featured in Biennial. "It was right around my birthday, and I think we probably celebrated with champagne that night."
Then, she called her mom.
"She reminded me that I told her — maybe five, ten years ago — that my ultimate goal into the Whitney Biennial by the time I was 30, and I'm 30," said Drucker. "I'm gonna have to create new goals now."
"Relationship" is the title of one of the three projects they brought to the Biennial. Through the series of photographs, you see Drucker and Ernst's relationship develop in real time.
"We met in the 2008, sort of in the very beginning our transitions," said Drucker. "For me, from male to female, and for Rhys from female to male. I got a new camera pretty soon after we met, it was just a digital point and shoot Leica, and began to exhaustively document our relationship together."
RELATED: LA artists Heather Cassils and Zackary Drucker defy gender norms
Drucker and Ernst have both lived in Los Angeles for over five years now. Their art isn't just informed by the city, they said, Los Angeles makes their work possible. "There's more of a community of artists," said Drucker.
"And I think, too, the film industry's infrastructure here creates kind of a really interesting subtext our underbelly," Ernst added.
The couple lived in New York before moving to L.A. and both agree the city just wasn't as conducive to their work.
"Before I moved out here, I worked doing freelance TV work for a while," said Ernst. "And just the idea of driving a little cube truck and having nowhere to park. And then there's a four story walk up, and everybody's cranky, and it's freezing outside... it's so much harder to make work in that kind of environment."
Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst will be being featured at the Whitney Biennial in New York now through the end of May.
Help for out-of-town journos: How to write a Garcetti puff piece
LOS ANGELES — The tremors may have had morning TV anchors diving under the desk, but it takes more than a 4.4 quiver to rattle Eric Garcetti.
So opens New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on March 18, noticing that we have a new mayor. What follows is a fairly standard and probably reasonable column with plenty of local color. (I think there's a rule posted on the wall at the Times - and NPR - that pieces about LA must either refer to earthquakes or "Dragnet.")
The Dowd column got LA Weekly writer Hillel Aron thinking that he could save other out-of-town journos assigned to write about Garcetti a lot of time, hence "How to Write an Eric Garcetti Puff Piece In 10 Easy Steps."
I see you're here to write about our new mayor, Eric Garcetti. Actually, he's not that new, he's been on the job for about nine months now, although he's off to something of a slow start. ... Lots to say about the new mayor, and only so many column inches to say it in, and you probably want to hit the beach for a day or two. Here then is a simple 10-step guide to writing an Eric Garcetti puff piece that's at least as good as all the other ones.
My favorite is #5:
5) Now you'll want to throw in a bit of "balance," as we say in the journalism biz. Begin a sentence with "Critics say..." Then you can pretty much make up anything you want: he's too liberal, he's not liberal enough, his ears are too big, what is jazz piano, anyway? If you really want to get hard hitting, you can point out that no one actually knows what Mayor Garcetti's plans and priorities are, or what the hell he does all day.
Ouch! Dowd uses "Critics say..." twice within four paragraphs.
Then there's this:
6) I suppose you'll probably want to quote some so-called "expert" in local politics around here. Unfortunately, Dan Schnur is running for Secretary of State (not as impressive as it sounds). That leaves roughly two people: Fernando Guerra and Raph Sonenshein.
Which presaged a piece in Time magazine published after Hillel filed his.
“His style kind of captures the mood of the city as it is now and as it’s evolved,” says Raphael Sonenshein, executive director of the Pat Brown Institute of Public Affairs at California State University at Los Angeles. “L.A. is a city that’s becoming more sophisticated, more cosmopolitan, and he has an intercultural fluency. He also has a pretty youthful sensibility.”
Dowd missed her big chance when she followed Garcetti to Tom Bergin's. You can find lots of great Irish pubs in New York. She should have made Hizzoner take her to Langer's, for pastrami that beats anything she'd find in New York.
Rare chance to see Frida Kahlo photo archive, now at Museum of Latin American Art
John Rabe talks with Edward Hayes Jr., Assistant Curator at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, about the 240 photos from Frida Kahlo’s personal collection now on display. The exhibit, Frida Kahlo, Her Photos, is up until June 8.
Frida Kahlo, Her Photos is a selection from an archive of over 6,500 photos at La Casa Azul - Museo Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist’s childhood home and final resting place. Never intended for public display, the photos are a glimpse into Kahlo’s artistic, political, and famously complicated love life, often featuring her husband Diego Rivera and her lovers.
"We have photographs here that maybe weren’t meant to be seen," says curator Edward Hayes. "There are very intimate photographs — a whole section on lovers, close friends, acquaintances, high-profile affairs.”
Though the images on display are copies — Rivera’s will specified that the originals should never leave Mexico — the reproductions are highly detailed, sometimes including Kahlo's handwritten notes or even a lipstick kiss.
But the collection isn’t all drama and steamy extramarital affairs. Some of the more mundane snapshots are the most humanizing. A tiny portrait of Kahlo’s dog, La Burgesa, is accompanied by a short note to a traveling Rivera: "When are you coming home? The dog misses you." It reads like an email that anyone today might write to their husband or wife.
Frida Kahlo, Her Photos also includes images taken by many of the couple’s well-known photographer friends like Edward Weston, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Man Ray and Tina Modotti.
"Maybe if you’ve seen the recent Salma Hayek movie, you think you know the story," Hayes says. "But this exhibition draws light to different parts of her life. It also makes me reflect on what images mean to me, how I use photography and how we go beyond a family album to something different."
Why are there so many dead lotto scratchers on the sidewalk?
I've seen them all over Los Angeles: in grocery stores, bodegas, liquor stores and, annoyingly, on the street. They're scratchers, the cheap little tickets made by the California Lottery with names like "Lucky for Life," "Spicy Cash" and "$500 Frenzy." Try to walk a city block without finding one littered on the ground.
Recently, I walked down the block to get a sandwich and on my way picked up four scratchers. Then I got an idea.
Why not make a scratcher recycling program? For every, say, 25 used scratchers you turn in, you get one brand new scratcher in return. Would-be litterers might be encouraged to hold on to their spent-up tickets. And in the event a scratcher ends up on the street anyway: pick up 24 more, and that's a free chance to get free money. Everybody wins.
RELATED: Man wins $52 million in CA lottery, doesn't realize it for a month
I pitched my idea to Elias Dominguez, a spokesperson for the California Lottery. He was interested in hearing the idea. But ultimately, he said, he doesn't think it'd work. "It sounds like a great idea, to kind of curb littering and get rid of these tickets," said Dominguez. "But I'm not even sure we could do that."
Why not? Dominguez said the California Lottery would have to get the old tickets sent back to the organization, and that could mean hundreds of thousands of tickets to sort through and recycle. "Just from a logistics standpoint, I don't even think it would be possible for us to take all these tickets if we actually did that for all our scratcher games."
Plus, Dominguez said, the Lottery already has a program designed to keep dead scratchers off the street. It's called Second Chance.
"If you have a Super Lotto Plus or scratchers ticket that did not win, you can actually go on our website and enter a code that's on your ticket," said Dominguez. "And that enters you into a draw. You can actually win a cash prize."
Dominguez went on to say that while it depends on which scratcher you're using and when, Second Chance drawings can go for as much as $5 million. "I mean, hey, you told me there's a bunch of tickets on the ground. If I were you, I'd pick them up, enter them online and you have a chance to win, basically for free," said Dominguez.
That means the four tickets I found on the street could make me a millionaire. Why would anyone leave their tickets on the ground?
So I gave it a shot. I went to the Second Chance website, registered for an account, clicked the link in the verification email. Entering my tickets into the drawing proved more difficult than I predicted. I needed to enter two different codes for each ticket: the first is 13 digits and the second is seven. Oof.
My first ticket — called Electric 8's — went in no problem. But somehow I entered in the wrong number for the next three. And the more I tried to fix it, the worse it got. Eventually I'd apparently put in so many bad codes, the California Lottery website locked me out for a half hour.
I gave up and threw the other three tickets in my recycling bin. That was enough. If we can't recycle scratchers at the store and get free tickets, I can at least recycle them at home and feel better about myself at the end of the day.
Correction: A quote was fixed for typos.
Occupational therapist John Hwang hangs with the homeless (photos)
John Hwang knows languages heard all over Southern California: English, Farsi, Korean, Spanish. But it’s how he interacts with Skid Row residents that shows he understands real communication. KPCC’s Elaine Cha spoke with Hwang for this audio profile.
By day, La Puente resident John Hwang works in Monterey Park as an occupational therapist. By night – and sometimes quite late into the night – he’s walking L.A.’s Skid Row, checking in with old friends and making new ones along the way.
“I’ve always been very intrigued by people living on the street,” says Hwang, “because if you live in L.A., you see them all the time.” He had no plans to document his visits when he started going out to Skid Row about a year and a half ago. Yet as he met more people, and heard more of their stories, he felt he needed to share them somehow.
So Hwang began taking photos.
With his subjects’ permission, Hwang posted their portraits to Facebook, paired with simple descriptions or anecdotes, like this one:
"Suffers from bouts of severe depression, paranoia, and psychosis. The last few years he has either been in a mental institution or in jail until Skid Row became his home. He is still imprisoned. Tormented inside the invisible walls of his mind. Unable to sleep. He wanders the streets like a zombie. I took him to get dinner tonight. I sat with him for hours. He was mostly quiet. And then he gave me a faint smile and said 'Thanks for staying next to me...'"
Friends responded immediately with likes, comments, and shares that reached scores of people he didn’t know at all — people who’ve reached out to offer Hwang help with funds, food, clothes. Even a collection of "National Geographic" magazines.
(Photo: John Hwang)
Hwang writes about his encounter with the man above:
"'Cavi cavi...' people would whisper as I walked by. Cavi means crack cocaine in Skid Row. People often think I am there to buy drugs. It was early evening and I was walking down a street known as "Crack Alley." There were some walking around like zombies, while others sat on the sidewalk in a daze. One man invited me into his tent. He offered to sell me drugs, but I politely declined and told him that I don't do drugs. 'Good! You shouldn't do drugs, it will mess up your life,' he said."
When asked what keeps him coming back to Skid Row, Hwang says, “It’s an amazing thing to be able to connect so deeply with a stranger so quickly. It’s an incredible high.”
(The music that accompanies Elaine's piece is by G. Graham Allan. It's called The Lost One, and is from his Tidal compilation CD.)