Roaming on Thursday with my friend Jesse

After a great breakfast at Back on the Beach in Santa Monica, Jesse and I checked out the Hammer Museum in Westwood.  We enjoyed the permanent collection of Armand Hammer and then visited the many other temporary exhibits.  Here is a bit of what we appreciated:

We were greeted by the work of Lily van der Stokker entitled "The Tidy Kitchen."

Lily van der Stokker was born in 1954 in the Netherlands.  She resides and works in Amsterdam and New York City.
The program states that for this exhibit, "The Tidy Kitchen, she may have created her most political work to date.  In this work which goes from floor to ceiling in the entry of the museum, she uses heavily text-based approach which she brings to the subject of housework and cleaning.  The phrases "Washing and Cleaning" and "Organized and Tidy," are surrounded by descriptions of objects and actions from the domestic world, such as "sticky honey bear" and mildew on the shower curtain."   At one time or another we all have to deal with issues of cleaning.  The phrases like "oven clean in 2 hours and 45 minutes" remind us of how we are constantly bombarded with ads for products claiming to make our lives easier and better.  The program states that women have been expected to do the cleaning without compensation.   The artist believes that women should be paid for the skills and contribution with the text "Crying Crying for $320 per 8 our day.

We then went up to see the permanent exhibit and appreciated several favorites that are seen below:

"Don Quixote and Sancho Panza," 1866-68 by Honore Daumier, French, 1808-1879, oil on canvas

"Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat," 1637 by Rembrandt Harmensz, van Rijn, Dutch 1606-1669, oil on panel.

"Portrait of a Man in Armor," 1530 by Titian, Italian 1488-1576, oil on canvas.

"Touc, Seated on a Table," 1879 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, French, 1864-1901. oil on panel

We then roamed into the exhibit entitled "Provocations:  The Architecture and Design of Heatherwick Studio."  This fun exhibit shows the designs of Thomas Heatherwick in London.  The program states that this shows the breadth of the studio's practice by focusing on the design concepts behind these various designs.   Here photos of a few of my favorites:

1:10 scale model of the Olympic Cauldron, London, 2012, copper-plated brass.  The description states that his design was created to engage every country in the Olympic Games to take part in making and lighting the Olympic cauldron.  During opening ceremonies, a representative from each nation placed its copper element on slender rods radiating from the heart of the stadium.   Lit by young athletes, the individual flames were lifted and surged into a single, symbolic blaze.  

Afterward, the elements, patinated by the heat, became individual mementos of the 204 participating countries.

Zip Bags, 1993, Reel of zipper with an imaginative staircase design in the background.

Jiading Bridge, Shanghai, China, 2010.  This scale model of a design for a 65-foot-long waterway span that rises for boats to pass underneath.  

"Extrusions," 2009, Electroless-nickel-plated aluminum. "Can you squeeze a chair out of a machine, the way you squeeze toothpaste out of a tube?
A design for a modern London double-decker bus in the background.

A portion of the bus.

"Raw Extrusion," 2009

Next we passed into the gallery with an exhibit by Charles Gaines entitled "Gridwork 1974-1989.  The artist lives in L.A. and is on the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts.  The seventy-year-old African American artist also has an current exhibit at the Art + Practice gallery in Leimert Park neighborhood of L.A.  The artist created the gridwork style of painting as a rules-based procedures to construct order and meaning in contrast to the free expression style of artists like Jackson Pollock.  Here are some photos of his works:

From the series "Walnut Tree Orchard, he begins with photographs.

He then translated the photographs into drawings on paper with a hand-drawn grid. 

He used the same process with black-and-white photographs of people.

The facial features are then presented as negative space in a field of numbered squares.

"Numbers and Trees (1986-89).  The description states that the painted tree is composed of differently colored and numbered squares that are overlaid so that the numeric information about the other trees in the series is collapsed into one image.  Each vertical axis depicts the same number in each of its squares, beginning with zero at the center axis to form the trunk of the tree.

We ended our day at the outdoor concert stage behind the Jimmy Kimmel Life show in Hollywood. Thanks to brother-in-law Pat, we were enjoyed a performance by Chicago and Earth Wind and Fire.
It was great fun...we "Boogied On Down."  Here are a few photos: