David and Art

A California artist named Ed Ruscha offered a distinctive vision to the 20th century art world. Of the crop of Los Angeles artists who rose to worldwide fame in the second half of the twentieth century, the best known is perhaps painter Ed Ruscha. His work is among the most distinctive you’ll see, and his signature style so strong that you can spot him easily from across the museum.   Born in 1937...

Influences on jazz didn’t come just from New York and New Orleans. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve come to know an innovative gallery owner from the 1950s named Walter Hopps. Paintings and sculpture weren’t his only interests, however. Initially, he was interested in jazz which was itself a very cutting-edge art form in the early ’50s. In 1952 in LA, Hopps, a friend from Stanford named Jim Ne...

The gifts that the muses bring to artists are rarely finished products. I’ve been doing this show for about 5 1/2 years now—since the summer of 2018—and people sometimes ask me “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, they come from many different directions: from reading, from talking to friends, from things I see, things I hear. And sometimes apparently, just out of the blue. But rarely do any of th...