I had never heard of Lancaster, let alone gone there, before I drove up the 405 and the 14 last November to see “Being Here and There” at the Museum of Art and History. It was “worth the trip,” as the Guide Michelin says of exceptional destinations. Almost all the 26...
Local Color at OCMA
The subtitle “Works from the Orange County Museum of Art” made it clear that the exhibition on view there January 11 through March 9 was a collection show. But the main title, “California Landscape into Abstraction,” at first seemed an awkward and obscure attempt to...
Camera Obscura by Abelardo Morell
In 1987, the year his son Brady turned two, Abelardo Morell lay down on the nursery floor in order to see the world the way a wriggling baby would. From that vantage point he looked up at a stack of blocks towering over him as if it were a BCE column or stele, and he...
Death and Glory
I visited the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens while its current exhibition, “A Strange and Fearful Interest: Death, Mourning, and Memory in the American Civil War,” was being installed. I’d be tempted to call the Huntington a “peculiar...