Los Angeles Museum to Oversee Watts Towers

December 23, 2010, 4:13 pm

By RANDY KENNEDY

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said on Thursday that it had completed an agreement with the City of Los Angeles that puts the museum in charge of efforts to repair and preserve the Watts Towers, the cathedral-like spires and crockery-encrusted forms built by the self-taught artist Simon Rodia in his spare time over more than three decades. The towers, which were once almost demolished by the city and then later designated a national landmark, were damaged slightly in the 1994 earthquake and again during a 2008 windstorm.

The museum, with $150,000 supplied by the city’s department of cultural affairs, will collaborate with other art institutions and with community groups in the Watts neighborhood to assess the site’s condition and make a plan for repairs and conservation. The hope is that the effort will lead to greater philanthropic attention and a source of long-term financing to maintain the towers, two of which soar more than 90 feet and have become symbols of Los Angeles’s cultural history.

Rodia, an immigrant from Italy who died in 1965, used basic tools and found or donated materials (scrap iron, mesh, shells, broken glass and tile) to build the massive artwork, which he described as a monument to America and to the human spirit. “I had it in mind to do something big,” he once said, “and I did it.”

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Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Paints Over Mural

December 13, 2010, 3:45 pm

By RANDY KENNEDY

Street art – graffiti, uncommissioned public art, call it what you will – has found greater acceptance in the gallery and museum world over the last several years but the fit hasn’t always been comfortable. Anyone looking for evidence of the tensions now has a marquee example. The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, run by the former New York gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch – a longtime champion of street art – late last week ordered a wall mural it had commissioned by Blu, an Italian graffiti artist, to be whitewashed because it found the artwork inappropriate. The mural, on a wall of the museum’s Geffen Contemporary wing, was planned as a kind of advertisement for an ambitious exhibition focusing on street art that the museum will open in April. But as Blu neared completion of the mural – which conveyed a strident antiwar message, showing rows of caskets draped with one-dollar bills instead of flags – the museum changed its mind and began painting it over on Thursday.

The decision, reported by the Los Angeles Downtown News, was made because the mural wall faces an ambulatory care center for veterans and a monument honoring Japanese-American soldiers in World War II. “The museum’s director explained to Blu that in this context, where MOCA is a guest among this historic Japanese-American community, the work was inappropriate,” the museum said in an e-mail, adding that Mr. Deitch had invited the artist to paint another mural.

In an e-mail to the Web site Animal New York, Blu described the incident as a “sad story” and told friends in the street-art world that he had no plans to return to Los Angeles before the exhibition opens.

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