Sarah Rara is a Los Angeles-based artist working collaboratively in sound and performance as one-half of Lucky Dragons (performances and recordings that are centered on the building up of ”fragile networks held together by such light things as skin contact, unfamiliar language, temporary logic”); drawing and designing as Sumi Ink Club (a weekly collaborative drawing society); and [...]

Jerry Andrus was so cool – a man of many talents and loves, including magic, scientific skepticism, philosophy and poetry.  He was a visionary illusionist that will have you wiggling with delight.  One of my favorites is his Tri-Zonal Space Warper (if you are like me you might be interested in Duchamps, Rotoreliefs and Motion Aftereffect). [...]

This one goes out to all my feline-obsessed friends (Stefani, Katie, Alex – I’m looking at you). Dreamcats is a website dedicated to “girls & cats, cats in soft focus, cats on film, dream cats,” curated by Anabela (of Fieldguided) and Erin Jane (of Atlantic Treefox). Click, purr, click. The cat awards (courtesy of google images)! cutest [...]

Anthurium are really rad, graphic flowers that make me laugh and at the same time stun me with their beauty.  They belong to the Arum family and are sometimes referred to as boy flowers or flamingo flowers. The original wild anthurium was first described by Moravian botanist Heinrich Wilheim Schott on a field trip to [...]

To Place is an ongoing series of books by Roni Horn about the relationship between identity and place. The books use Iceland as their starting point and evolve around Horn’s relationship with the country (she’s a frequent visitor). Here is Roni Horn talking about the project in a 1995 interview with Claudia Spinelli: The entrance to all my [...]

Justin Zzyzx is a rock superstar.  He is the main writer for The Vug – the best source for information on anything mineral and a huge resource for a lot of my rockhounding trips (thank you!).  I was stoked to read that he had a gallery in Downtown Los Angeles, the Zzyzx Gallery of Natural [...]

Here is a letter from Keith Haring to an aspring artist who wrote to him in 1987 asking for advice. Haring died 3 years later (at the age of 31) from AIDS-related complications. He was a true inspiration,  spreading his art across the world as an advocate of experimentation, universality and public art through his vocabulary of explosive abstract imagery. Universe of Keith [...]

I am a huge non-goal oriented, inconsistent collector of nature’s ephemera – collecting for instance, the feather.  The feather is the most complex organ system that protects the body (integumentary) found in vertebrates and is beautiful evidence of the amazing thing called evolution (check out the Sinornithosaurus). Basically put, every bird has feathers and anything [...]

One of the things I love most about what’s going on in Los Angeles today are the plentiful, vibrant art collectives that color the landscape - a handful of which we’ve featured on our blog here, here and here. This Thursday night is the launch of Collective Show Los Angeles 2011, an artist-organized exhibition of contemporary art groups recently established in [...]

Barite is a radiating form of crystal, sometimes forming beautiful flower-like clusters.  Thank goodness this gem is easily found in Palos Verdes, California. Less than an hour away from Los Angeles is a gorgeous stretch of ocean and land that offers interesting rock and tidal curiosities.  You can park, walk down an easy trail, and [...]