art

If our waking hours are a canvas, the art is how one fills it: tightly packed, loosely, a little of both. At a time when they were both 40 and the art scene in ’70s New York was in thrall to street-centered youth of all stripes, real-life writer Linda Rosenkrantz asked her close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, to make a record of his activities on one day — Dec. 18, 1974 — and then narrate those details into her tape recorder the following day at her apartment.

The goal was a book about the great mundane, the stuff of life as experienced by her talented confidants. In Hujar’s case, an uncannily observant queer artist and key gay liberation figure planning his first book, what emerged was a wry narrative of phone calls (Susan Sontag), freelancing woes (is this gig going to pay?), celebrity encounters (he does an Allen Ginsberg shoot for the New York Times) and chance meetings (some guy waiting for food at the Chinese restaurant). The Hujar transcript, recovered in 2019 sans the tape, was ultimately published as “Peter Hujar’s Day.”

Now director Ira Sachs, who came across the text while filming his previous movie “Passages,” has given this quietly mesmerizing, diaristic conversation cinematic life as a filmed performance of sorts, with “Passages” star Ben Whishaw perfectly cast as Hujar and Rebecca Hall filling out the room tone as Rosenkrantz. (They also go to the roof a couple of times, which offers enough of an exterior visual to remind us that New York is the third character getting the time-capsule treatment.)

From the whistle of a tea kettle in the daylight as Hujar amusingly feels out from Rosenkrantz what’s required of him, to twilight’s more honest self-assessments and a supine cuddle between friends who’ve spent many hours together, “Peter Hujar’s Day” captures something beautifully distilled about human experience and the comfort of others. For each of us, any given day — maybe especially a day devoid of the extraordinary — is the culmination of all we’ve been and whatever we might hope to be. That makes for a stealthy significance considering that Hujar would only live another 13 years, succumbing to AIDS-related complications in 1987. It was a loss of mentorship, aesthetic brilliance and camaraderie felt throughout the art world.

Apart from not explaining Hujar for us (nor explaining his many name drops), Sachs also doesn’t hide the meta-ness of his concept, occasionally offering glimpses of a clapperboard or the crew, or letting us hear sound blips as it appears a reel is ending. There are jump cuts too, and interludes of his actors in close-up that could be color screen tests or just a nod to Hujar’s aptitude for portraits. It’s playful but never too obtrusive, approaching an idea of how art and movies play with time and can conjure their own reality.

The simple, sparsely elegant split-level apartment creates the right authenticity for Alex Ashe’s textured 16mm cinematography. The interior play of light from day to night across Whishaw and Hall’s faces is its own dramatic arc as Hujar’s details become an intimate testimony of humor, rigor and reflection. It’s not meant to be entirely Whishaw’s show, either: As justly compelling as he is, Hall makes the act of listening (and occasionally commenting or teasing) a steady, enveloping warmth. The result is a window into the pleasures of friendship and those days when the minutiae of your loved ones seems like the stuff that true connection is built on.

MIAMI BEACH — South Florida is seeing a wave of new cars, but they won’t add to traffic or lengthen anyone’s commute. That’s because the cars are made of marine-grade concrete and were installed underwater.

Over several days late last month, crews lowered 22 life-size cars into the ocean, several hundred feet off South Beach. The project was organized by a group that pioneers underwater sculpture parks as a way to create human-made coral reefs.

“Concrete Coral,” commissioned by the nonprofit REEFLINE, will soon be seeded with 2,200 native corals that have been grown in a nearby Miami lab. The project is partially funded by a $5-million bond from the city of Miami Beach. The group is also trying to raise $40 million to extend the potentially 11-phase project along an underwater corridor just off the city’s 7-mile-long coastline.

“I think we are making history here,” Ximena Caminos, the group’s founder, said. “It’s one of a kind, it’s a pioneering, underwater reef that’s teaming up with science, teaming up with art.”

She conceived the overall plan with architect Shohei Shigematsu, and the artist Leandro Erlich designed the car sculptures for the first phase.

Colin Foord, who runs REEFLINE’s Miami coral lab, said they’ll soon start the planting process and create a forest of soft corals over the car sculptures, which will serve as a habitat teeming with marine life.

“I think it really lends to the depth of the artistic message itself of having a traffic jam of cars underwater,” Foord said. “So nature’s gonna take back over, and we’re helping by growing the soft corals.”

Foord said he’s confident the native gorgonian corals will thrive because they were grown from survivors of the 2023 bleaching event, during which a marine heat wave killed massive amounts of Florida corals.

Plans for future deployments include Petroc Sesti’s “Heart of Okeanos,” modeled after a giant blue whale heart, and Carlos Betancourt and Alberto Latorre’s “The Miami Reef Star,” a group of starfish shapes arranged in a larger star pattern.

“What that’s going to do is accelerate the formation of a coral reef ecosystem,” Foord said. “It’s going to attract a lot more life and add biodiversity and really kind of push the envelope of artificial reef-building here in Florida.”

Besides the project being a testing ground for new coral transplantation and hybrid reef design and development, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner expects it to generate local jobs with ecotourism experiences such as snorkeling, diving, kayaking and paddleboard tours.

The reefs will be located about 20 feet below the surface of the water and about 800 feet from the shore.

“Miami Beach is a global model for so many different issues, and now we’re doing it for REEFLINE,” Meiner said during a beachside ceremony last month. “I’m so proud to be working together with the private market to make sure that this continues right here in Miami Beach to be the blueprint for other cities to utilize.”

The nonprofit also offers community education programs, where volunteers can plant corals alongside scientists, and a floating marine learning center, where participants can gain firsthand experience in coral conservation every month.

Caminos, the group’s founder, acknowledges that the installation won’t fix all of the problems — which are as big as climate change and sea level rise — but she said it can serve as a catalyst for dialogue about the value of coastal ecosystems.

“We can show how creatively, collaboratively and interdisciplinarily we can all tackle a man-made problem with man-made solutions,” Caminos said.

Fischer writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press videojournalist Cody Jackson contributed to this report.

Somehow in Los Angeles, everything comes back to traffic.

While making their works featured in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, artists Patrick Martinez, Freddy Villalobos and Gabriela Ruiz set out to capture the essence of the city’s crammed streets through different lenses.

For over a decade, the Hammer has curated its Made in L.A. series to feature artists who grapple with the realities of living and making art here. It’s an art show that simultaneously pays homage to legacy L.A. artists like Alonzo Davis and Judy Baca, and gives a platform to newer faces such as Lauren Halsey and Jackie Amezquita.

This year’s show, which opened last month, features 28 artists. As part of that cohort, Martinez, Villalobos and Ruiz bring their lived experiences as Latinos from L.A. to the West Side art institution, drawing inspiration from the landscapes of their upbringing.

While creating their displayed works, Martinez took note of the many neon signs hanging in stores’ windows, leading him to make “Hold the Ice,” an anti-ICE sign, and incorporate bright pink lights into his outdoor cinder block mural, “Battle of the City on Fire.” With flashing lights and a shuttered gate tacked onto a painted wooden panel, Ruiz drew on her experiences exploring the city at night and the over-surveillance of select neighborhoods in the interactive piece, “Collective Scream.” Villalobos filmed Figueroa Street from a driver’s perspective, observing the street’s nighttime activity and tracing the energy that surrounds the place where soul singer Sam Cooke was shot.

This year, Made in L.A. doesn’t belong to a specific theme or a title — but as always, the selected art remains interconnected. These three artists sat down with De Los to discuss how their L.A. upbringing has influenced their artistic practice and how their exhibited works are in conversation. Made in L.A. will be on view until March 1, 2026.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

All three of you seem to put a spotlight on various elements of L.A.’s public spaces. How is your art affected by your surroundings?

Ruiz: I really got to explore L.A. as a whole, through partying and going out at night. I prefer seeing this city at night, because there isn’t so much traffic. That’s how I started my art practice. I would perform in queer nightlife spaces and throw parties in cheap warehouses. With my commute from the Valley, I would notice so much. I wouldn’t speed through the freeway. I’d instead take different routes, so I’d learn to navigate the whole city without a GPS and see things differently.

Martinez: That’s also how I started seeing neons. I had a studio in 2006 in downtown, off 6th and Alameda. I would wait for traffic to fade because I was staying in Montebello at the time. I would drive down Whittier Boulevard at night. And you see all the neon signs that have a super saturated color and glow bright. I thought about its messaging. None of the businesses were open that late. They were just letting people know they were there.

Ruiz: Specifically in this piece [“Collective Scream”], there’s a blinking street lamp. It reminds me of when I would leave raves and would randomly see this flickering light. It’s this hypnotizing thing that I would observe and take note of whenever I was on the same route. There’s also a moving gate, [in my piece,] that resembles the ones you see when you’re driving late at night and everything’s gated up.

Villalobos: You do experience a lot of L.A. from your car. It’s a cliche. But f— it. It’s true. When I moved out of L.A., I felt a little odd. I missed the bubble of my car. You can have what seems to be a private moment in your car in a city that’s packed with traffic and so many people. It made me think about what that means, what kind of routes people are taking and how we cultivate community.

Patrick Martinez’s “Battle of the City on Fire,” made in 2025, was inspired by the work of the muralist collective, named the East Los Streetscapers.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

It’s interesting that you all found inspiration in the biggest complaints about L.A. Maybe there’s something to think about when it comes to the way those born here think of car culture and traffic.

Martinez: I see its effects even with the landscapes I make. I’ll work from left to right, and that’s how we all look at the world when we drive. I always think about Michael Mann movies when I’m making landscapes, especially at night. He has all those moments of quiet time of being in the car and just focusing on what’s going on.

Beyond surveying the streets, your works touch on elements of the past. There’s a common notion that L.A. tends to disregard its past, like when legacy restaurants shut down or when architectural feats get demolished. Does this idea play any role in your work?

Martinez: The idea of L.A. being ashamed of its past pushed me to work with cinder blocks [in “Battle of the City on Fire”]. One of the main reasons was to bring attention to the East Los Streetscapers, the muralists who painted in East L.A. [in the 1960s and ‘70s as a part of the Chicano Mural Movement]. There was this one mural in Boyle Heights that was painted at a Shell gas station. It was later knocked down and in the demolition pictures, the way the cinder blocks were on the floor looked like a sculptural painting. It prompted me to use cinder blocks as a form of sculpture and think about what kind of modern-day ruins we pass by.

Villalobos: Speaking about L.A. as a whole feels almost too grand for me. But if I think about my specific neighborhood, in South Central, what comes to my mind is Black Radical Tradition. It’s where people are able to make something out of what other people might perceive as nothing. There’s always something that’s being created and mixed and mashed together to make something that, to me, is beautiful. It’s maybe not as beautiful to other people, but it’s still a new and creative way to see things and understand what comes before us.

Ruiz: Seeing my parents, who migrated to this country, come from nothing and start from scratch ties into that idea too. Seeing what they’ve been able to attain, and understanding how immigrants can start up businesses and restaurants here, speaks so much to what L.A. is really about. It’s about providing an opportunity that everybody has.

So it’s less about disregarding the past and more about making something out of nothing?

Martinez: It ties back to necessity, for me. Across this city, people come together by doing what they need to do to pay rent. It’s a crazy amount of money to be here. People need to regularly adjust what they do to survive. Recently, I’ve been seeing that more rapidly. There are more food vendors and scrolling LED signs, advertising different things. Once you understand how expensive this backdrop can be, that stuff sits with me.

Freddy Villalobos’ “waiting for the stone to speak, for I know nothing of aventure,” is an immersive work in which viewers can feel loud vibrations pass as they, figuratively, travel down Figueroa Street.

(Sarah M Golonka / smg photography)

We’ve talked a lot about how the past affects L.A. and the role it plays in your art. Does a future L.A. ever cross your mind?

Villalobos: I feel very self-conscious about what I’m gonna say. But as much as I love L.A. and as much as it helped me become who I am, I wouldn’t be too mad with it falling apart. A lot of people from my neighborhood have already been moving to Lancaster, Palmdale and the Inland Empire. When I go to the IE, it feels a little like L.A. and I’m not necessarily mad at that.

Ruiz: It’s really difficult to see what the future holds for anybody. Even with art, what’s going to happen? I don’t know. It’s really challenging to see a future when there’s a constant cycle of bad news about censorship and lack of funding.

Martinez: It’s murky. It’s clouded. This whole year has been so heavy, and everyone talking about it adds to it, right? We’re facing economic despair, and it’s all kind of heavy. Who knows what the future will hold? But there are definitely moves being made by the ruling class to make it into something.

When Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan first stepped up to the podium at the museum’s star-packed 14th annual Art + Film Gala, the Dodgers were down one point to the Toronto Blue Jays in the eighth inning of the final game of the World Series.

There was no giant screen in the massive tent where a decadent dinner was being served Saturday night in celebration of honorees artist Mary Corse and director Ryan Coogler. Instead guests in elaborate gowns and tuxedos discreetly glanced at their phones propped on tables and at the base of flower vases across the star-packed venue. This became apparent when Miguel Rojas hit a game-tying home run at the top of the ninth inning and the whole room erupted in cheers.

Michael Govan, CEO of LACMA, wearing Gucci, speaks onstage during the 2025 LACMA Art+Film Gala.

(Amy Sussman / Getty Images for LACMA)

When Govan returned to the stageto begin the well-deserved tributes to the artist and filmmaker of the hour, the game had been won, the effusive cheering had died down, and the phones had been respectfully put away.

“Go Dodgers!” Govan said, before joking that LACMA had engineered the win for this special evening. The room was juiced.

It made Los Angeles feel like the center of the universe for a few hours and was fitting for an event that famously brings together the city’s twin cultural bedrocks of art and cinema, creating a rarefied space where the two worlds mix and mingle in support of a shared vision of recognizing L.A.’s immeasurable contributions to the global cultural conversation.

“This is a celebration that can only happen in L.A. — where art, film and creativity are deeply intertwined,” Govan said. “I always say this is the most creative place on Earth.”

The event raised a record $6.5 million in support of the museum and its programs. Co-chairs Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA trustee Eva Chow hosted a cocktail party and dinner that drew celebrities including Dustin Hoffman, Cynthia Erivo, Cindy Crawford, Queen Latifah, Angela Bassett, Lorde, Demi Moore, Hannah Einbinder, Charlie Hunnam and Elle Fanning alongside local elected officials and appointees including U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles); L.A. County Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Lindsey Horvath; L.A. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky; West Hollywood Councilmember John M. Erickson, and Kristin Sakoda, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture.

Sakoda said she thoroughly enjoyed the festivities “as representative of the incredibly diverse culture of Los Angeles and how that speaks to our entire nation.”

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1. George Lucas arrives at the LACMA Art + Film Gala on Saturday. (Jordan Strauss / Invision via Associated Press) 2. Elle Fanning arrives at the LACMA Art + Film Gala on Saturday. (Jordan Strauss / Invision via Associated Press) 3. Angela Bassett arrives at the LACMA Art + Film Gala on Saturday. (Jordan Strauss / Invision via Associated Press)

A special nod of gratitude went to previous gala honorees in attendance including artists Mark Bradford, James Turrell, Catherine Opie, Betye Saar, Judy Baca, George Lucas and Park Chan-Wook. Leaders from many other local arts institutions also showed up including the Hammer Museum’s director, Zoe Ryan; California African American Museum Director Cameron Shaw; and MOCA’s interim Director Ann Goldstein.

Rising in the background was LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries, the 110,000-square-foot Peter Zumthor-designed building scheduled to open in April as the new home for the museum’s 150,000-object permanent collection.

“Every day I’m in that little building behind installing thousands of artworks,” Govan said to cheers. “I can’t wait for people to rediscover our permanent collection, from old favorites to new acquisitions. It’s a monumental gift to L.A., and in addition to L.A. County and the public, I would like to thank the person whose generosity brought us to this landmark moment, Mr. David Geffen.”

Geffen sat in a sea of black ties and glittering gowns, near Disney CEO Bob Iger and DiCaprio — who had been filmed earlier in the week in attendance at Game 5 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium.

Govan also gave a special acknowledgment to former LACMA board co-chair, Elaine Wynn, who died earlier this year and was one of the museum’s most steadfast champions. Wynn contributed $50 million to the new building — one of the first major gifts in support of the effort. Govan noted that the northern half of the building will be named the Elaine Wynn wing.

Honoree Ryan Coogler, wearing Gucci, speaks onstage during the 2025 LACMA Art+Film Gala.

(Amy Sussman / Getty Images for LACMA)

Left unmentioned was the fact that earlier in the week LACMA’s employees announced they are forming a union, LACMA United, representing more than 300 workers from across all departments, including curators, educators, guest relations associates and others. One worker told The Times there were no plans to demonstrate at the gala, which raises much-needed funds for the museum.

The crowd sat rapt as the night’s guests of honor, Corse and Coogler, humbly spoke of their journeys in their respective art forms, with Govan introducing them as “artists whose brilliant groundbreaking work challenges us to see the world differently.”

The night concluded with an enthusiastic performance by Doja Cat on an outdoor stage in the shadow of the David Geffen Galleries, the lights girding its massive concrete underbelly like stars in the sky.

“It was a beautiful evening of community coming together around something that reminds us of our shared humanity at a time when we need it,” said Yaroslavsky with a smile as the evening wound down.

“Who are you really? What is real happiness? What do you actually need for happiness?” Rhea Seehorn murmurs.

It’s an otherwise ordinary Wednesday afternoon, steps away from bookshelves stuffed with works like “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck and the “A Court of Thorns and Roses” series by Sarah J. Maas, when she casually lists these big life questions aloud while leaning over a vegan brownie and cup of tea at a small table inside Village Well Books & Coffee in Culver City. I’m still questioning whether I read the street parking signs correctly. But these are queries Seehorn has given hard thought to in recent months.

That’s what happens when you’re headlining a Vince Gilligan show. Existential reckonings are part of the gig.

Seehorn is at least familiar with the deep internal struggles that swirl within Gilligan’s protagonists. For six seasons on “Better Call Saul,” AMC’s hit prequel spinoff to “Breaking Bad” that told the backstory of Walter White’s smarmy lawyer Saul Goodman a.k.a. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), Seehorn played Kim Wexler. The fan-favorite type A lawyer with a perfectly-positioned ponytail was McGill/Goodman’s principled but increasingly conflicted girlfriend who got caught up in his elaborate schemes and paid a price for his crimes.

In his first follow-up to the “Breaking Bad” universe, Gilligan opted to forgo revolving another series around a tormented man in favor of one that let the shades of Seehorn’s talent fill the screen.

Gilligan says that in “Better Call Saul,” which he co-created with Peter Gould, he saw in Seehorn what he had observed in Aaron Paul years before on “Breaking Bad” — an actor whose performance propelled a side character, wayward junkie Jesse Pinkman, into a figure that commanded viewers’ attention and became integral to the story.

“Aaron made that character indispensable,” Gilligan says over video call. “It was like déjà vu with Rhea Seehorn. I hate saying I wasn’t aware of her prior to us auditioning and casting her. But she was just fantastic from Day 1. What Peter and I saw in her was a potential to take a show that, at the beginning, was about one character and make it a two-hander. And I just knew very, very quickly in the early life of ‘Better Call Saul’ that I wanted to work with her again after it was over.”

So he set out to create a story where she was No. 1 on the call sheet.

How did Seehorn process that news?

“I just cried,” she says.

It’s not, as some may have hoped, a Kim Wexler spinoff — though, she’s still open to that: “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. Anything. A series. A film. A Staples commercial,” she says.

Rhea Seehorn as Carol in Apple TV’s “Pluribus.”

(Apple TV)

“Pluribus” has been a tightly-guarded project for Apple TV with a strict embargo on details that makes it difficult to provide a lot of context to its premise. Here’s what can be said: Seehorn plays Carol, a fantasy romance author who, despite a successful career and seemingly loving relationship with her partner, is described as “the most miserable person on Earth.” After a signal from space changes the world in a significant way, she must save humankind from happiness. The nine-episode drama premieres with two episodes on Nov. 7; new episodes will be released weekly after that.

For a while, Seehorn only had the first script to make her assessments about the world Gilligan was building. She eventually got her hands on two more before 2023’s dual Hollywood strikes kicked in. When she finished reading through them, one thought came to mind: “‘Wow, this is a lot of me,’” she says, launching into laughter. “He had warned me — ‘You’re going to be in almost every scene’ — but then you read it and you’re like, ‘Oh … oh.’”

Careful to be as vague as possible, she continues: “I can’t spoil it. There’s a lot of time I spend completely on my own. I’m not giving away anything am I? Make sure I’m not!” Aside from the way she has to be coy about the series, she’s appealingly unguarded in her enthusiasm for the journey it sent her on as an actor.

“‘Better Call Saul’ was its own animal, but it had the mothership,” she says. “With this, in our conversations, it felt like Vince wanted to push things to the limit — it’s genre-defying, tone-defying. It’s hilarious and then gut-wrenchingly upsetting. It’s scary in a variety of ways. It really makes you think: What would you do in this situation?”

Seeking to playfully lean into the show’s interest in exploring happiness and the human condition, in scheduling our meet-up I asked that Seehorn pick a location that makes her happy, which led us to this bookstore near her home. “I buy books constantly,” she says. Her most recent purchase was Rachel Kushner’s spy thriller “Creation Lake.” But lately, she’s been prioritizing William T. Harper’s book, “Eleven Days in Hell: The 1974 Carrasco Prison Siege at Huntsville, Texas,” which chronicles the true story of the standoff between inmates and law enforcement. At the time of this sit-down, Seehorn is days away from beginning production in Texas on a film adaptation of the book that will also star Taylor Kitsch and Diego Luna.

She lights up as the conversation veers into the stuff she watched to unwind while shooting “Pluribus”: “I’m obsessed with ‘Chicken Shop Date,’” she says. “Do you watch? Can we please use this article to get me on that show? This is my campaign.”

Rhea Seehorn, who stars in the new Apple TV series “Pluribus,” says the show is genre-defying: “It’s hilarious and then gut-wrenchingly upsetting. It’s scary in a variety of ways. It really makes you think: What would you do in this situation?”

(Anthony Avellano / For The Times)

She wrapped production on “Pluribus” last December. Since then, she‘s shot an indie film, “Sender,” with “Severance’s” Britt Lower, had a brief family vacation and helped the eldest of her two stepsons get settled in for his first year of college. They’re the kind of life moments, she says, that feed into those big questions discussed earlier and what the show confronts.

“It’s about this reckoning — a big exploration of who you are. It got me thinking about how we handle really difficult emotions,” Seehorn says. “There was a constant through line for me about this feeling of anxiety that we all know. When we have those nightmares where you’re running around telling everyone that the barn is on fire and they all keep saying, ‘It’s fine.’ And you’re screaming that it’s not.

“You find yourself thinking, how do I measure success?” she continues. “About everything — relationships, career, talent, ambition. There’s reasons we make armor, sometimes long-term, sometimes short-term. There are choices that are survival skills, that are good for you at one time, that later are no longer the crutches and tools they used to be. The performance Carol is giving at the beginning — where she hates the life she’s living and questions the people who like her work because it’s not impressive enough — Vince and I had some deep-dive talks about that as people in the arts.”

Of course, the philosophy of self and purpose and happiness was not something Seehorn considered much while growing up. Deborah Rhea Seehorn — she went by Debbie until her early teens — was born in Norfolk, Va., but spent her childhood in places like Arizona and Japan because of her father’s job as an agent for the Naval Investigative Service, later known as NCIS when it added “Criminal” to its name. “My dad was not Mark Harmon,” she jokes. After her parents divorced when she was 12, the family stayed in the Virginia Beach area.

On paper, Seehorn wasn’t primed for a life of acting. But she felt a creative pull: Her mother did musical theater in high school; her father and paternal grandmother painted. And Seehorn and her sister began sketching from a young age. Seehorn initially had ambitions of pursuing a career in design or art — she majored in painting while a student at George Mason University. She thought maybe she’d land a job doing exhibition design or art restoration at the Smithsonian or one of the other museums around town. But when she was required to take an elective course her freshman year, she saw an opportunity to try something that otherwise felt out of reach to her.

“At the time, at least to me, American television and film had people who looked like models,” she says. “I didn’t. I thought I would get made fun of mercilessly if I said I wanted to be an actor. It felt the same as saying I wanted to be a supermodel. But I knew immediately, with the first class I took, that acting was it for me.”

It was taught by Lynnie Raybuck, a teacher and actor who remains a mentor to Seehorn. This is where — in life and in this conversation — it becomes clear Seehorn revels in the technique of acting. She grows animated referencing Practical Aesthetics, the acting technique developed by David Mamet and William H. Macy for the Atlantic Theater Company, and detailing her fondness for in-depth script analysis.

“To me, it blew my mind the first time I realized that it isn’t magic fairy dust on some people — that they’re just talented and you’re not,” she says. “That there is a way to work toward that. As soon as somebody said there was a way to study that and there was a way to get closer and closer to inviting that audience in to go with you on a journey and make it believable, I just was like, ‘Well, this is what I’m doing for a living.’”

Rhea Seehorn starred as Kim Wexler opposite Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill in “Better Call Saul.” (Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television)

She knew it wouldn’t pay the bills right away. She ushered, worked the box office, read stage directions for new plays — she had days jobs, too, like working at TGI Fridays — “By the way, they just offered me suspenders since I never got them.” (She was underage and unable to serve alcohol at the time, so she was a hostess who did expo for the waiters.)

She eventually landed in New York, working at Playwright Horizons, an off-Broadway theater. After a few years, the pull of L.A. led her west. She was cast in the ABC sitcom “I’m With Her,” starring Teri Polo and loosely based on writer Chris Henchy’s marriage to Brooke Shields. It didn’t last long, but other roles would come along with varying degrees of steadiness. She had a recurring role as an assistant DA in the legal dramedy “Franklin & Bash” and played the best friend of Whitney Cummings’ fictionalized version of herself in NBC’s “Whitney,” which ran for two seasons from 2011 to 2013.

Then, as “Better Call Saul” was coming together, the casting directors working on the project were familiar with Seehorn, who had auditioned for them many times over the years, and what she could deliver.

“The first time I met her was for the producer sessions and there were three actresses who were reading for Kim with me,” Odenkirk says by phone. “The other two actresses were absolutely fantastic. But Rhea and I had chemistry, and we all knew it. We all felt it. It was undeniable and it was easy.”

She was cast as Kim, before a last name was even assigned to the character, and with no inkling for how essential she would become to the story. And it quickly becomes clear how she dissects her characters. (Both Odenkirk and Gilligan, without prompting, say that her scripts were often heavily marked up with scribbled notes, highlights and tabs.)

“I only have one line of dialogue in that first episode, other than the intercom,” Seehorn says, still able to recite it by memory. “They told me later it wasn’t on purpose that I have almost no contractions in the first couple of episodes and other people do. And I was like, should I ask them if it’s OK to elide ‘want to’ to ‘wanna’ or ‘do not’ to ‘don’t.’ But then I was like, ‘No! What if I just try to figure out who talks like this?’ It started to be this thing of ‘Who is this controlled person? And why would she be this controlled?’ She became so important to me because I had largely built her out of subtext and this private part of her that mostly the audience was my biggest confidant.”

Rhea Seehorn on starting her acting career: “I thought I would get made fun of mercilessly if I said I wanted to be an actor. It felt the same as saying I wanted to be a supermodel. But I knew immediately, with the first class I took, that acting was it for me.” (Anthony Avellano/For The Times)

Odenkirk admiringly references Seehorn’s level of attention and their shared approach in defending the emotional intelligence of their characters. He notes the predicament the “Better Call Saul” writers sometimes faced in placing Jimmy/Saul and Kim, who knew each other so well, in dramatic situations that ordinarily would require more obliviousness or willing unawareness.

“When Kim and Jimmy were together, there were times — not many, but a few — where one of them was lying to the other one,” he says. “And it was always a challenge. We’d be like, ‘Saul knows he’s being lied to’ or ‘Kim knows Saul is lying.’ And we’d have to find a way around it. Or we’d have to let go — she’s [Rhea] good at that too … I just love her seriousness of purpose. And her love for losing herself in the dream.”

It’s why he’s not surprised Gilligan wanted her to lead his next series.

“She is formidable in nature,” Odenkirk says. “Her strength on screen is great, her dynamic range is incredible. She has the strength of character of a leading man — I’m just going to say it. She has the backbone and the steely determination of a leading man.”

In fact, when the idea for “Pluribus” began tugging at Gilligan years ago, in the midst of “Better Call Saul,” he initially envisioned it having a male protagonist.

“But I would take these long walks during our lunch breaks in the writers room and, I can’t remember when exactly, but it dawned on me on one of those walks that I really like this young lady, Rhea Seehorn,” he says. “She’s a really good actor. And I started thinking, ‘Why does the main character of my next show have to be a guy? ‘ I was about to say I kind of tailored the role to Rhea, but the truth is, I don’t know if that’s true. Rhea has so many strengths as an actor, I know she can do anything I threw at her — just like I knew many years before that Bryan Cranston could do anything. She makes it look easy.”

When Seehorn and I speak again a few weeks after our initial meeting, she is video-calling from a nondescript room during a break from production on “Eleven Days.” She has already fiddled through a number of jigsaw puzzles and “Paint by Numbers” — her activities of choice when she needs to turn down her actor brain — in the time since we last spoke; she reaches for the painting of plants she recently completed as proof. We eventually return to the idea of happiness. What makes her happy right now?

“It is my family and my friends, but it’s also my work,” she says. “Carol, on paper, has many of the things that I want, that many of us want. Success at work, especially in a career in the arts. But she won’t believe the hype. Her mocking of her work and her fans is just a mocking of herself. It’s self-loathing — like she’s trying to beat people to the punch.

“For me, I realized I fully own and will not be embarrassed about the fact that a third leg on that stool for my happiness is my work,” she continues. “It is intrinsically a part of who I am and I am a better mom to my stepsons and a better partner to my fiance because I get to do what I love.”

And she’s finding new ways to do more of it. She has become an executive producer on Katja Meier’s Swiss TV show “$hare” and made her episodic directorial debut with “Better Call Saul” — “I would like to try to direct again. There’s a couple of projects and people I’m talking to about directing on their show. People are like, ‘Why didn’t you direct the first season [of ‘Pluribus’]?’ I’m like,’I was trying to remember to brush my teeth with all I had going on.’”

She references the children’s book “Archibald’s Next Big Thing,” written by actor Tony Hale, whom she shared screen time with on “Veep.” It’s about embracing the journey you’re on.

“You’re constantly moving your goal post and all it is doing is just s— on yourself and where you are now,” she says. “Carol missed things until they were taken away. She could have stopped judging everything and judging herself.”

It was a reminder to embrace the freedom to think outside the box with her performance. The first episode is a high-wire balancing act; at one point, there’s a 12-minute stretch that has her character twisting through confusion, fear, grief, anger and frustration like pretzel dough being looped into a knot — on her own, yet not alone.

“Everything made me nervous about Carol,” she says. “As soon as Vince sent me the script, I was like, ‘This is bananas.’ You’re on your way to work and you just think, ‘What if I just took this off-ramp and I fled the scene and it would be all over?’ But then you’re like, ‘You know what, I’m gonna show up and do my best. Believe me, I did some takes that I’m sure were embarrassing, but I was just like, ‘When else are you going to try? The time is now.”

In other words, she says, “Don’t be a Carol.”

A UK train station close to a major attraction has been returned to its former glory, which dates back nearly 100 years.

Over the past two years, Richmond Station in London has undergone a massive £325,000 restoration project.

Main features such as the facade have been reinstated to what they would have looked like in the 1930s and the bronze and mahogany entrance doors have also been repaired and polished.

New flagpoles have been added to where they would have been originally, with each flying the National Rail Double Arrow.

There is also a transformed entrance canopy and ticket hall.

Inside the ticket hall bronze panels that have been handmade to original designs have replaced cladding.

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When some of the cladding was removed, a number of original timber frieze and green glass signs was also found, most of which was intact.

Since, missing sections have been replaced so the signage can be enjoyed once again.

A number of new roof-lights that recreate 1930s ‘Glasscrete’ have also been implemented.

At night, there is a softer lighting to highlight the entrance and canopy and SWR installed a chandelier with features inspired by original Art Deco light fittings.

The shops also have new oak fronts and retro poster frames hold 1930s artwork.

In the booking hall, signs such as enquiries for left luggage are back on display and an old WH Smith sign has been preserved.

One of the original metal signs from outside the station, now appears in the booking hall as well.

The Art Deco station first opened back in 1937 and was designed by Southern Railway, led by chief architect James Robb Scott.

Chris Gregory, asset enhancement manager for South Western Railway, said: “We are very proud of what has been achieved, bringing the station back to its original heritage condition and providing a fantastic gateway to Richmond.”

For those heading to the station, Richmond is full of things to explore including a large sprawling park with over 630 red and fallow deer, which have roamed freely in the park for nearly 400 years.

In fact, it is the largest of London’s Royal Parks sprawling across 2,500 acres.

One popular spot is the The White Cross, which is known for flooding often thanks to its riverside location.

Don’t worry though – the pub often hands out wellies for customers to use if they want to get into, or out of, the pub.

Just up the road is a major UK attraction too.

The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew – or more commonly referred to as Kew Gardens – is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that spans over 300 acres and features a vast array of plants.

Inside the gardens, visitors can head to the Palm House, which is a large Victorian-era glasshouse with iron features home to a large collection of tropical rainforest plants.

To get to Kew Gardens from Richmond, the fastest route is to hop on the District Line or the Overground, which takes about three minutes to reach Kew Gardens Station.

Alternatively, you could walk from Richmond along the River Thames towpath, which takes about 30 to 40 minutes.

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In other train news, another historic station that used to have trains to the beach is set to reopen after 60 years and it has vintage dining carriage plans.

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Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s most exquisite bounties, a space for pioneers (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Showing Up”) and wanderers (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy”) who command your attention the way an ER waiting room does, lingering tensely.

One might not consider a heist film in such anthropological terms. And yet “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s latest and one of her best, while set in motion by a daylight art grab orchestrated by Josh O’Connor’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is another precisely turned Reichardt movie: honest, sad, funny and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you might expect, it’s really about the crime’s aftermath, our cut from this robbery being a deft, fascinating character study rooted in an apathy that’s starkly juxtaposed with the restive year it’s set in: 1970.

By the look of things, preppy, soft-spoken James Mooney (O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, isn’t obvious criminal material, no matter what composer Ray Mazurek’s propulsive, horn-forward jazz score might imply. James cases his local art museum, often with his unwitting wife, Teri (Alana Haim), and two young boys in tow. Otherwise, James is just a distracted dad, checked-out husband and disappointing son living off the status and largesse of his parents, an esteemed judge (Bill Camp) and a society mother (Hope Davis).

Still, based solely on the error-prone heist — it’s been ages since pantyhose masks seemed so ridiculous — thievery isn’t this spoiled man’s strong suit either. (You didn’t think that title was respectful, did you?) When he’s stashing the stolen paintings later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt is laying bare a privileged man’s half-assed delinquency, especially with O’Connor so hypnotic at conveying self-absorbed cluelessness with his woeful eyes, posture and movement. As the movie then hits the road for his escape, the early fall colors of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to gray tones and darker interiors, and James’ vibe is less rebel eluding capture — even if a pal he visits (John Magaro) expresses admiration — than alienated loser leaving behind a mess, an assessment radiating from Gaby Hoffmann as Magaro’s wife. The bebop groove abandons James, too, slowing into jagged drum solos.

The last contextual indignity are the details of the period itself: Nixon posters, anti-war signs, Vietnam footage on televisions, a protest march. Unforced but ever-present in Reichardt’s mise-en-scène, they remind us that this bored aesthete’s misadventure is an especially empty way to buck conformity. When good trouble beckons, why pick the bad kind?

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

“Grounded,” the newly opened exhibition of relatively recent acquisitions of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, starts out setting a very high bar. It’s a compelling launch, even if the spotty show that unfolds in the next several rooms falls apart.

Grounded, it isn’t.

“Land Deeds,” a 1970 work by Iranian American artist Siah Armajani (1939-2020), is the opener, and it’s terrific. The piece is composed of 50 documents recording real estate purchases that the artist made in all 50 U.S. states, spending less than $100 on each. Sometimes, I’d guess, much less: Armajani only bought a single square-inch of land in each place, so the properties were cheap. Maybe that would cost a hundred bucks in Beverly Hills or Honolulu, but a square-inch of Abilene, Kan., or Whitefish, Mont., would be lucky to get a buck.

In true Conceptual art form, the notarized documents confirming the transactions are lined up on the wall in alphabetical order, from Alabama and Alaska to Wisconsin and Wyoming, in two rows of 25. Visually dry, they nonetheless quickly pull you in. These are warranty deeds, a legal document used to guarantee that a property being sold is unencumbered and the transfer of ownership from seller to buyer is legit. In good Dada and Pop art-style, the work’s title turns out to be a pun: A deed is not just a real estate certificate but an endeavor that one has undertaken.

Siah Armajani’s 1970 “Land Deeds” records his purchase of one square-inch of all 50 U.S. states.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Other artistic resonances unfold. Land art was then at the cutting edge of avant-garde activity.

By 1970, sculptors Christo and Jeanne-Claude had just wrapped a million square-feet of coastal Australia in tarpaulin lashed with rope. Robert Smithson had bulldozed dirt and rocks to build a spiral jetty coiling out into Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Michael Heizer had dug a huge trench across Mormon Mesa near Overton, Nev., making a sculptural object out of empty space. Armajani’s unusual earthwork joined in: Embracing a legal, bureaucratic form, he pointed to land as a decidedly social structure.

The document display is droll but serious. It may be a layered example of up-to-the-minute Conceptual art, deeply absorbing and surprisingly suggestive, but the deeds are also lithographs, a perfectly traditional medium. They’re signed by administrative officials — one Julian Allison, warranty trustee, and notary public Brenda J. Hord — rather than being autographed by the artist. An art experience is a social transaction.

Armajani, an immigrant working as an artist in New York but not yet a U.S. citizen, was profoundly committed to democratic principles. (His citizenship would come in the wake of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which installed a disastrous theocracy from which the Middle East still suffers.) With “Land Deeds,” he put his finger on a critical real estate context: From the get-go, full participation in American democracy had been limited to white male landowners. The explanation was that they had a vested interest in the community.

The deeper reasons, however, were profoundly anti-democratic — the noxious intransigence of patriarchy and white supremacy in Western culture, which drastically narrowed the eligible land-owning class. Women and people of color, except in limited instances, need not apply. (And suffice to say that warranty deeds for land transfers from Indigenous people were in rather short supply.) Gallingly, this autocratic check on egalitarian participation was also spiked with an element of informed equanimity: An educated populace is essential to democracy’s successful functioning, but in the 1770s, that mostly meant white male landed gentry, since they were likely to have had formal schooling.

At LACMA, Armajani’s marvelously revealing “Land Deeds” sets the stage for “Grounded.” The show was organized by LACMA curators Rita Gonzalez and Dhyandra Lawson, and deputy director Nancy Thomas. Entry wall text — there is no catalog — says it “explores how human experience is embedded in the land, presenting the work of artists who endow it with meaning.”

But, collectively, the 39 assembled contemporary paintings, sculptures, photographs, textiles and videos by 35 artists based in the Americas and areas of the Pacific underperform. Sometimes that’s because the individual work is bland, while elsewhere its pertinence to the shambling theme is stretched to the breaking point.

Familiar photographs of figures in the landscape by Ana Mendieta, left, and Laura Aguilar, center, offer background for the theme explored in “Grounded.”

(Museum Associates / LACMA)

The land theme is so loose and shaggy that, without the contemporary time frame, the show could start with prehistoric cave paintings, toss in a Chinese Song Dynasty scroll whose pictures follow a journey down the Yangzi River, add a Central African Kongo spirit sculpture filled with grave dirt and, for good measure, suitably hang a Jackson Pollock drip painting solely because it was made by spreading raw canvas flat on the ground.

Superficial bedlam, in other words.

Some work does stand out. Across from the Armajani is Patrick Martinez’s “Fallen Empire,” which takes a sly commercial real estate approach. The poignant mixed-media painting doubles as a large shop façade of crumbling, graffitied ceramic tiles with signage attached on a tarp. The name “Azteca” evokes a long-gone historical realm, here attached to a shop now falling into ruin. Martinez scatters ceramic roses across the painting, a mordant honorific to past glory and current hopes.

In the next room, Connie Samaras’ serendipitous landscape photograph unshackles whatever might be meant by being grounded. Shot from her L.A. home in the hills, what at first appears to be a strange cloud in the night sky over the twinkling city below turns out to be the vapor trail of a Minuteman missile deployed one night in 1998. A tangle of light above a black silhouette of a palm tree emits a sulfurous glow, its nauseous beauty balanced on the tip of potential annihilation.

Also among the more engaging works are two well-known photographic excursions into the landscape. Laura Aguilar’s “Grounded #111,” from a large series that likely gave the show its name, poses her corpulent nude body before a majestic boulder in the Joshua Tree desert, as if a secular saint enclosed within a sacred mandorla.

Six adjacent photographs in Ana Mendieta’s “Volcano Series no. 2” record a performance type of Land art in which a female form seems to erupt from within the Earth, spewing a volatile shower of flaming embers and smoke. Forget placid if repressive fantasies of Adam’s rib. The volcanic explosion provides a theatrically dramatic precedent for Aguilar’s contemplative composition.

Other impressive works include Mexico City-based Abraham Cruzvillegas’ exceptional sculpture, “Autoconcancion V” — the title’s made-up word translates to “auto with song” — which upends conventional L.A. car culture. An old automobile’s beat-up rear bench seat becomes the launching pad for a wooden box holding a small fan palm, held aloft on buoyant metal rods and exuding a witty mix of aplomb and high spirits.

A 70-foot video projection by Lisa Reihana reimagines a famous scenic French wallpaper.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, who is of Māori British ancestry, transformed a famous early 19^th century French scenic wallpaper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet into an equally extravagant, 70-foot-wide projection of video animation. The showily exoticized wallpaper, sold throughout Europe and in North America by celebrated manufacturer Joseph Dufour, was the culmination of Western public fascination with British Royal Navy Capt. James Cook’s three voyages to the Pacific. In a big, darkened room, Reihana redecorates.

Amid dreamy island landscapes, “in Pursuit of Venus [infected]” beautifully mixes interactive scenes of playful harmony and brute conflict between red-uniformed colonizers and colonized Polynesians. She maintains a nuanced sense of humanity’s transgressions and innocence, without demonizing or idealizing either side. Emblematic is a wickedly funny episode where a British plein-air painter at his easel bats away pesky tropical insects, invisible to a viewer’s naked eye, as he attempts to render a still life of a dead fish.

What either the Reihana video or the Cruzvillegas sculpture has to do with how human experience is embedded in the land — “grounded” — I cannot say, except in the most superficial ways. The land is certainly not a major focus of either one. The Cruzvillegas sculpture celebrates varieties of youthful play, while the Reihana animation ruminates on dimensions of cultural collision. The exhibition’s purported theme unhappily narrows perspectives on the assembled works of art, rather than opening wide their myriad readings.

Lisa Reihana, “in Pursuit of Venus [infected],” 2015, projected video animation.

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

Essentially, “Grounded” is an old-fashioned “Recent Acquisitions” show, with most works entering LACMA’s collection in the last half-dozen years or so. (The big exception is Mendieta’s “Volcano” series, easily the show’s most famous work, purchased a quarter-century ago; it’s apparently included here as a benchmark.) Six pieces are shared with the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of the new MAC3 (Mohn Art Collective) program, and the Aguilar is shared with the Vincent Price Art Museum at East L.A. College.

The exhibition is on view in LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum for eight months, until late June 2026. The unusually lengthy run will put recent art on par with LACMA’s historical departments, when the new Geffen Galleries building opens in April. Those rooms are also expected to thematize the museum’s diverse permanent collection of art’s global history.

But “Grounded” would have been better left without its imposed topic, which inadvertently casts much work as ugly stepsisters unsuccessfully trying to jam their feet into Cinderella’s glass slipper. Skepticism over the coming Geffen theme idea mounts.

No one goes to Cannes expecting to be frightened by a film about a long-dead British writer. Unless, of course, that writer is George Orwell.

When Raoul Peck’s documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5” premiered at the festival in May, the crowd reacted with the startled tension of a horror screening — gasps, murmurs, a few cries — before finally breaking into thunderous applause.

What they saw on screen felt both familiar and terrifyingly current. Peck builds the film entirely from Orwell’s words, delivered in a low, steady burn by actor Damian Lewis (“Billions”), repositioning the dying author of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in his final tubercular days on the Scottish Isle of Jura, into today’s world. His vision of power, propaganda and language as a weapon meets a barrage of torn-from-the-news imagery: refugees adrift on boats, authoritarian leaders twisting the truth, AI hallucinations blurring what’s left of reality. The film, to be released nationwide on Friday by Neon, plays less like a documentary than a séance in which Orwell’s ghost watches his own warnings play out: urgent, relentless, immersive as a nightmare.

Peck says the Cannes reception didn’t surprise him.

“I knew it would touch a nerve,” Peck, 72, says over Zoom from New York. His calm, French-accented voice — he’s based in Paris but travels frequently — carries the quiet fatigue of someone who’s spent decades watching history repeat itself. “It’s not just a problem of the U.S. — it’s everywhere. We have all sorts of bullies and there’s no reliable sheriff in town. Even the most powerful institutions are on shaky ground. I knew the film would either break people or energize them. If you’re a normal citizen, a normal human being, you must ask yourself questions when you come out of it.”

There are no talking heads in Peck’s film, no experts spelling out the relevance of an author who died in 1950. Instead, he draws from the writer’s letters and diaries, as well as the longer-form works like the barnyard political allegory “Animal Farm” and the dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” He also weaves in fragments from past screen adaptations of Orwell’s titles, including the 1954 animated “Animal Farm” and Michael Radford’s stark, desaturated adaptation of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” starring John Hurt, cross-cutting them with current images of drone wars, surveillance and algorithmic control.

A scene from the documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5.”

(Velvet Film)

“Raoul has been unbelievably thorough,” says narrator Lewis via Zoom from his home in London, where he regularly rides his bike past one of Orwell’s former residences. “The film is dense in the best way, thick with ideas and images. You come out of it feeling like you’ve been through something important.”

Lewis, who delivers Orwell’s words with a steely intensity that builds toward alarm, says his warnings have only grown more urgent.

“I read recently that about 37% of countries in the world are now categorized as not free,” he adds. “That’s getting dangerously close to half the planet. What Raoul’s film captures — and what Orwell saw so clearly — is how authoritarian ideas don’t arrive overnight. They creep up on us, little by little, as words like ‘democracy’ get redefined to mean whatever those in power want them to mean.”

Peck’s filmmaking has long blurred the line between art and activism. Born in Haiti, he fled with his family from François Duvalier’s dictatorship in 1961 and grew up in what was then the Republic of the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where his father worked for the United Nations. After studying engineering and economics in Berlin, he returned home to serve as Haiti’s minister of culture in the 1990s. His breakthrough, the Oscar-nominated 2016 film “I Am Not Your Negro,” channeled James Baldwin’s words to examine race and power in America and the country’s uneasy reckoning with its past. He continued that exploration in HBO’s “Exterminate All the Brutes” (2021), tracing the myths of empire and white supremacy that shape the modern world.

“If I can’t mix politics and art, I probably wouldn’t make a project,” Peck says. “That’s what Orwell himself said — ‘Animal Farm’ was the first time he was really trying to link politics with art. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life as a filmmaker.”

Few writers have been more quoted — or misquoted — than Orwell. Decades after coining ideas such as Newspeak (state-controlled language) and doublethink (the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at once), he’s been claimed by every side: Fear-mongering politicians cite him, pundits weaponize him, partisans wield “Orwellian” as shorthand for whatever offends them most. Even President Trump recently praised Orwell in the same breath as Shakespeare and Dickens at a state banquet at Windsor Castle.

Asked what Orwell would make of that, Peck gives a small, mirthless laugh.

“He would probably faintly smile,” he says. “Because that’s exactly what he wrote about — how thought corrupts language and language corrupts thought. We’re living doublespeak now in an exponential way, the bully using the words of justice and peace while bombing people at the same moment. It’s so absurd. That’s why I feel so close to him. Coming from Haiti, I learned very early that what politicians were saying never matched my reality.”

George Orwell, author of “1984” and “Animal Farm,” whose warnings about power and language echo through the timely documentary “Orwell: 2+2=5.”

(Associated Press)

Peck came to the project warily. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch Orwell,” he admits. “Where I come from, Orwell had been turned into a kind of Cold War mascot.” Raised under Mobutu Sese Seko’s U.S.-backed regime in what became Zaire and later educated in America and Europe, he was keenly aware of how Orwell’s legacy had been co-opted, from the CIA’s funding of the 1954 animated “Animal Farm” to the deployment of his books as Cold War propaganda.

“That was not something that interested me,” Peck says. “I grew up deconstructing everything I was getting from the West, including Hollywood movies.”

Then came a call from his friend, Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and producer Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”), who was involved with a project that had secured the rights to Orwell’s complete body of work and wanted Peck to direct it.

“How could I say no?” he recalls. “For a filmmaker like me, who loves to dig deep into someone’s mind and work, it was an incredible gift.”

What Peck found wasn’t a prophet or a symbol but a man full of contradictions: a writer wrestling with class, illness and empire, trying to fuse politics and art before his own time ran out. That realization deepened when he came across a photograph of Orwell as a baby in the arms of his Burmese nanny, a white child of the British Empire cradled by the colonized woman charged with his care. Born into what he called the “lower-upper-middle class,” Orwell gradually recognized his own complicity in the system he opposed and came to despise his role as a kind of middle manager in the machinery of oppression.

“His own biography — born in India, sent to Burma as a young soldier, doing what he did there and being ashamed of it — drew him closer to my own experience,” Peck says. “We were from the same world. We saw the same things.”

To embody Orwell, Peck turned to Lewis, also known for “Band of Brothers” and “Homeland.”

“I knew I was telling a story, not making a traditional documentary,” Peck says. “So I needed a great British actor, someone with real stage experience. I knew Damian could bring the presence I wanted — to be Orwell, not imitate him. That was the main direction I gave him: to work from the interior.”

“If we don’t bring rules around AI very rapidly, we won’t be able to put the paste back in the tube,” says filmmaker Raoul Peck. “AI is an instrument and should stay an instrument. That means we’re using it. It’s not using us.”

(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)

Lewis, who had previously voiced Orwell for the international Talking Statues project — an app that lets passersby scan a QR code to hear historical figures “speak” — approached the feature-length performance with similar restraint.

“His language, the rhythm of his prose, dictates the rhythm of delivery,” he says. “Raoul was very clear that it should sound intimate and conversational, not overly formal. That’s what we tried to aim for — something direct, specific, detailed and personal.”

Much of “Orwell: 2+2=5” unfolds like a fever dream, Orwell’s words colliding with scenes from the present, including bombed-out streets in Gaza and Ukraine. “There were too many conflicts to include,” Peck says. “So I had to find the connections — what repeats, how bodies are treated, how power behaves.”

In one of the film’s most charged moments, Peck turns Orwell’s warning about political language into a montage of modern euphemisms: “peacekeeping operations,” “collateral damage,” “illegals” — and then, pointedly, “antisemitism 2024.” He knows the inclusion is provocative but says that’s the point: to show how words can be twisted or emptied of meaning, including in debates over Israel’s war in Gaza.

“Every word is precise,” Peck says. “I don’t say the Jews, I don’t say Israel, I say the Israeli administration. But even then, there’s a reflex — you can’t touch this.”

At Cannes, that moment drew applause. One of Peck’s closest friends — a Jewish writer who, he notes, agrees with him on nearly everything politically — told him later that while she was deeply moved by the film, she’d felt a jolt of fear as the audience clapped.

“We talked about it,” Peck says. “In France today, you can’t touch that term. And for me, that’s the beginning of the end — when you can’t speak your mind.”

He recalls being in New York after 9/11, unable to voice unease about the flag-waving and rush to war. “I cried like everybody else,” he says. “But when, after five days, you’re asked to wave a flag, that’s using your humanity for war. The point is the same — to shut down conversation.”

Peck carries Orwell’s warning into the digital present. The writer’s words play against AI-generated images and voices, echoes of the future he once imagined.

“He wrote about it without knowing it would be called AI,” Peck says. “He said someday you’d be able to write whole books and newspapers with artificial intelligence — exactly what’s happening now.”

For Peck, the technology is the next front in the battle over truth and power. In his film, every AI-generated sound, image and piece of music is clearly labeled with onscreen text.

“There should be transparency about that,” he says. “If we don’t bring rules around AI very rapidly, we won’t be able to put the paste back in the tube. Profit is the only guideline right now — nobody’s controlling its impact, not on energy, not on children, not on schools. AI is an instrument and should stay an instrument. That means we’re using it. It’s not using us.”

Even as “Orwell: 2+2=5” reaches theaters, Peck is already working on two new documentaries, including one about the 2021 assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse.

“It’s an incredible geopolitical mess,” he says. “Every day I discover more. I need to go back to fiction for a while — documentaries are exhausting. But I can’t complain. I wish everyone could be as passionate about their work as I am.”

For all its darkness, Peck insists on leaving a sliver of light. He points to Orwell’s line in “Nineteen Eighty-Four”: “If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

“The civil society is always the one who saved the day — the civilians, the students, the churches, the alliances,” he says. “Like the civil rights movement. Blacks, Jews, whites, churches, everybody sat down around the table and decided to have a strategy. And unfortunately, that’s the only thing we have. It’s long and it’s hard, but that door is still open. It’s us, individually and collectively, who have to make that choice.”

What keeps him going, he says, isn’t optimism so much as duty.

“If I lived completely engulfed in my own bubble, I’d probably be desperate,” he says. “What keeps me grounded is that I still have friends in Congo. I still work with Haiti every day. I talk with journalists who risk their lives in Gaza. So I can’t afford to look at those people and say, ‘I’m tired.’ They’re still doing the work.”

He pauses, his voice tightening. “People laugh at the latest stupidity from the president, as if it’s funny,” he says. “But that’s a dictatorship coming. He’s attacking every institution — newspapers, academia, justice, business. It’s the same playbook. They change the laws first, because most people would rather obey the law than say ‘No, two plus two equals four.’ That’s what authoritarian leaders count on.”

He sits quietly for a moment. “People are waiting for miracles,” he says finally. “But there are no miracles.”

Strictly Come Dancing pro Dianne Buswell is expecting her first child with her boyfriend Joe Sugg, and her co-stars have been showering her with love and support

Pregnant Dianne Buswell says she ‘can’t deal’ after her Strictly Come Dancing co-star left her on the verge of tears.

The professional dancer is taking part in the competition this year alongside Neighbours icon Stefan Dennis, and the duo made their competition debut during the opening week last weekend, delivering a Foxtrot to the Neighbours Theme by Barry Crocker.

Following their performance, Stefan acknowledged there had been issues with the routine, but judge Anton Du Beke still praised it as a “brilliant effort”. However, judge Craig Revel Horwood went on the attack, stating that the dance had been “littered with mistakes”.

This week, Stefan confessed to being ‘stumped’ by the dance, reports the Manchester Evening News.

The actor, renowned for portraying Neighbours’ Paul Robinson for four decades, and defending champion Dianne, who is expecting her first child, delivered an 80s-themed cha cha to Give It Up by KC And The Sunshine Band, earning 17 points.

Last month, Dianne announced that she is expecting her first baby – a boy – with her partner Joe Sugg. The Australian dancer and the YouTuber first crossed paths on Strictly in 2018 when they were partnered together for that series.

The expectant parents shared the news through a charming video, accompanied by Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’, which showed them creating a painting that depicted themselves as stick figures with a smaller one between them to symbolise their baby.

Dianne and Joe have subsequently been inundated with messages of affection, with Dianne also receiving presents whilst working on Strictly at Elstree Studios.

On Saturday, Dianne posted on social media, revealing she had been given a tiny cardigan that was delivered to the studio after her pregnancy reveal.

Accompanying the image, which displayed the miniature piece of handcrafted knitwear, the Australian performer shared a series of tearful face emojis before writing: “This was sent to the studio today and I cannot deal. It’s so small.”

During the latest live programme, she returned to her social media account and alongside a selfie with Strictly colleague Neil Jones, in which she could be seen pouting with an emotional expression, Dianne displayed the gift. Displaying a miniature pair of Adidas trainers, Dianne wrote: “Nah I can’t deal thank you Uncle Jonsey [face holding back tears and heart emojis] @mr_njonesofficial @joe_sugg.”

She also revealed another parcel containing tiny baby socks decorated with teddy bears. “And then these from uncle @ciaranfoley [face holding back tears and heart emojis] @joe_sugg. This lille boy is already so loved and lucky. Thank you [face holding back tears and heart emojis].”

The first time Angel “Angel Baby” Rodriguez heard Art Laboe on the radio, he was 13, in his father’s garage in the City of Industry. Laboe was introducing “Nite Owl” (1955) by Tony Allen and the Champs. “His voice caught me first,” Rodriguez told me, “that very distinctive tone, and then I heard the listeners calling in. The rawness of connecting with a listener, of spinning the record, it was something.”

Rodriguez became a DJ himself, in the mold of Laboe, at first playing records for Radio Aztlan, the late-slot Friday program at KUCR in Riverside. “I didn’t sleep on a Friday night for over 20 years, from my 20s into my 40s,” he told me. Now he hosts “The Art Laboe Love Zone,” keeping alive his hero’s legacy — three hours of live radio, emanating five nights a week from a studio in Palm Springs, that bring “the music to someone,” in Angel Baby’s words.

I am one of those someones. I was a teenager when I first started listening to Laboe in the 1970s. I spent nights with him on the radio for the rest of his life, until he died Oct. 7, 2022. By then I’d already discovered Rodriguez, who took over the Laboe tribute broadcast in 2023, with his own old school “radio voice” and an oldies playlist suitable for dance parties, house parties, long-haul travel and anyone burning the candle at both ends.

Now, with algorithms curating Spotify and Sirius, with fewer live DJ voices anywhere, terrestrial American radio is said to be dying. But not Art Laboe’s voice.

The most beloved man I’ve ever met, hands down, was Laboe. He stood just over 5 feet but commanded theaters filled with thousands of people, standing onstage in shimmering sapphire or gold lamé suits, while four generations of fans screamed his name.

Born to an Armenian family in Utah, Laboe was always fascinated with radios and broadcasting. At the age of 9, he took a bus, alone, to Los Angeles to see his older sister, and eventually moved to California, attending Stanford, serving in the Navy and becoming a DJ on KRLA, the oldies station. His 1950s live music revues, at the El Monte Legion Stadium, were the first integrated dance concerts in California. He DJ’d on live radio continuously for 79 years, and emceed legendary music revues almost that long.

If Laboe didn’t invent the song dedication, he perfected it. Starting in 1943 on KSAN in San Francisco, Laboe read out dedications to loved ones sent to him by letter from wives missing husbands in World War II, and then later from call-ins sending songs to a lover lying next to them in bed, or sitting alone in the dark, separated by migrant labor, military service, a prison sentence or work.

DJ Angel Rodriguez, who carries on a tribute to Art Laboe, and a longtime fan, Proxie Aguirre, 82.

(Oscar Aguila for The Times)

Laboe’s resonant voice echoed through the Riverside neighborhoods where I grew up, from passing cars and open windows, a staple of la cultura in particular — the Chicano culture of lowriders, Pendletons and khakis. Even now, my neighbor Lydia Orta, 75, talks about going to his concerts in El Monte when she was 9, with her grandmother, while her son Johnny, 45, plays archived Laboe broadcasts through speakers in their yard.

On Aug. 9, at the Farmhouse Collective in Riverside, more than 500 Laboe fans from all over the Southland gathered to celebrate the man, two days after what would have been his 100th birthday. Onstage, Rodriguez, hosted in his own signature style — no gold lamé, but a fedora, black sunglasses and a white guayabera shirt. His handle, Angel Baby, derives from the iconic song of the same name recorded in 1960 by Rosie and the Originals, when Rosie Hamlin was just 15 years old, still a student at Mission Bay High School in San Diego, writing poetry about her boyfriend. Rodriguez is the Prince of Oldies now — Laboe is still the King — keeping la cultura, with its intense devotion to music and community, alive.

At the concert, I met Mary Silva, 73, who drove in with her daughter. “I grew up in East L.A.,” she told me, “and there were 14 siblings before I came. … We listened to Art Laboe in Florence. I still listen every night, on 104.7.” Her favorite song? “‘Tell It Like It Is,’ ‘cause I always tell it like it is.” The classic is by Aaron Neville.

Just at the stage edge were Elizabeth Rivas, 72, from San Bernardino, and her grandchildren Rene Velaquez, 34, and Raymond Velasquez, 16. Rivas has listened to Laboe and now Rodriguez for decades, and her favorite song is “Tonight,” by Sly, Slick and Wicked. Granddaughter Rene said, “She taught us to listen.” Rene’s pick was another by Sly, Slick and Wicked: “Confessin’ a Feeling.”

Near them was Henry Sanchez, 54, from my old neighborhood in Riverside, who grew up listening to Laboe on 99.1. His favorite? Brenton Wood’s “Take a Chance.” And Sal Gomez, 49, also from Riverside, loves Wood’s “Baby You Got It,” which he remembered from KRLA.

Onstage, Rodriguez — introduced by Joanna Morones, Laboe’s longtime radio producer — took the microphone and said, “Gracias a Dios that I am honored to be sitting in Art’s chair five nights a week, taking phone calls and dedications from all the listeners. It gives me chills to sit there.”

When Sly, Slick and Wicked took the stage, resplendent in three-piece suits and fedoras, their dance moves crisp and perfect, the lead singer told the crowd, “Art Laboe used to say ‘Confessin’ a Feeling’ was his most requested song at night, and for 50 years you all have kept us singing.” The audience joined in: “Baby, my love is real.” Time passes, love changes, but the song remains the same.

And yet these big gatherings are not where I hear the devotion. It threads through the dark, tracing the melancholy of separation and the intimacy of the night, as the voices of Angel Baby and Art Laboe come through radio speakers.

The Monday after the celebration, I listened from 9 p.m. to midnight, as always. At least eight terrestrial radio stations carry “The Art Laboe Love Zone,” and thousands of fans stream it in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and overseas.

Rodriguez, who drives the 110-mile round trip from Riverside to Palm Springs each weeknight after working as the head street sign maker for Riverside County, had gone through snail mail and DMs on Instagram and Facebook, collecting the dedications he’d read. Morones had chosen the recordings of Laboe for the night. From out of the past, Laboe spoke to a woman who wanted him to blow a kiss through the radio to a man far away.

Rodriguez read a letter from Papa Lito, from Wilmington, now in Delano. And then a dedication from Proxie Aguirre, who’d made an appearance at the birthday celebration. Aguirre is 83 now, a Laboe fan since she was 15. She was pictured on the cover of a Laboe compilation album, eyes sparkling, forever young. She was driven from Venice to Riverside by her sister-in-law.

“This is from the all-new Proxie, for her husband of 35 years, Eddie,” Angel Baby’s dulcet voice intoned. “She says, ‘Eddie, I love you mucho.’”

Then: “Let’s drop the needle on the record, baby bubba.”

Susan Straight’s 10th novel, “Sacrament,” will be published in October. It features a lowrider funeral in San Bernardino and a nurse who sings like Mary Wells.

Haworth, West Yorkshire

Bradford is 2025’s UK City of Culture, and Wild Uplands is part of the year-long celebration that involves four new installations on the moors above Haworth, 10 miles west of central Bradford. There are pink marble butterflies designed by Meherunnisa Asad. On the ridge above, Steve Messam’s 10-metre tower of locally quarried stone looks out over heather-purple hills. These works are dotted around the lake and abandoned quarries of Penistone Hill country park and a family-friendly guide charts a route around all four. While wandering over the moors, you can tune into a geolocated immersive soundscape, Earth & Sky, which includes music by Bradford-born composer Frederick Delius. The Brontë Bus from Hebden Bridge via Keighley stops three times an hour in Haworth, and it’s then a 15-minute stroll past the Parsonage to Penistone Hill. Haworth’s steep, cobbled Main Street is lined with pubs and cafes such as the Writers’ Bloc, which opened in November 2024 and serves cream teas inside a hollowed-out book. At the bottom of the street, Haworth Old Hall has a choice of locally distilled gins.
To 12 October, bradford2025.co.uk

Folkestone, Kent

The 2025 Folkestone Triennial, the UK’s biggest urban collection of contemporary outdoor artworks, features new site-specific works by artists from around the world. It is free and open daily until 19 October, and you can choose your own routes using the map in the digital guide. No 15 is an old Martello tower containing Katie Paterson’s extraordinary years-long project Afterlife. She has fashioned 197 amulets from matter embodying the harm caused by the climate crisis: fragments of charred wood from burnt forests, stones from islands menaced by rising seas … Walk past Jennifer Tee’s Oceans Tree of Life, a seaweed sculpture of brick and fused sea glass built into the grassy clifftop, to reach Sara Trillo’s chalky Urn Field. Down some steps off the harbour arm, don’t miss Red Erratic by Dorothy Cross, a waterside block of red Syrian marble carved with human feet. Stop off at Herbert’s for an ice-cream, where artist Emeka Ogboh has designed a lolly that tastes like lemon cheesecake and can be dipped (sherbet dip-dab-style) into a slightly salty-spicy coating that looks like sand. Ogboh’s choral sound installation Ode to the Channel is a few minutes’ walk away past Sunny Sands beach. Here you can sit on the steps with your ice-cream and listen to the music and the waves.
To 19 October, creativefolkestone.org.uk

Newquay, Cornwall

A series of new murals are appearing on walls around Newquay. There are colourful seaside abstracts, bouncing beachballs, a fisher mending nets by candlelight … Bus 56 from Newquay runs hourly up to Porth, where local artist Phil Strugnell has painted a big, colourful mural on the side of the SeaSpace aparthotel. From here, you can follow the coast path back to Newquay for a couple of miles. Skirting Lusty Glaze and Towan Beach, walk through the ancient burial site at the Barrowfields to reach the town. Stroll past the new murals, each one with a QR code to give you details about the artist, and end near Elle Koziupa’s chiaroscuro fisher opposite Sainsbury’s.
Muqy Street Art Trail, ovenqy.co.uk

Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

The British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent runs until late October. More than 60 artists, including comedian Johnny Vegas, are involved in films, events and exhibitions in the Spode Works, a historic ceramics factory 10 minutes’ walk from Stoke-on-Trent station. There are regular trains from Crewe, London Euston and elsewhere. A bronze Josiah Wedgwood stands opposite the station, holding a copy of the Portland Vase. Spode is a maze of old factory buildings, storerooms and galleries. New commissions include Playscape, turning clay spoil into a playground, and Josie KO celebrating Black women in Stoke with a collaborative bottle kiln-inspired goddess. When you’ve finished exploring Spode Works, follow the new Living Heritage trail, which launched in April, and starts from Spode. There are Staffordshire oatcakes and deep-filled sarnies at the Quarter, while the Little Vintage Tea Room at Spode Museum has homemade cakes and a mosaic counter designed by artist Philip Hardaker, inspired by Spode’s blue Italian ceramics.
To 19 October, britishceramicsbiennial.com

Wolterton, Norfolk

Wolterton Hall and its 200-hectare (500-acre) estate have been closed to the public for decades. Now a new art and culture programme comes with a chance to explore the Palladian house and grounds during opening hours (generally Wed to Sun, 11am to 4pm) if you book a free ticket online. The inaugural exhibition, Sea State, includes tempestuous new North Sea-inspired works by Maggi Hambling and painted-steel wave-form sculptures by Ro Robertson in the Marble Hall. In the old Portrait Room, don’t miss Hambling’s moving tribute to her late partner of 40 years, Tory. This is less an art trail than a parkland stroll and indoor exhibition, but both are lovely. Maps available at Wolterton offer various routes around the lake and ponds, with views of the heronry and ruined round-towered church. There are more great walks at nearby Mannington. Norfolk-based bakery Bread Source has cafes in Wolterton Hall’s library and at Mannington too, serving cakes, drinks and huge flaky croissants.
Sea State runs to 7 December, wolterton.co.uk

Westminster, London

Author and journalist Juliet Rix’s new book, London Statues of Women, features interviews with artists and models. It covers the more obvious monuments, such as Queen Victoria at Kensington Palace and Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square. But you can also find groundbreaking director Joan Littlewood outside the Theatre Royal in Stratford and Amy Winehouse in Camden Market. The book includes three statue safaris around Westminster, Bloomsbury and the City. The Westminster route starts with a dancing Anna Pavlova in gilded bronze on top of the Victoria Palace theatre and ends at Waterloo near Basil Watson’s National Windrush Monument. Look up on Horseferry Road to see Mary and Etienne Millner’s bronze figure of visionary mathematician Ada Lovelace, backed by gold computer punch cards. Or head to the riverside garden by St Thomas’ hospital to find nurse Mary Seacole.
London Statues of Women is published by Safe Haven Books

Wrexham, Clwyd

A new public art trail is part of Wrexham’s bid to be 2029 UK city of culture. Coordinated by local artist Liam Stokes-Massey, the trail includes 14 works so far and the city is planning a second phase this autumn. The Boss is Stokes-Massey’s tribute to Wrexham FC manager Phil Parkinson, and there are several football-themed works. Others celebrate the city’s industrial heritage, such as Josh Colwell’s monochrome miner with caged canary. The Art Bunny (AKA Rachel West) evokes Wrexham’s markets, where her mum and grandad worked. There’s a map to plot your route round the murals. Tŷ Pawb gallery, market and food court has homemade curry, pies from the Pie’d Pie’per and more.
Find out more at wcct.wales

In 2022, the iconic L.A. comedian Cheech Marin opened an art museum with the hope of inspiring a Chicano art renaissance.

“I looked around and said, ‘This could be the next big art town’ — because the foundations were already there,” Marin told De Los. “There was this kind of nebulous underground here, but [they’ll] reach officialdom when they have their museum.”

Now, as the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture enters its fourth year, Marin said he believes his goal is slowly coming true.

Known colloquially as the Cheech, the museum is widely considered the only space in the nation that exclusively showcases Chicano art. It’s located in Riverside, a majority-Latino city which is also within one of the largest Latino-populated counties in the country.

Since its grand opening on June 17, 2022, the center has housed hundreds of artworks from Marin’s vast private collection, including from prominent artists such as Wayne Alaniz Healy, Judithe Hernández and Frank Romero.

In its first two years, the space attracted over 200,000 visitors, according to an independent study commissioned by the city, with around 90% of attendees coming from outside the Inland Empire. The study also found that the Cheech brought around $29 million into the city’s local economy in that time frame.

“We were recognized as one of the top 50 shows in the world,” Marin said. “The fame of the museum is spreading far and wide, and people are coming from all over the United States.”

While the Cheech grew in nationwide prominence, its artistic director, María Esther Fernández, explained that the museum’s team also worked to fulfill Marin’s goal by taking advantage of its rapid success.

In the last three years, the center has become a hub and vital resource for many of the region’s Chicano artists. It has done this by creating opportunities to network with high-profile individuals, hosting recurring professional development workshops and regularly contracting emerging creatives for different design projects.

Drew Oberjuerge, the center’s former executive director, added that the museum has invested in the region’s economy by hiring locals to help prepare artwork for installation while also paying musicians and other contractors to work throughout their events.

Cheech Marin photographed in the Riverside Art Museum for the unveiling of the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture (a.k.a. “The Cheech”) in 2022.

(Gustavo Soriano / For The Times)

Most important for these artists, however, is the space that the Cheech has designated to put their art front and center.

“What we’ve been really lucky to leverage is the visibility of the Cheech,” Fernández said. “We’ve been really dedicated, since we opened, to featuring artists that are emerging or some that are even mid-career in the community gallery.”

Some of the creatives, who have collaborated with the Cheech within the community gallery since it first opened, say the center’s efforts have legitimized their career paths and created new opportunities to help pursue their dreams.

The gallery is located next to the museum’s entrance and is only a fraction of the space given to the other exhibits within the 61,420-square-foot museum — and it feels like being in a waiting room in comparison to the rest of the center too. Yet, on only four small walls, the artists featured in the area have put on powerful exhibitions that tell the region’s story while also making art on par with Marin’s collection.

This includes shows like “Desde los Cielos,” which was co-curated by Perry Picasshoe and Emmanuel Camacho Larios, and looked into the concept of alienness — as well as Cosme Córdova’s “Reflections of Our Stories,” which emphasized a cultural connection between Inland Empire artists, despite the use of vastly different mediums.

Perry Picasshoe stands outside the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture as part of a performance piece in Riverside on July 3, 2025.

(Daniel Hernandez)

In total, the Cheech has held at least seven different exhibitions that showcased artists from across the Inland Empire — at times, catching Marin’s connoisseur eyes.

“I bought a couple of pieces from different artists because they are of that quality,” Marin said. “It’s great to be encouraging local talent as well as recognizing a larger picture that they are a part of, or going to become a part of [the Cheech].”

According to the Cheech’s spokesperson, Marin has purchased three works from Inland Empire-based artist Denise Silva after they curated an exhibition named “Indigenous Futurism” within the gallery. Another piece, created by artist Rosy Cortez, who has been featured in several exhibitions, was purchased by an anonymous donor and added to the center’s permanent collection.

“We’ve also begun to implement an artist fee for artists who are participating in the exhibitions,” Fernández said, adding that her team has assisted in the transportation of larger works of art as well. “Participating in exhibitions can be cost-prohibitive for artists, and so it’s something we’re trying to mitigate in our practices.”

Their most recent exhibition within the community gallery, called “Hecho en Park Avenue,” has been one of their most successful showings, with over 1,300 community members attending its opening earlier this year.

The exhibition’s co-curator, Juan Navarro, explained that the show culminated years of work within Riverside’s Eastside neighborhood. He, along with other Chicano artists, has been creating art within the Latino-dominant community since 2021.

Then, when the Cheech asked them to curate a show, Navarro felt it was the perfect chance to tell the stories of the Eastside’s locals. The response to the final product was more than Navarro could have ever imagined.

“The community showed out: from intellectuals from UC Riverside, from local government, to state government showed up, to the gang members,” Navarro said. He also noted the emotional weight of being recognized for his art, while surrounded by the work of Chicano artists who waited decades for their own to be recognized.

“Seeing this big, broad community and seeing that our show met the need for a diverse audience… It was meaningful to a lot of people, that’s what I cared about.”

The show’s other co-curator, Michelle Espino, also expressed gratitude for the chance to tell the Eastside’s story at the Cheech. Besides being one of its featured artists, Espino worked on many of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the “Hecho en Park Avenue” exhibition.

It was also a full-circle moment for her; years prior, Espino had written about Fernández’s work for a Chicano art history class. This year, she met with Fernández to ask for advice and to finalize plans for the exhibit.

“It [validated] that I do want to continue with this,” Espino said. “She is literally the person I look up to.”

On top of Espino’s one-on-one meetings with the artistic director, she has also enrolled in a few professional development workshops hosted by the center, most recently taking a class that taught both the art of portraiture and poetry. The Cheech regularly partners with a nonprofit organization named the Riverside Arts Council to host professional development classes.

“If we had these resources when I was younger, my trajectory could have probably been a little bit different,” Espino said.

Marin, in his lifelong quest to collect works for his private collection, has seen how Chicano artists have grown their communities in their respective cities. It starts with painters sharing their works with each other through smaller shows, he said, which builds excitement and increases participation. He likened it to a biological process, where each generation builds upon the growth of the previous iteration.

That process is starting in the Inland Empire now, he added.

“We are a part of this big American picture,” Marin said. “And there’s nothing more official that you can do besides having your own museum.”

Hernandez is a freelance writer based in Riverside. This article is part of a De Los initiative to expand coverage of the Inland Empire with funding from the Cultivating Inland Empire Latino Opportunity (CIELO) Fund at the Inland Empire Community Foundation.

Clifton Powell is unapologetically dropping the name of the agent who he alleges fired him for taking a role in the 2005 musical “The Gospel.”

“My agent at the time, and I’ll say his name, his name is Jeff Witjas at APA,” the veteran actor told “The Art of Dialogue” last week on YouTube. “He called me and said, ‘You’re doing another one of those little Black movies?’ I said, ‘You’re damn right. I got a family to feed’ and hung up the telephone on his ass and they let me go.”

Witjas did not respond immediately Friday to The Times’ request for comment.

One of Hollywood’s famous “Oh, that guy” character actors is headed toward 300 credits in his prolific career. Powell, 69, has appeared in Oscar-winning films like the 2004 biopic “Ray,” critically acclaimed films like the 1993 crime drama “Menace II Society” and box office juggernauts like the 1998 buddy-cop comedy “Rush Hour.”

Throughout his career, Powell said he doesn’t let his representation dictate the projects he takes. When picking his projects, the actor follows advice given to him by Jamie Foxx years ago.

“He said, ‘Clif Powell, keep one foot in…’ that means keep one foot in with your people and I’m always going to be with the people, because African Americans, and young white kids, young Asians, Latinos and women have made me a household name.”

Powell said his mentality has paid dividends. The director of “The Gospel” later cast him in Peacock’s critically hailed crime drama “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist.”

His hiccup with a top acting agency did not slow down his career. Based on his IMDb page, Powell has remained a working actor and kept his family well fed. But there are certain roles his personal boundaries have ruled out: gay roles.

“It’s not militant. It’s just that I’m — certain things I’m just not comfortable with,” Powell said.

One role that did fall within his zone of comfort was a part in 2Pac’s dystopian music video for “California Love,” where his character is introduced as “Monster” by a high-pitched Chris Tucker.

“A lot of people still don’t know that’s me … everybody thinks that’s George Clinton,” Powell said on “The Art of Dialogue.”

So shout his name next time the video plays, instead of saying “That’s the guy from ‘Rush Hour.’” That guy’s name is Clifton Powell.

How does one care for their aging parent without losing sight of their own identity?

The first thing Roxana Ortega will say is: “We have to not abandon ourselves.”

The L.A.-born Latina actress outlines the deeply emotional process of caring for an aging parent in her first play, “Am I Roxie?,” which premieres Sept. 11 and kicks off the Geffen Playhouse’s 2025-26 season.

The production will remain through Oct. 5 at the Gil Cates Theater and is directed by Bernardo Cubría, (“Crabs in a Bucket” and “The Play You Want”).

Ortega’s one-woman show was inspired by her mother, Carmen, whose memory is in decline due to Alzheimer’s disease. Bounded by her commitment to being the perfect Latina daughter, Ortega illustrates how she stepped up to provide caregiving duties, while trying to sustain her acting career — even if it was just a Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwich commercial.

“This show to me is about how to not abandon ourselves in a time of such great darkness,” says Ortega through a video call.

Onstage, Ortega masterfully transforms her solo act into an ensemble performance, through her many quirky accents and mannerisms alone; her characters range from her three Peruvian tías to an imaginary cholo critic and a perky, silicone-bloated nurse.

Capturing a broad emotional spectrum, from joy to grief, it is clear that Ortega — a former troupe member of the Groundlings Sunday Company — showcases a lifetime of skills on the Westwood stage.

“Everything just merged as I was trying to write about what was happening,” says Ortega. “I was also leaving sketch comedy [group] the Groundlings, so I was finding my own voice. All those things merged to birth this, a perfect combination of so many desires and dreams I’ve had.”

With over 80 acting credits to her name, the multi-hyphenate artist is best known for voicing the melodramatic Frida Casagrande from Nickelodeon’s Emmy-winning show “The Casagrandes,” an animated sitcom about a family living in the fictional Great Lakes City. Other notable credits include Netflix’s “Grand-Daddy Day Care” and “Santa Clarita Diet,” Warner Bros.‘ “Miss Congeniality 2” as well as the popular Fox series “New Girl.”

Audiences should buckle up — preferably with tissues at the ready — for a roller coaster of emotions, as they witness Ortega relinquish control over an unchangeable fate, while holding compassion for her mother and herself in “Am I Roxie?”

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Your one-woman show, “Am I Roxie?,” explores your personal journey as a caretaker for your aging parent, but it also focuses on your artistic aspirations. Can you walk me through your decision to make this the subject of your next project?

I’ve always wanted to turn my personal material into art; most artists do feel that way. I had been doing it for quite a while in sketch comedy, [by] taking characters like my tías, who I find to be so hysterical, and trying to put them into things. So I knew somewhere in the back of my brain — or in the middle — that I wanted to do a show about my family. I watched Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s “Lackawanna Blues,” so I always wanted to do that.

This play approaches heavy topics with humor. How did you strike that balance?

I think that’s just the way my brain works. I think a lot of comedians are this way; we’re always looking for laughs and maybe that’s how we survive ’cause we are very sensitive people — I’m very sensitive and very intense, so laughter is that levity.

Through the development process, we did have some discussions about certain moments. Do we want people to laugh when I’m in the chaise longue texting, “Is [my mom] still alive?” We had more “Shark Tank” sounds running through that and then changed it.

Caregiving is obviously a huge endeavor for Latinos — Latina women, more specifically. How do you make sense of the idea of care now?

I [think of] abandonment. There’s something so primal when somebody is aging and you can tell, “This person was in charge of me; they’re so vulnerable; now they need me. Oh my god, I can’t abandon them, right?” You feel like, “I don’t want to be abandoned, so I don’t want to abandon them.” It really shocked me how strong that urge was and I think we also have to not abandon ourselves. We absolutely cannot.

If you go into the caregiving world, they talk about care like: “Here’s your pills, here’s the food and we have some music coming in.” Maybe if you’re lucky, there’s bingo — but my mom wouldn’t play bingo! Are you f— kidding me? Care should be individualized. It should address the spirit.

Guilt creeps up in this play disguised as your inner Latina critic every time you do something that feels selfish in light of your mom’s situation. What relationship do you have with your inner critic now?

I definitely feel like I’ve gone through a journey from fear to love with the task of caregiving and even in relation to myself; I learned to love myself more, which is part of caring for yourself.

In this process of putting [my story] out there, of just being so gentle with myself and saying, “No matter what happens, no matter how it’s received, I’m not going to put my identity on the line.” There will be no beating myself up. There will be no, “Now you’re terrible because this, this, this …” It’s always a practice. Life is too short for us to feel bad.

There’s no benefit to suffering, and most of our suffering we do to ourselves through that critic by giving it power. And in our culture, sometimes it’s glorified.

You’re an overachiever, a Berkeley grad and former Groundlings member. But in “Am I Roxie?,” you balance the urgency of achieving your goals with the grief of losing a parent who is still alive. How did it feel to not give up on your dreams?

I felt like a terrible daughter. It’s hard. There’s a point in the show when I leave my mom and she says, “Don’t leave me here,” and I leave her and go to an audition. That’s a hard moment and I can tell that the audience is like, “How could you do that?” It feels vulnerable to show that I did that. But then, how does a mother leave their child at kindergarten? How can you find the balance where you are nurturing yourself and nurturing somebody else?

It was hard. I would beat myself up a lot and cry about feeling so terrible. And then go the next day to absolve myself. The more [my mom] found other relationships with a caregiver, the more I felt like, “Okay, she’s safe.”

Motherhood is also at the core of your story — not just with your mother, but as you explore your own fertility journey. How did your concept of motherhood change after caring for your mother?

What I didn’t explicitly say in the play is that I am a mother. I mothered my mother. Now, not everyone who is a mother by having a baby is necessarily a “mothering mother.” Something that this disease taught me is what these words really mean. What is it to be a sister? What is it to be a mother? What I learned in caring for my mom is that I am a mother, because I was able to nurture on such a deep level. Even when all the signs showed that she’s not there anymore. A mother knows her baby. She was my baby at the end.

After our fertility journey, 10 years of trying, me birthing this piece of art was me mothering my creativity into existence.

 You don’t mention Alzheimer’s by name until that very end. Why?

Part of it was accepting the journey and being able to say the diagnosis. Sometimes there’s an avoidance around Alzheimer’s. Nobody wants to say the word or talk about the disease ’cause it’s sad. So I wanted to make it a moment when I actually said it so that we can see the weight of it. Hopefully viewers will leave the theater being able to speak about it and to know it in an intimate way. Naming it is so important, so we can take the sting and discomfort off.

There are tender moments onstage where you let out tears. What is it like to relive those real-life moments on stage every night?

It is so difficult, more difficult than I thought it would be. My mom is onstage with me when I walk out there. I take her hand and I put her in that little opera chair next to me and we are together. Saying goodbye to her every night is hard.

Inside Superchief Gallery, murmurs of excitement and eagerness filled the air. Around 60 people gathered in the downtown art space for a screen printing workshop on a late summer evening in August.

Young families, friend groups and couples filled neon pink pews, ready to print designs on T-shirts. Salsa music blared over the speakers as a few stragglers took their seats and others admired artwork on the walls, including a fine-line David Lynch drawing, a ceramic Garfield and a depiction of a lowrider’s paint job.

Despite the lively atmosphere, this gathering might be one of the last. Co-founder Bill Dunleavy said the gallery may be forced to close this month if it can’t raise enough money to pay the bills.

“We thought we had until November to save Superchief, but it came early,” Dunleavy said. “It’s not easy to build the type of community we’ve built. It would be a real shame, and set the culture back to some degree.”

For over a decade, Superchief has established itself as a place where punk rockers, graffiti writers, street photographers, homegrown fine artists and anyone with a piqued interest in counterculture gather to celebrate art.

Audrey Caceres poses with her screen printed jersey at Superchief Gallery, during the workshop.

(Jonathan Alcorn/For The Times)

The gallery’s possible closure would add to the list of shuttered businesses in downtown L.A. that have struggled to rebound following the COVID-19 pandemic. Although downtown continues to attract residents, many office buildings are struggling with falling values and high vacancies.

This year alone, the neighborhood has seen legacy kitchens like the Original Pantry Cafe and Cole’s French Dip face permanent closure. The Mayan, a historic nightclub, is set to shut down later this month and Angel City Brewery announced that its Arts District taproom is being put up for sale.

Nick Griffin, executive vice president of the DTLA Alliance, a coalition of property owners, said the closures reflect the “ebb and flow” of business and changing tastes rather than conditions in downtown.

“Superchief might be closing, but Dataland, the digital AI Art Museum up on Bunker Hill, is going to be opening next year. The Lucas Museum, a massive billion-dollar museum, is opening in Exposition Park. The Broad is doing a $100-million expansion of its facility,” said Griffin. “It’s the normal churn of businesses and culture.”

He says that more businesses are opening in the area than are closing, but the ones that are closing tend to be “very high profile,” cater to niche audiences and often have a cult following — like Superchief.

Art galleries have faced their own challenges.

The global art market declined 12% in 2024, marking its second consecutive year of falling sales, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Facing shrinking revenue and rising overhead costs, several other art galleries across the city, like Blum, Clearing and Tanya Bonakdar, have also recently announced the closure of their L.A. locations.

Dunleavy first started to notice a falloff in business about a year ago. The gallery’s usual sponsors, who would attach their names and brands to the various exhibitions, started to pull out and revenue from digital art (NFT) sales declined.

“People are just being more careful with their money,” Dunleavy said. “They’re scaling back their advertising and promotional budgets. At the same time, fewer people are buying art. These are the two things that keep an art gallery business model afloat: sponsors and sales.”

Last spring, he and his business partner Ed Zipco launched a fundraising campaign to help save Superchief. They started a Patreon, a monthly subscription service tailored to individual audiences where members are invited to attend special events and get various perks for a monthly fee ranging $10 to $30.

Subscribers and regular gallery-goers have since carved pinewood derby cars, participated in a figure drawing class where models in lingerie were bound by ropes and shopped at a monthly vendor market. The crowdfunding now has about 400 members.

Although the fundraising has helped, the gallery isn’t making enough to cover monthly expenses that range from $10,000 to $15,000, most of it to pay for renting the 10,000-square-foot building on South Los Angeles Street.

The gallery employs two part-time employees and is now open only on the weekends. Dunleavy disclosed that he hasn’t paid himself in over two years and has taken on more loans to meet expenses.

A flier with a Patreon QR code is pictured at the Superchief Gallery during their event.

(Jonathan Alcorn/For The Times)

“We started to incur a lot of debt in order to stay afloat, hoping things were going to get better. But things didn’t get better, they just got worse,” he said.

Superchief moved into its current location in 2022. The gallery, which opened in 2014, was previously housed in a warehouse in Skid Row where it shared space with artists. It soon built a relationship with L.A.’s underground art scene, selling artworks and competing with larger mainstream galleries.

In 2020, a few weeks before the pandemic, a nearby explosion damaged the building, and the gallery was forced to relocate to its current location.

“The economy is unreliable, and the art market is not what it was pre-pandemic, so it’s forcing us to make some real pivots and adaptations,” Dunleavy said.

Though September may be the final curtain call for the gallery, Dunleavy hasn’t given up. He plans to host ticketed parties and other fundraising events with the gallery’s associated artists.

“Patreon is about halfway where it needs to be in order to be sustainable,” Dunleavy said. “I’ve learned how to cope with stressful situations by throwing crazy parties and unconventional events — so that’s exactly what I plan to do.”

Surrounded by ink-flooded screens and piles of white T-shirts used for the August workshop, Audrey Caceres, a frequent Superchief goer, had just finished printing her pink jersey with the gallery’s logo in bright blue ink. The Boyle Heights resident says the gallery’s location, on the outskirts of downtown near East 21st Street, has brought new life to the commercial area.

“I really can’t imagine LA [sub]cultures without Superchief. It’s such a strong foundation for photographers, zine makers, and multimedia artists,” Caceres said. “So, if they weren’t here, I don’t know where people would run to display their work.”

Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new Peter Zumthor-designed David Geffen Galleries are alive with sound and activity. Voices echo through the vast, concrete space and a cacophony of drills and electric lifts beep, buzz and blare. A unique colored glaze is being applied to gallery walls, and paintings and photos are being installed throughout.

That gritty whir? It’s the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill. “A very fine product,” says senior art preparator Michael Price with a sly smile. He’s been drilling holes in the concrete walls with the large red contraption, which comes with a small attached vacuum that sucks up concrete dust as it penetrates the wall. The work is simple and done in a matter of seconds.

Senior art preparator Michael Price drills into concrete walls to hang art in LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries. He jokingly calls the Hilti TE 4-22 cordless rotary hammer drill “a very fine product.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Some of the first holes were drilled a little more than a week ago for the installation of a photo sculpture LACMA commissioned for its entrance by Los Angeles-born artist Todd Gray, titled “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” Last Wednesday, Gray, along with LACMA director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and curator Britt Salvesen, watched the final panel of the 27-foot-long assemblage being hoisted onto the wall and put in place using wooden cleats that fit together much like a jigsaw puzzle.

“This is another thing that concrete makes possible,” says Salvesen, the head of the photography, and prints and drawings, departments, noting with satisfaction how flush the photographs sit against the wall. “The traditional sheetrock drywall used in many museums have been painted and repainted so many times, they’re not exactly pristine when it comes to leveling.”

Gray steps back and looks at the finished product, nodding with quiet pride. The L.A. native attended Hamilton High School and CalArts and felt deeply honored to have been tapped for a permanent commission. He was therefore among the first people to take a hard-hat tour of the building when it was under construction so he could familiarize himself with the space. The new building opens in April 2026.

“I was kind of overwhelmed,” Gray says. “I had never been in an architectural space like this so I was just really curious. But I must admit, I was much more concerned about this wall.”

The wall is big — a blank, concrete slate — and Gray’s piece will be the first work of art guests see when they walk up the broad staircase leading to the new galleries. In Butler’s portrait, which Gray took in the 1990s, the influential writer looks contemplatively off into the distance — whether near or far, one can’t be sure. Her expression is unreadable, at once thoughtful, curious, interested and detached.

A portrait of Octavia Butler, taken by Todd Gray in the 1990s, anchors the 27-foot-long photo sculpture commissioned by LACMA for the entrance of its new David Geffen Galleries.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Her face is in a gold, oval frame and the viewer’s eyes follow hers to other aspects of the piece — an assemblage of large and small photos taken by Gray in places around the world, including Versailles, Norway and Ghana. It includes an image of an idyllic-looking path through bright green foliage that leads to a slave castle in Cape Coast, Ghana. There is also a striking image of stars in the cosmos, a lovely fresco from a church in Rome, a picture of traditional sculpture housed at the AfricaMuseum in Belgium and a series of stoic Greek columns.

“A lot of my work is contesting art history, or talking about art history, or photography’s place in history, my history, various histories culturally,” said Gray, explaining why he likes that LACMA’s collection will not be exhibited chronologically, or by medium or region, but rather in a series of interwoven exhibits that connect vastly different art in dialogue. “So it was really a commission made in heaven.”

The new galleries, explained Govan, will focus on “migration and intersection, rather than American art over on one side of the museum and European art in a different wing.”

Gray’s photo sculpture, for example, will be adjacent to a gallery featuring African art and near another with Latin American art.

It will also be directly across from a floor-to-ceiling window. These giant windows are a key part of Zumthor’s design — and a flash point for controversy, with critics arguing that too much sunlight could harm fragile art.

Translucent curtains are being designed for some of the windows, but won’t be used throughout, and not in the entrance across from “Octavia’s Gaze.” For that reason, Gray said he employed a relatively new technique called UV direct printing that was developed for outdoor signage. The process involves intense ultraviolet lights that cure and harden the ink, ultimately searing it into the printing material. These prints won’t fade, Gray said.

Todd Gray, left, oversees the installation of his photo sculpture “Octavia Butler’s Gaze.” The piece used a new UV printing technology to ensure it won’t fade in the sunlight coming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows across from it.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Delicate and old art will not be put at risk by light, Govan said. The interior of Zumthor’s building is dotted with boxy, windowless galleries that Govan and Zumthor call “houses.” And like houses, the interior of galleries are being treated to color — not in the form of paint, however.

Zumthor conceived of three colors that he wanted used in the galleries, explained Diana Magaloni, senior deputy director for conservation, curatorial and exhibitions, who has been mixing the glazes and working with a team of four trained artists to apply them. The colors are a reddish black, a Renaissance ultramarine blue and a blackish burgundy that Zumthor hoped would conjure a cave-like dimness. Overall, Magaloni said, Zumthor wanted the color to look as if it were emerging from darkness.

There are 27 galleries and the colors will be divided by section: Nine on the south side are red, nine on the north side are black and the nine in the middle are blue.

The glazing technique was conceived by a friend of Zumthor’s who lives in Switzerland, and LACMA is currently the only organization to employ it, Magaloni said.

Pigments made of minerals including hematite and rocks like lapis lazuli are ground into nanoparticles and suspended in silica, resembling “melted glass,” as Magaloni describes. The glaze is then applied to the walls, a process that must be done at once in order to prevent any impression of brushstrokes, and also because the glaze hardens quickly. Once it’s dry, the team applies a second coat of glaze pigment infused with black carbon nanoparticles. The effect is dark and mottled — it looks as if the concrete has swallowed the color.

“The concrete has all this life in and of itself,” said Magaloni. “You can walk through the building and you can see that those surfaces are not really homogeneous. The material expresses itself with no artifice, and we wanted to preserve that.”

Painting the concrete would erase that life, she added.

A gallery blushing in a deep wine color, with the theme of “Leisure and Labor in the American Metropolis,” is almost ready. Work by George Bellows, James Van Der Zee, Mary Cassatt and Robert Henri adorn the walls, and there is a table ready to receive a Tiffany lamp. Govan points out that such paintings would not have been originally displayed on white walls but rather on walls of richly colored fabric.

“She’s asking you something,” Todd Gray said of his portrait of Octavia Butler.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Gray’s piece will also be in dialogue with this room, calling to it from another time and place — asking viewers to turn their gaze to history, slavery, transcendence, salvation, power and so much more.

At this moment in time, when arts institutions are grappling with the implications of the Trump administration’s claim that the Smithsonian Institution presents “divisive, race-centered ideology” and vow to monitor what other museums around the country are putting on display, Gray’s piece feels like a small bit of resistance.

“She’s asking you something,” Gray says of Butler.

The answer is yours to declare.

MAGA loves a red cap and boasty T-shirt slogan, but not when it’s coming from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and it looks a lot like the gear they purchased from the Trump Store. So guess what the governor did over the weekend?

After weeks of mocking tweets from Newsom that mimic Trump’s usage of ALL CAPS, multiple exclamation points and memes picturing the 79-year-old as a ripped young man, the governor took the next logical step in his get-under-their-skin campaign and launched his own store for merch, the Patriot Shop.

“THE PATRIOT SHOP IS NOW OPEN!!!” he crowed. “MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING THIS IS THE GREATEST MERCHANDISE EVER MADE. PLEASE ENJOY, AMERICA!”

But how will Newsom’s parody products compete with the president’s monetization of office, a grift that’s made millions selling Trump-themed sneakers, Christmas gift wrap, perfume, cryptocurrency and even guitars?

It starts with a red trucker cap, naturally. The governor’s reads “NEWSOM WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.” The product’s description includes the explainer: “Humility is overrated.”

Curiously, it was just last week when the president wore a red hat that said, “Trump was right about everything!” and told reporters, “I know Gavin very well. He’s an incompetent guy with a good line of bulls—.”

Also available on Newsom’s clapback merch site is a tank top echoing Trump’s own words about a woman who will never, ever support him: Taylor Swift. “TRUMP IS NOT HOT,” it reads in bold red letters. The product description that follows: “A simple statement of fact.”

Three hours after the launch of the shop, Newsom boasted in an X post: “WOW! $50,000 IN PURCHASES ALREADY!! THANK YOU PATRIOTS!!!” By Monday, sales had doubled, according to a follow-up post.

Fox News coverage of the governor’s latest move in his troll-Trump campaign was low wattage compared with last week, when the conservative news outlet devoted days to Newsom’s “embarrassing” social media antics. How dare he refer to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by Trump’s mean nickname, “Meatball Ron.” That’s the president’s job!

Sunday it appeared Fox was determined not to show any big feelings over Newsom’s new MAGA-inspired line of merch. Will Cain delivered the news with a halting discipline and just a jab or two, calling the governor a “shadow” of their beloved leader. Newsom’s X account still ran with it, thanking Fox News for its coverage of his new cyber store. “Thank you for the promotion of our ‘FANTASTIC’ Patriot Shop, @WillCainShow !!!!!”

The Patriot Shop also lists a “Holy Bible” signed by “America’s Favorite Governor!” for $100, but it’s marked “SOLD OUT!” It harks back to when Trump marketed his own “God Bless the USA” Bible, which included the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. I guess we’ll never know what Newsom might have included in his.

The site also features “The Chosen One” T-shirt, featuring an image of Newsom being prayed over by notable Trump supporters Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and the late Hulk Hogan. Trump in 2019 declared himself “the chosen one.”

Newsom has been both heralded and chided for turning the president’s bully tactics back on the MAGA elite, but if social media response is any indication, it appears to be one of the few moves from an establishment Democrat that’s energizing the base and gaining attention on a national level. His taste-of-their-own-medicine campaign gained his X press account more than 250,000 new followers in August alone. And Newsom’s change in tactics has been at the top of news feeds for a week.

It appears Trump has clearly been triggered by Newsom. At a recent White House Cabinet meeting, the president said, “You have an incompetent governor in California. Gavin. I know him very well. … He’s a nice guy, looks good. [Imitating Newsom] ‘Hi everybody. How you doing?’ He’s got some strange hand action going on.”

Newsom responded on X, “You really want to have the conversation about hands?”

Director Ryan Coogler and artist Mary Corse will be honored at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 14th annual Art+Film Gala, the museum announced Sunday.

The splashy, high-fashion dinner is co-chaired by LACMA trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio, and is scheduled to take place on Nov. 1. It will be the last such event to occur before the museum opens its new Peter Zumthor-designed building next spring.

Los Angeles is uniquely suited for the gala, which seeks to highlight and strengthen the connections between film and visual art by bringing the two communities together in grand style. Last year’s honorees were Baz Luhrmann and Simone Leigh, and per usual, a host of celebrity guests attended the party including Blake Lively, Kim Kardashian, Laura Dern, Viola Davis, Andrew Garfield and Sarah Paulson. Charli XCX closed out the night with a banger.

LACMA Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan called last year’s event, which raised $6.4 million, its most successful ever. Proceeds go toward LACMA’s mission of making film more central to its programming, as well as toward funding exhibitions, acquisitions and educational programming.

Mary Corse will be honored at LACMA’s Art + Film gala.

(Indah Datou)

Other previous honorees include artists Helen Pashgian, Betye Saar, Catherine Opie, Mark Bradford, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Barbara Kruger, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. On the film side there has been Park Chan-wook, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, George Lucas, Kathryn Bigelow, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood.

Coogler — who directed “Black Panther,” “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station” — is having a stellar year. His gory Southern-vampire horror film “Sinners,” which was released in mid-April, has been a massive hit. The film, which had a budget of $90 million, grossed $48 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend, and has gone on to gross more than $365 million worldwide.

Topanga-based painter Mary Corse is known for her connection to Southern California’s Light and Space movement, but her career has been defined by her willingness to experiment with form and various materials, including ceramics and acrylic on canvas. Corse devoted much of her life to her “White Light” series, which involves layering tiny glass beads — called microspheres — over white acrylic paint for a constantly shifting, reflective effect.

“Mary Corse has continually expanded the possibilities of painting in her exquisite works, which invite us to think deeply about the nature of perception,” said Govan in a statement. “Ryan Coogler’s films do something equally transformative. Through masterful storytelling and visual innovation, he reframes history, redefines narratives and opens new worlds of possibility.”