artist

Cardi B, entering the newest phase of her rap career, has just one question in mind: “Am I the Drama?”

That’s the title for the Grammy winner’s long-anticipated sophomore album, which she unveiled Monday on social media. The “Bodak Yellow” artist, 32, announced “Am I the Drama?” will drop Sept. 19, seven years after she made her splashy debut with 2018’s “Invasion of Privacy.”

The aptly dramatic “Am I the Drama?” cover art features Cardi B in an abstract red body suit and matching fishnet tights grabbing the heel of one of her sky-high platform pumps. The image also features a raven resting on her shoe and even more of them swarming around her.

Cardi B hinted at her album and its raven motif Sunday in a theatrical teaser as she reflected on “seven years of love, life and loss” and trading in grace for hell.

“I learned power’s not given. It’s taken,” the Bronx native says. “I’m shedding feathers and no more tears. I’m not back. I’m beyond.”

Cardi B broke out with “Bodak Yellow” almost a year before she released “Invasion of Privacy” in April 2018. Times critic Mikael Wood in his review commended the rapper for her relatability — “through her words and delivery … the songs make you feel like she’s speaking directly to you.”

At the 2019 Grammy Awards, Cardi B won a top honor and made history while doing so: She became the first woman to win the rap album category as a solo artist.

Cardi B continued to gain popularity over the following years for hits including “I Like It” with J Balvin and Bad Bunny, and “WAP” with Megan Thee Stallion. The latter, and Cardi B’s recent singles “Up” and “Outside,” will be among the 23 songs on the new album, according to the tracklist preview on Spotify.

“Am I the Drama?” will arrive as Cardi B also marks new milestones in her personal life.

Earlier this year, the “Hustlers” actor made her romance with NFL star Stefon Diggs official after parting ways with Migos rapper Offset. She also became a mother for a third time in September when she welcomed her daughter Blossom Belles, with Offset. They also share 6-year-old daughter Kulture and 3-year-old son Wave.

For Thieb Delaporte-Richard, the Parisian cafe within walking distance of his home in Santa Monica was the best spot for an early-morning chat.

While standing in line, the aroma of baking croissants wafted, and the buzzing of espresso machines reverberated off the skeletal remains of an old church that now houses the café.

“This kind of feels like home, to be honest, and I think that’s the reason I like this place,” Delaporte-Richard said of both the cafe and Santa Monica.

Born in Strasbourg, France, Delaporte-Richard spent much of his childhood bouncing around — from eastern France to Paris to French Guiana in South America — never living in one place for more than a few years and never quite sure how to answer when asked which place he truly called home.

“Every city, everywhere, you can see the sunset. But here, it’s so unique — with no clouds and those colors,” French artist Thieb Delaporte-Richard says. “For some reason, it feels like I only see those colors here.”

(Los Angeles World Cup 2026 host committee)

He eventually returned to Paris to attend Gobelins design school. While there, he had the opportunity to travel to the U.S. for a three-month internship in Santa Monica — his first taste of the beachside city, where he says he “had this vision of Hollywood, palm trees, the sunset,” and wanted to have the “California experience.”

A decade later, Delaporte-Richard, 30, wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Every day, he’s still drawn to the Santa Monica Pier, Pacific Coast Highway, the Santa Monica Mountains and the iconic seaside sunsets.

“Every city, everywhere, you can see the sunset,” he said. “But here, it’s so unique — with no clouds and those colors. For some reason, it feels like I only see those colors here. The way it bounces — it’s so red at the bottom, then you see hues of orange, purple and then blue, nothing to hide it. That makes it so unique.”

In a year’s time, when teams and fans arrive in Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup — with Los Angeles set to host opening stage matches and quarterfinals at SoFi Stadium — Delaporte-Richard’s interpretation of that sunset will blanket Southern California. From walls to billboards to screens, the striking visual will serve as the focal point of the official L.A. poster for the tournament.

Delaporte-Richard’s pièce de résistance.

Like many in L.A. County, Delaporte-Richard is a transplant drawn to the area in pursuit of a dream. For him, that dream is art, and the region city welcomed him. His L.A.-centric poster stands as a love letter to the place he adores.

“My story is L.A.,” Delaporte-Richard said. “Moving here, I realized how much deeper it is — how L.A. is also all of the stories that people told me. That really changed my vision and made me realize it’s much more than what I thought. When I moved here, it was just supposed to be for a short time. And I realized, well, I love this place.”

Delaporte-Richard didn’t want his poster to be just a checklist of landmarks or symbols — his initial instinct was to include every aspect of the city. But once he scrapped that idea, he focused on subtlety: a careful balance between representation and cliché, aiming to capture an authentic L.A. feel.

He settled on the concept of a silhouetted footballer mid-strike — a composite inspired by countless goal-scoring moments, including one by his childhood hero, Ronaldinho — launching a left-footed shot against the setting sun over the downtown skyline. The city’s signature palm trees stand tall, while Easter eggs like the sweeping searchlights of a Hollywood premiere reveal themselves on a second glance. The player’s outline remains ambiguous enough to let viewers imagine their favorite star in the scene.

“A lot of people reached out to tell me, ‘Oh, it truly captures the spirit of L.A.,’” Delaporte-Richard said. “There is nothing more meaningful to me than people who’ve lived here their entire lives, for generations, telling me it feels like home. A poster like that is not just a marketing visual. To me, it’s a piece of culture. It becomes part of the history.”

The chance to showcase his art, however, nearly slipped away. Delaporte-Richard learned about the contest close to the submission deadline. Pressed for time, he put together a storyboard in a few hours in his apartment. During the next few days, he feverishly sketched and digitally painted the piece. By the end of the week, he finished the project and submitted it with just two hours to spare.

“I knew I wouldn’t have much time,” Delaporte-Richard said, shuffling through his black notebook filled with original sketches and concept art explaining his goal of capturing the energy and motion soccer brings. “I searched for an idea that would work and created that connection between soccer and Los Angeles.”

When Delaporte-Richard hit send on his submission, he wasn’t sure what to expect. At first, all he received was an automated message thanking him and highlighting that more than 900 people had entered the poster contest.

Then came the waiting game. In December, he was notified that he was one of 16 finalists whose work was getting evaluated by five Los Angeles County experts in public art and cultural exhibitions. Several months later, Jason Krutzsch of the Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment Commission reached out with a message.

“I received an email that said, ‘Congratulations, your poster has been selected,’” Delaporte-Richard said. “I had to send an email just asking, ‘Is it for real? Is it literal? You’re not joking?’ And he was like, ‘I’m dead serious.’”

It took a phone call for it to finally hit Delaporte-Richard — he won. It was a big moment he shared with his wife, who moved to California with him from France, and with friends and family back home in Paris.

For the first time, the soft-spoken, introverted Delaporte-Richard found himself in the spotlight, with his first major project now available for the world to purchase — unfamiliar territory for him. Initially, the poster’s release left him anxious, unsure of how people would react.

Would they love it? Would they hate it? The weight felt heavier because of how deeply personal the project was.

Delaporte-Richard’s decision to enter the contest comes from a lifelong love of soccer that began in his youth in France, where he first learned to kick a ball. To him, Brazilian legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho, Argentine star Lionel Messi and French hero Zinedine Zidane were magicians devoted to their craft, inspiring Delaporte-Richard to follow his path.

When he was 16, his first designs were soccer banners and photoshopped graphics. A chance to celebrate soccer sparked his love of art.

Having never been to a World Cup, Delaporte-Richard says it is an honor to now have his work be part of the games. He plans to attend matches at SoFi Stadium, the venue he passed through a months ago when his artwork was first put on display by the L.A. World Cup host committee.

“If you ask the person who’s got into design, creating football banners, about doing the World Cup poster, 15 years later, I would not believe it,” Delaporte-Richard said. “I wouldn’t believe it at all. So this experience in L.A. and in the U.S. made it a reality.”

After living in her two-bedroom apartment in Los Feliz for more than a decade, Debra Weiss encountered a problem experienced by many renters in Los Angeles: She was evicted.

“I moved into the apartment in 2014, and four years later, my landlord sold it to a wealthy family who bought it at a loss,” said Weiss, 69, who works as a textile artist. “They knew they couldn’t evict us due to rent control.”

In this series, we spotlight L.A. rentals with style. From perfect gallery walls to temporary decor hacks, these renters get creative, even in small spaces. And Angelenos need the inspiration: Most are renters.

When the landlords put the three-unit complex on the market in 2022, however, they offered Weiss $50,000 to move out — far more than the amount required by law — to make the building easier for them to sell. She declined, concerned it would affect her Social Security benefits, as there is a limit to how much one can earn and still receive full benefits.

Then, last February, the three tenants received eviction notices under the Ellis Act, which allows landlords to evict renters from rent-controlled apartments if the building is being torn down or removed from the rental market. It’s currently for sale for $3.2 million.

As a senior, Weiss was entitled to a full year’s notice because she had lived in her unit for more than a year. Still, she knew she would eventually have to move out of the comfortable 1,200-square-foot duplex, for which she paid $2,670 a month in rent.

Artist Debra Weiss stands in her dining room where she often works as a fiber artist.

When she began looking for another apartment in the area, Weiss quickly learned that she could no longer afford to live in Los Feliz. “The apartments were so much more expensive than what I was used to paying, and they had no parking or a washer and dryer,” she said. (Weiss was paid $24,650 in relocation assistance, which was taxed, due to her age and the length of time she lived in her Los Feliz apartment.)

She also visited some small studios and considered purchasing a TIC, or Tenancy in Common, where buyers purchase a share in a corporation that owns a building. However, to secure a loan, she’d need someone to co-sign. “Even though they are cute, they are tiny and not necessarily in the best neighborhoods,” she said. Another option, a Craftsman apartment near USC, wasn’t in a good walking neighborhood, something that was important to Weiss. It was also dark and hundreds of dollars more a month than her previous apartment. “I’m almost 70 years old and I need light to work,” she added.

Handknitted sculptures, embroidered weavings and a tufted rug adorn the guest room.

When her son-in-law spotted a charming two-bedroom apartment near the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for $2,950 a month on Zillow, Weiss decided to check it out.

“My initial reaction was, ‘I want this,’ ” Weiss said of the fourplex.

The rental had high ceilings, oak floors, ample sunlight, an appealing fireplace, a garage and a washer and dryer. A newly redone modern kitchen felt out of character for the 1930s building, but that didn’t bother Weiss. “The kitchen is a blank canvas,” she said of the all-white cabinets and countertops. “The white background makes all of my stuff stand out,” including ceramics by Mt. Washington Pottery and Altadena artist Linda Hsiao.

Weiss knits a sweater for her granddaughter with yarn she purchased in Japan.

Concerned that the landlord wouldn’t want to rent to her because of her age, she was pleasantly surprised when she got the apartment. “The light is amazing,” Weiss said. “I was initially worried about some of the modern touches like the overhead lighting, but it floods the room with bright light that allows me to work at night.”

Nearly a year after moving in, Weiss has filled the apartment with her stitched collages, quilts and the artworks of others, many of which she described as “trades.” “I like color and pattern and objects,” she said as she pointed out some Japanese ceramics on her buffet and a dress that she crocheted with scraps of fabric, yarn and metal.

In the guest room, a wall hanging composed of three separate weavings in a gingham check pattern is embroidered with a series of characters she based on her 5-year-old granddaughter’s drawings. “It’s about people coming together in chaos and supporting each other,” Weiss said. “I like the pattern; it reminds me of eating together on picnic tables.”

“I like objects,” Weiss said of the many treasures and collections of things that are featured throughout her rental.

On the opposite wall of the guest room above her sewing machine, a series of metal sculptures she knitted with copper and silver hangs alongside cloth dolls and purses. In the corner, a cowl made of macrame, textiles and yarn adorns a mannequin. There’s also a colorful latch hook rug that she made with acrylic yarn that looks more like artwork than a functional accessory.

In her bedroom, a coverlet that Weiss assembled from vintage quilts adorns the bed.

The long hallway ends at the laundry room and is lined with her colorful quilts, some of which are mounted on Homasote board, along with weavings and stitched works, which, like her cooking, are improvisational.

“I work without planning and respond to the materials and see what it becomes,” she said. “I start knitting and see where it goes. I get excited about the material, and then I go for it. “

The hallway in Weiss’s apartment is lined with her artworks.

Much of the wood furniture in her apartment was made by her father, who died 13 years ago.

“I’ve had this since my kids were little, and you can see all the markings,” she said of the hutch in the corner of her dining room. “My dad made it 40 years ago for the Van Nuys house I grew up in.”

It is here, at the dining room table that her father made, that she works, hosts workshops and teaches lessons in fiber art, collage and stitching. Later this year, she hopes to host a sale of her work at a holiday open house in her apartment.

Weiss is an expert in mixing texture, pattern and color in her Mid-Wilshire apartment.

The mixing of colorful Persian rugs, textiles, natural materials, chunky wood pieces and intricately knitted metal sculptures creates a warm balance throughout her apartment.

Bursting with color and pattern, the rooms offer a sense of calm that Weiss appreciates as a woman who raised three daughters alone and has had to pivot during major life changes. Over the years, she has run a clothing company, Rebe, which closed in 2019 due to economic uncertainty, declared bankruptcy and sold her Woodland Hills house. Most recently, she was forced to weather the eviction process.

“I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” said Weiss, who works six to eight hours a day at home and sells her artwork and sewing patterns on her Specks and Keepings website and at L.A. Homefarm in Glassell Park. “I’ll always figure out a way to make money by selling the things that I make.”

Even though the process of having to move was stressful, Weiss is happy with her new home and neighborhood. “I take the Metro bus everywhere and hardly ever drive,” she said. “I go to the Hollywood Farmer’s Market on Sundays. Kaiser is nearby and I can walk to LACMA. Everything worked out perfectly.”

Weiss pulls out a drawer of her flat files cabinet filled with her artwork.

The two towering sculptures comprising thousands of pounds of bronze and stainless steel took artist and filmmaker Sir Daniel Winn more than a year to complete.

They vanished in a weekend.

Police believe that on June 14 or 15 at least one thief made off with both “Icarus Within” and “Quantum Mechanics: Homme,” — sculptures valued at a combined $2.1 million — from a warehouse in Anaheim Hills. Other artwork and valuables inside the warehouse that would have been easier to move were untouched. Authorities have scant details about the heist.

“Unfortunately, we have little information but we are investigating,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Matt Sutter said.

The life-sized “Quantum Mechanics: Homme” artwork, composed of lucite, bronze and stainless steel, depicts a winged and horned man and was featured in the award-winning short film “Creation” in 2022. It’s valued at $1.8 million.

A second Winn piece, “Icarus Within,” based partially on the sculptor’s chaotic childhood escape from Vietnam, is a steel and bronze sculpture that also stands 8 feet tall, weighs a ton, and is valued at $350,000.

Both sculptures were being stored in a temporary facility and were last seen by warehouse workers in Anaheim Hills on Saturday, according to the Anaheim Police Department.

When the workers returned to the facility Monday, both pieces were missing, according to police.

Winn believes the pieces may have been stolen by an unscrupulous collector while an art recovery expert suspects the two sculptures will be destroyed for scrap metal.

“Typically these sculptures, when we do exhibitions, take about a dozen men and two forklifts to move it and a flatbed or a truck to carry it,” Winn said. “This is not an easy task.”

Winn told The Times that the last few days have been stressful and that his anxiety has been “through the roof.” Winn is considered a blue-chip artist, meaning his work is highly sought after and has a high monetary value.

The former UC Irvine medical student, who was once homeless after switching his major from medicine to art, said he blends fine art, quantum metaphysics and philosophy into his work.

The Vietnamese refugee owns the Winn Slavin Fine Art gallery on Rodeo Drive and was appointed earlier this month as Art Commissioner for John Wayne Airport.

The loss of his art has pushed Winn “to a dark place,” he said, though he’s found some catharsis in talking about the situation.

“These are my children,” he said of each of his individual works. “I have no physical, organic children. Every artwork I create is my child.”

The larger of two sculptures, “Homme,” was the seventh and only unsold work in Winn’s Quantum Mechanics series, which explores philosophical concepts, universal truths and tries to answer the enduring question: why are we here?

The smaller “Icarus Within” focused on Winn’s struggle around the age of 9 in emigrating to the United States in the final days of the Vietnam War. The sculpture was tied to Winn’s movie “Chrysalis,” based on his memoirs, that is supposed to premier this fall.

Winn said the level of sophistication in the theft led him to suspect he was targeted and that his pieces may be on the black market.

He turned over a list of individuals who have recently inquired about his sculptures to police, he said.

Sutter, the Anaheim Police sergeant, said this is the largest burglary he’s seen in his 25 years with the department.

“We’ve had our share of high-end homes that were burglarized, but this type of crime, involving forklifts, trucks, crews and the sheer size of the sculptures is something I can’t remember us having before,” Sutter said.

Sutter said investigators are asking businesses near the warehouse for any footage that could help them identify a suspect.

“I have no idea where these sculptures are,” Sutter said. “They could be in somebody’s house or in a shipping container somewhere. That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

Chris Marinello, founder of the dispute resolution and art recovery service named Art Recovery International, said the sculptures will likely be scrapped for their metals.

Marinello said scrap yards tear apart such works into thousands of small pieces to cloak the metal’s origin.

“Unfortunately, the criminals are not that bright and they don’t see artwork but, instead, a sculpture worth millions that is more valuable to them for the raw metals like steel and bronze,” Marinello said.

Marinello pointed to a two-ton Henry Moore bronze sculpture, known as the Reclining Figure, stolen from the artist’s foundation in Hertfordshire, England in 2005.

The piece was valued at 3 million pounds, but authorities believe it was scrapped for just 1,500 pounds.

“You can’t sell sculptures of this magnitude on the market,” Marinello said of the Winn’s stolen pieces.

LONDON — Music streaming service Deezer said Friday that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters.

Deezer, based in Paris, is grappling with a surge in music on its platform created using artificial intelligence tools it says are being wielded to earn royalties fraudulently.

The app will display an on-screen label warning about “AI-generated content” and notify listeners that some tracks on an album were created with song generators.

Deezer is a small player in music streaming, which is dominated by Spotify, Amazon and Apple, but the company said AI-generated music is an “industry-wide issue.”

It’s committed to “safeguarding the rights of artists and songwriters at a time where copyright law is being put into question in favor of training AI models,” CEO Alexis Lanternier said in a press release.

Deezer’s move underscores the disruption caused by generative AI systems, which are trained on the contents of the internet including text, images and audio available online. AI companies are facing a slew of lawsuits challenging their practice of scraping the web for such training data without paying for it.

According to an AI song detection tool that Deezer rolled out this year, 18% of songs uploaded to its platform each day, or about 20,000 tracks, are now completely AI generated. Just three months earlier, that number was 10%, Lanternier said in a recent interview.

AI has many benefits but it also “creates a lot of questions” for the music industry, Lanternier told The Associated Press. Using AI to make music is fine as long as there’s an artist behind it but the problem arises when anyone, or even a bot, can use it to make music, he said.

Music fraudsters “create tons of songs. They upload, they try to get on playlists or recommendations, and as a result they gather royalties,” he said.

Musicians can’t upload music directly to Deezer or rival platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Music labels or digital distribution platforms can do it for artists they have contracts with, while anyone else can use a “self service” distribution company.

Fully AI-generated music still accounts for only about 0.5% of total streams on Deezer. But the company said it’s “evident” that fraud is “the primary purpose” for these songs because it suspects that as many as seven in 10 listens of an AI song are done by streaming “farms” or bots, instead of humans.

Any AI songs used for “stream manipulation” will be cut off from royalty payments, Deezer said.

AI has been a hot topic in the music industry, with debates swirling around its creative possibilities as well as concerns about its legality.

Two of the most popular AI song generators, Suno and Udio, are being sued by record companies for copyright infringement, and face allegations they exploited recorded works of artists from Chuck Berry to Mariah Carey.

Gema, a German royalty-collection group, is suing Suno in a similar case filed in Munich, accusing the service of generating songs that are “confusingly similar” to original versions by artists it represents, including “Forever Young” by Alphaville, “Daddy Cool” by Boney M and Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”

Major record labels are reportedly negotiating with Suno and Udio for compensation, according to news reports earlier this month.

To detect songs for tagging, Lanternier says Deezer uses the same generators used to create songs to analyze their output.

“We identify patterns because the song creates such a complex signal. There is lots of information in the song,” Lanternier said.

The AI music generators seem to be unable to produce songs without subtle but recognizable patterns, which change constantly.

“So you have to update your tool every day,” Lanternier said. “So we keep generating songs to learn, to teach our algorithm. So we’re fighting AI with AI.”

Fraudsters can earn big money through streaming. Lanternier pointed to a criminal case last year in the U.S., which authorities said was the first ever involving artificially inflated music streaming. Prosecutors charged a man with wire fraud conspiracy, accusing him of generating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and using bots to automatically stream them billions of times, earning at least $10 million.

Chan writes for the Associated Press.

Born and raised in Houston, singer-songwriter Kane Rodriguez grew up surrounded by music. His grandfather, father and brother are musicians, and the sounds of cumbia, banda and norteño were ever present in his house.

The 22-year-old Texican launched his music career by playing with his brothers in a cumbia group in his teens but says he always felt more of a calling toward corridos. He leaned into his musical tastes at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, uploading videos on TikTok of himself singing and playing his guitar.

His first big hit was his 2022 melancholic cover of Aldo Trujillo and Legion RG’s “El Chaman,” which tells the story of an enigmatic character whose emotional availability contradicts his tough-guy appearance. The clip was just him and his guitar in front of a plain background while being filmed at an upward angle — nothing fancy, but his voice and musicality shined.

“I started seeing myself grow and grow, and then a couple videos would go viral, and people asked for more,” Rodriguez said in a recent interview. “I guess people really like how I sound just with the guitar, so I just try to keep recording. … I think TikTok, for me, is a big part [of my success].”

The singer and multi-instrumentalist released his debut studio album, “La Batuta,” in April under Warner Music México.

The LP’s intricate instrumentation works deftly to complement Rodriguez’s gravelly vocals and his swashbuckling lyrics, telling tales of romantic conquests, occasional sadboi reflections and living it up with his compas over the course of 13 tracks.

The “Se Volvieron Locos” artist has been touring the U.S. since his album’s release and was scheduled to perform at Downtown L.A.’s Peacock Theater — in a billing with Chino Pacas, Estevan Plazola, Los Caimanes De Sinaloa, T3R Elemento, El de La Guitarra and Omar Ruiz — but the show was canceled because of the temporary L.A. curfew and the ongoing ICE raids in the city.

Rodriguez fans can rejoice, however, as the singer has a show scheduled for June 20 at El Farallon Event Center in Lynwood. Ahead of his performance, Rodriguez spoke about his rise to fame, collaborating with other artists and his hopes for the future.

This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity.

This is your first studio album. What was the process of recording it like?

It took a while, a cool seven months to get it done. But we picked the right songs and we got the right songwriters. We added different genres, so it took us a while, but I think it was worth it. It’s a big jump from [playing] live to the studio.

How do you think being from Houston informs your work as an artist, and what kind of obligation do you feel to represent the city?

Right now in Houston there’s really not that many corrido artists, so I think being one of the few ones from Houston really helped because I get a lot of support from my hometown.

I grew up in the southeast part of Houston [in an area] called Pasadena, on a little trailer park. It wasn’t nothing too crazy or nothing too bad. I think growing up in a neighborhood like that made me hungrier to make it out of the hood. That just helped me build up.

I think right now Houston needs somebody that could rep them and take them to the next level on the corrido side, and I think I have that responsibility. I want to take that responsibility, and hopefully we can make it bigger.

You’re now on tour and collaborating with big artists. How does it feel to continue to grow in popularity, and how are you managing that emotionally and professionally?

It’s a dream come true. I’m coming from playing in backyards like almost every day, playing 10 hours a day. To play in front of people with big artists — it’s just crazy. It’s really hard to to believe, but I try not to get too excited or get too comfortable. We try to keep our feet on the ground. It’s sort of incredible how everything is building up real fast.

Who are some of the acts you’ve had the chance to work within a professional space that you kind of can’t believe actually happened?

For sure Legado 7 — they’re OGs. I think everybody would listen to them back in 2018, 2019 when I was in high school. So getting the chance to be in the studio and make a hit song with them is even crazier.

And Adrian L Santos also. That fool’s from my family’s hometown over there in Mexico. He’s real poppin’ and a real humble guy. Working with him was one of the best experiences.

Being a musician can feel sometimes, from the outside looking in, like it’s not a “real job,” but getting that cosign from a label changes things. What was your family’s reaction to that moment?

At first they were real iffy, because a lot of people don’t make it out in music. It’s real hard. So they were there, mentally. But the good thing about my parents is they let me do it. They stood back. They’d seen the hunger that I had for it and knew I wouldn’t listen — I’d just keep doing it. Right now they’re real proud, and I’m happy to see them like that.

You’ve got your album out, you’re going on tour — where do you see it going from here? Where are you trying to go?

My vision in the next two years is: I’m trying to sell out stadiums. That’s one of my goals. My biggest dream is to have thousands of people sing my songs.

Los Angeles County prosecutors on Wednesday charged 19 people with conspiring to murder a rapper who allegedly angered a member of the Mexican Mafia, a prison-based syndicate of Latino gang members.

According to a complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accused Mexican Mafia member Manuel “Snuffy” Quintero issued an order in 2022 to kill Nelson Abrego, who performs under the name Swifty Blue.

In the complaint, prosecutors described a sprawling conspiracy that played out over TikTok messages and recorded jail calls, drawing in prisoners from Kern County, jail inmates in downtown Los Angeles and gang members in Paramount, the southeast Los Angeles County city that both Quintero and Abrego call home.

Quintero, 49, was arrested Wednesday and has yet to enter a plea. It wasn’t clear from court records whether he has a lawyer. A longtime member of the Paramount Varrio gang, Quintero has served prison time for assault, manufacturing methamphetamine and false imprisonment, court records show.

Manuel Quintero, shown in a Feb. 15, 2014 photograph from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, has been identified by law enforcement officials as a member of the Mexican Mafia.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation)

On New Year’s Eve in 2022, an alleged subordinate of Quintero, Giuseppe “Clever” Leyva, told an informant he’d notified gang members in Paramount, Compton and downtown L.A. that they had instructions to attack Abrego “on sight,” the complaint says.

Leyva, 34, is now in custody on an unrelated federal case that charges him with selling drugs and guns in Imperial County. He pleaded guilty to trafficking methamphetamine in March and has yet to be sentenced. His attorney in the federal case didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

After the informant asked if “Snuffs is mad” at the rapper, Leyva allegedly said of Abrego: “F— him.”

It’s unclear why Quintero was angry with Abrego, who could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

In a 2024 interview with The Times, the rapper declined to discuss any potential issues with the Mexican Mafia or “jailhouse politics.”

Abrego previously said his music resonates with people because “everybody wants to be a gangster.”

“Whether you’re a lawyer, a police or a kid going to school, everybody wants to be big, bad and tough,” he said in 2024.

Eight months after he spoke to the informant, the complaint says, Leyva warned another person in a TikTok message to stay away from the rapper.

“Let me give u a lil 411 s u won’t get mis guided with the internet,” he wrote, according to the complaint. “With Swifty his career is done.”

“I talked to him tried to guide him but he didn’t listen,” Leyva allegedly continued, adding that now the rapper was “getting his blues” in Men’s Central Jail.

In November 2023, Abrego was jailed on a gun possession charge. Onesimo “Vamps” Gonzalez, held two cells down from the rapper, called his mother and told her to ask an associate if “the one who sings” was “still good,” according to the complaint.

Gonzalez’s mother hung up. When her son called back, she allegedly said, “He’s no good.”

Men’s Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles.

(Al Seib/Al Seib/Los Angeles Times)

Both Gonzalez and his mother are charged in the conspiracy. Gonzalez was already in custody; Dominga Gonzalez, 66, was arrested Wednesday at her Bellflower home, according to a statement from the FBI.

Two days after mother and son spoke, another jail inmate, Jonathan “Dreamer” Quevedo, called a man imprisoned in Kern County who was using a contraband cell phone, according to the complaint.

After mentioning “Swifty Blue,” Quevedo allegedly asked Jacob “Eagle” David if he recalled a “raza rapper” who was “in the shower.”

Prosecutors believed this was a reference to Jaime Brugada Valdez, a rapper known as MoneySign Suede who was stabbed to death in the showers at the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad in 2023.

“The end result should be the same,” allegedly replied David, who was imprisoned for carjacking and robbery.

The next day, the complaint says, David instructed Quevedo to tell the attackers: “Handle that s— with prejudice… You know how that’s like a court term? Well, this s— [is] with prejudice.”

Quevedo allegedly confirmed it was “already in motion.”

When inmates were let out of their cells at 5:50 the next morning to take a shower, Adrian “Slick” Bueno, Andrew “Largo” Shinaia and Jude “Crazy” Valle entered Abrego’s cell, the complaint says. While Michael “Weasel” Ortiz obstructed a nearby camera, Bueno, Shinaia and Valle beat the rapper and “sliced” him, prosecutors charged.

About five hours later, Quevedo called a woman from jail and asked her to tell David in state prison that “old boy got his rap session,” according to the complaint.

“They didn’t really get a good show,” Quevedo allegedly said. “Expect them to be performing in probably the 4000 floor” — another area of the jail — “here soon.”

The attempt on Abrego’s life was unsuccessful, and by March 2024, the complaint says, Leyva told Joshua “Demon” Euan in a TikTok message the rapper was recording a live stream outside his family home “as we speak.”

Euan drove to the house at 1 a.m. and sent Leyva a photograph of a gun in the cup-holder of a car, according to the complaint. “He ain’t here,” he wrote to Leyva.

Later, Euan allegedly told Leyva he sent people to vandalize Abrego’s family home. According to the complaint, he sent photographs of graffiti that read, “Swifty Blue 187,” a reference to the California penal code section for murder.

Euan, 37, eluded arrest Wednesday and remains at large, according to the FBI.

Growing up in a small town in New Hampshire, Nora Princiotti lived two hours away from the nearest mall, so the Scholastic Book Fair was her lifeline to pop culture purchases.

In fall 2003, the then-9-year-old made a beeline to the fair and bought gum, glitter gel pens and “Metamorphosis,” the second studio album from “Lizzie McGuire” star Hilary Duff.

At that time, Duff was “the single most important person in the world to me outside my immediate family,” Princiotti writes in “Hit Girls: Britney, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Women Who Built Pop’s Shiniest Decade.” “This is the first day of the rest of my life.”

This proclamation is no exaggeration. Duff’s CD was Princiotti’s gateway to the vibrant pop music universe of the 2000s — an era that “Hit Girls” thoroughly examines through the lens of some of the decade’s music icons.

The chronological book opens with Britney Spears reigniting industry interest in mainstream pop after the roaring success of her snappy debut single, 1998’s “…Baby One More Time.” Princiotti subsequently devotes chapters to Rihanna’s world-shifting dance music and savvy use of technology; the scrappy (and occasionally bumpy) pop-punk odyssey of Avril Lavigne; and the complicated relationship between indie rock and pop, exemplified by “American Idol” sweetheart Kelly Clarkson.

She also reexamines with a much kinder eye the music of Ashlee Simpson, whose career cratered after she was caught lip-syncing on “Saturday Night Live,” and then-tabloid fixtures Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton.

Princiotti, a staff writer at the Ringer who covers pop music and the NFL and co-hosts the podcast “Every Single Album,” says she was certain which artists needed to be included in “Hit Girls.”

“I had the idea a little bit before the Y2K resurgence that we’ve experienced over the last few years,” she says. “But it was trickling into the ecosystem. And I had this very clear idea that there are all these disparate segments of the pop star world and the version of that world that existed in the 2000s. … Even though that music is different, it all fit together to me really obviously, because I was the fan.”

Princiotti augments her rigorous research with colorful memories from this era, including chatting on AIM (her handle was mangorainbow99), digging up Taylor Swift rarities on YouTube and hearing Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” at a high school dance.

Finding a cohesive story of the 2000s was more challenging. “The question that I had to answer [in the book] was, ‘Other than the audience — and other than having this feeling inside me that a book that covered the rise of Britney Spears also needed to cover ‘Rumors’ by Lindsay Lohan and also needed to cover Ashlee Simpson, because that’s how I lived it — what actually ties these artists together?’”

That uniting thread is Spears. The book deftly traces the parallels between the evolution of Spears’ career and how the decade itself unfolded — from the way her music broadened beyond teen pop (e.g. the electro-disco “Toxic”) to the negative impact the intense tabloid scrutiny had on her mental health.

“She is the artist of the 2000s,” Princiotti says. “If you think of the aughts as a whole, it starts with Britney, [and] she manages to keep it going. There’s so many things that I think just come back to that one woman.”

Princiotti also concludes that the female pop stars of the 2000s helped legitimize pop music.

“There’s something about what all of these women — because it is women in the book — did to chip away at the idea that pop is disposable and unserious music, that somehow got us to this place where it is more often recognized as a serious art form, something that moves culture [and] is worthy of real, deep criticism,” she says.

“You’re seeing every day where there are thesis-driven projects about Taylor Swift and the music of Taylor Swift, and [people asking,] ‘What does she mean to society?’ and ‘What does she mean to culture? The thing that struck me was, ‘Oh, we didn’t have that. It wasn’t like that — and now it is.’”

“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Nora Princiotti says of Taylor Swift.

(Ballantine Books)

Given the book’s narrow time frame — “Hit Girls” starts just before Y2K and ends in the early 2010s — the book also takes a different spin on the careers of Swift and fellow superstar Beyoncé.

The latter was newly emerging as a solo artist with 2003’s “Dangerously in Love” after breaking through with Destiny’s Child. Princiotti argues that Beyoncé’s success on the pop charts opened doors for hip-hop and R&B artists, which had a seismic impact on culture as a whole.

Although these genres had started making massive inroads into the pop charts and mainstream music starting in the late 1990s, Princiotti observed in her research that magazine and tabloid covers still largely prioritized white artists.

“While there was a clear relationship between the interest in an artist like Britney Spears’s life and the interest in her music, that feedback loop did not exist for a lot of Black artists,” she writes. “Which meant that hip-hop could dominate popular music while being shut out of the elite celebrity spaces that promote true pop stardom.”

Swift, meanwhile, was an earnest country-pop wunderkind building her fan base one MySpace comment at a time — and even then happened to be a genius at understanding the psychology of fandom and the online habits of her followers.

“I came away with an appreciation of just how early in her career she laid the blueprint of how she would develop her fan base,” Princiotti says. “When it’s all said and done, we will look back at her artistic legacy, yes, as the songwriter of a generation, yes, as the poet laureate of young women.”

“But I do think that the legacy of Taylor Swift is going to start with the communities of people that she brought together within her fan base — and how powerful and sometimes scary and how mobilized that fan community has become, and how she built it to be that way.”

As with Swift, many of the artists in “Hit Girls” remain popular today. Lavigne and Beyoncé are currently on major tours; Clarkson has found success with her daytime talk show; Rihanna is a billionaire business mogul thanks to her brands Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty. And Duff, who now has four kids, starred in the TV show “Younger” and, most recently, the short-lived “How I Met Your Father.”

Near the end of “Hit Girls,” Princiotti explores the ongoing influence of these artists and this decade — from the current crop of young pop stars led by Olivia Rodrigo and nostalgia festivals like When We Were Young to fashion trends such as dark denim, “going-out” tops and butterfly hair clips.

Princiotti herself maintains a love of pop stars and offers solid theories about why this specific era remains such a fascination: a heady mix of nostalgia, second chances and perspective.

“For people like me who lived through at least some of it, it’s the ability to go back a little bit older and wiser,” she says. “We can take the best of it and then reexamine the worst of it with more open eyes. And there’s something to me that’s very satisfying about that.”

The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32.

The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter’s painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis’ accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show’s three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed.

That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” which hangs alone in the show’s entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.’s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell.

In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting’s otherwise neutral palette. It’s easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich.

Noah Davis, “40 Acres and a Unicorn,” 2007, acrylic and gouache on canvas

(Anna Arca)

The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn’t last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn’s back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he’s going to ride it forward.

Perhaps the canvas’ most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace.

Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis’ lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in “40 Acres and a Unicorn” recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London’s Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis’ unusual exploratory strategies.

Titled “Nobody,” a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich’s radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915.

Noah Davis, “Nobody,” 2008, house paint on linen

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles)

The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich’s art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,” most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy.

“Nobody” weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It’s one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency.

Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis’ choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker’s often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg’s hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis’ torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip.

That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. (“Nobody” almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — “somebody” — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind “Mary Jane,” a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet’s “The Railway,” is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms.

Noah Davis, “Mary Jane,” 2008, oil and acrylic on canvas

(Kerry McFate)

So is the forest of “The Missing Link 6,” where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis’ intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise.

Art history is threaded throughout Davis’ work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran’s celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout “1975 (8),” where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool.

The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, “The Missing Link 4,” has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise.

For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction.

Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.” People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In “1975 (8),” the title’s date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court’s appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled.

Noah Davis, “The Missing Link 4,” 2013, oil on canvas

(Robert Wedemeyer)

The 2013 painting’s composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis’ mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in.

Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist’s metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we’re left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna’s Italian Renaissance painting of a “Dead Christ” or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha.

The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, “Imitation of Life.” The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s.

Not all of Davis’ paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of “Maury” with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art’s messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving.

Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist’s reputation. At any rate it’s just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis’ abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show’s reality is better.

Noah Davis, “Imitation of Jeff Koons,” 2013, mixed media

(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)

SALT LAKE CITY — The 39-year-old man shot and killed at a weekend “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City was a successful fashion designer and former “Project Runway” contestant who devoted his life to celebrating artists from the Pacific Islands.

Arthur Folasa Ah Loo was killed when a man who was believed to be part of a peacekeeping team for the protest shot at a person brandishing a rifle at demonstrators, accidentally striking Ah Loo. Ah Loo later died at a hospital, authorities said.

Detectives don’t yet know why the alleged rifleman pulled out a weapon or ran from the peacekeepers, but they charged him with murder and accused him of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said at a Sunday news conference.

The “self-taught” fashion designer from Samoa, known to many as Afa, was deeply connected to his culture and community, according to the website Creative Pacific, a nonprofit organization he co-founded to support artists from the Pacific Islands. Ah Loo’s designs, which often featured colorful geometric patterns, were inspired by his Samoan heritage.

Ah Loo leaves behind his wife and two young children, according to a GoFundMe for his family that raised over $100,000 in 48 hours.

He was a founder of Utah Pacific Fashion, an organization that celebrates artistic heritage from Oceania. Recently, he designed a garment for the star of the Disney Channel animated movie “Moana 2,” Hawaiian actor Auliʻi Cravalho.

Cravalho wore the outfit to the film’s red carpet premiere in Hawaii in November. She said in an interview with Vogue at the time that the design combined traditional and modern aesthetics from her culture. Ah Loo strung individual white dovetail shells into a cape-like shape reminiscent of Hawaiian ʻahu ʻula — a feather cloak worn by ancient Hawaiian royalty, according to Vogue.

“This was the first time I was so active in helping to design a custom look, and Afa surpassed what I had envisioned,” Cravalho told the magazine at the time.

LEAD ARTIST wore down Dancing Gemini in the final strides to deny Roger Teal a fairytale Lockinge win at Newbury.

Teal’s well-backed 2-1 favourite headed the eventual winner with a furlong to run, but the petrol tank began to empty and John Gosden’s runner got back up close home.

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It was heartbreak for nice guy Teal, who was seeking just his third Group 1 win, but he took it on the chin and is up for another crack at the winner.

There was promise, too, from Richard Hannon’s Classic winner Rosallion, who was a few lengths away in third on his first run for nearly a year.

But it was Gosden who had the last laugh, winning a Group 1 just 10 days after sacking Kieran Shoemark as his stable jockey.

He will no doubt feel his decision has been vindicated after Oisin Murphy steered home 17-2 shot Lead Artist by a neck, a result Gosden admitted he didn’t see coming.

He said: “It was a very strong Lockinge and if you’d asked me beforehand I’d have said we’d be in the first three, I didn’t expect him to win.

“He is a lovely horse and he’s won over nine furlongs before, so Ryan came at us from off the pace and used up petrol and we’ve just been able to get back past him.

“We’ll go to the Queen Anne at Royal Ascot now where I expect we’ll meet several of these horses again, and it should be a hell of a race.”

Dancing Gemini will definitely be there, and Teal said he won’t duck and dive his way through the season with his stable star.

The Lambourn trainer said last month he wanted to emulate last season’s top miler Charyn, and so far the four-year-old is sticking to the script.

Teal said: “We said we were going to try and do a Charyn and he was second in the Lockinge last year, so it’s not the end of the world. We’ve run better than Charyn did, he ran great.

“Ryan said the ground was probably a bit lively for him, it was the quickest ground he’s been on.

“We don’t duck and dive, we’ve only gone down a neck and he has put the rest of the field to bed so we’ll go to the Queen Anne now.

“It was a bit of an awkward draw, we had to take him back further than we wanted to. He’s gone down on his sword and he’s a Group 1 winner waiting to happen.”

Hannon was a bag of nerves before Rosallion’s long overdue return to action, but he was pleased with the colt after such a long lay-off.

He said: “It was a very good run, he was pretty fit coming here but there is nothing like race fitness.

“I’ve no doubt he’ll improve loads for that, so we will go again and head to Ascot.”

L.A. has long been a beacon for the arts. So it’s only fitting that “Forever,” the Netflix series that showrunner Mara Brock Akil envisioned as “a love story within a love letter to Los Angeles,” celebrates local artists.

The Midcentury Modern home of Justin Edwards, one half of the couple whose love story informs the show — an adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel — is flooded with work from Black Angelenos.

“Local Los Angeles artists were important for me to put into the sets, and the Edwards family home, specifically, being collectors of Los Angeles art,” Akil, an L.A. native, told The Times.

Production designer Suzuki Ingerslev and set decorator Ron Franco are also Angelenos, which they said contributed to the cultural competency of their work on “Forever.” Although the writers’ strike made elements of their jobs difficult, both agreed that their experience on “Forever” was uniquely positive, in large part because of their curation of the art in the Edwards’ home.

“Sometimes art can really make a space and it makes a statement and it tells you who the character is,” said Ingerslev. “In this case, you really knew who the Edwards were — they curated art and they cared about where they live — and I thought that really made a big difference through the art and through the furnishings as well.”

Franco agreed, saying he had fun sourcing artwork from Black artists that matched Ingerslev’s color palette and also contained themes pertinent to the show.

“A lot of times the shows that you see now are just headshots and everything that we put up becomes a background piece that’s kind of blurred,” he said. “We are very lucky in that this camera really opened up, and you follow everybody through both of the [permanent] sets and you really feel a lot.”

Audiences noticed their effort, said Ingerslev, who’s been bombarded with questions about the artworks in “Forever,” which was just renewed for a second season.

Here are five local Black artists whose work are featured in the show.

Noah Humes, 31

Humes cites a book about artist and writer Romare Bearden that he received from Akil when he was 6 years old as the foundation for his worldview as an artist. (Humes’ mother was a casting director on “Girlfriends,” the 2000s TV series created by Akil, whom Humes calls “Auntie Mara.”)

“I look back [and] that’s what helped form and shape my energy with how I approach the canvas, wanting to tell the story of my community and different things that I see — social moments, political moments, historical remnants,” said the figurative painter.

Humes is drawn to bright colors that capture the vibrancy of his hometown of L.A. “Her” and “Mid City,” which feature prominently in the Edwards family’s media room in “Forever,” depict solitary figures against yellow backgrounds. The foliage in “Her” grows in Humes’ mother’s frontyard. “Mid City,” the neighborhood where Humes was raised, features the red-crowned parrots that wake him up every morning.

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1. “Her” (Noah Humes) 2. “Mid City” (Noah Humes)

“I felt inclined to represent and show a certain subtlety of ‘We’re here, we’re centered, we’re always a focal point of unfortunate times, but also we can overcome things and become stronger than we have been,’” Humes said of the twin paintings, which he completed in 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the national racial reckoning that followed.

Humes also credits his neighbors in L.A., a “system of Black excellence,” for positively influencing his artistry. Animator Lyndon Barrois (“Happy Feet,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks”) is his mentor, and members of the hip-hop collective Odd Future, including siblings Syd and Travis “Taco” Bennett, as well as Thebe Kgositsile — who uses the stage name Earl Sweatshirt — are his childhood friends.

Francis ‘Tommy’ Mitchell, 41

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

Mitchell has been drawing for as long as he can remember, but it was a high school classmate pointing out the permanent nature of a ballpoint pen that led to his aha moment.

“You can erase graphite, you can paint over acrylic and oil,” said the Baltimore- and L.A.-based artist. “Ink is one of those things that I just think of, no pun intended here, it’s forever.”

Mitchell’s portraits feature individuals shaded with ink set against monochromatic acyrlic background. Because it is extremely time-consuming, most artists working in ink compose smaller, more intimate images, said Mitchell. In contrast, his portraits are huge. If the work were hung on the walls of a museum, the viewer may never notice the figure’s skin was drawn in ink and not paint.

“Going to museums or galleries as a kid, I would see these amazing European paintings, and I’m like, ‘Wow, these are amazing,’ but there’s no one that looks like me,” he said, of his desire to focus on portraiture.

“Francis R. of City College”

(Francis “Tommy” Mitchell)

The subject of “Francis R. of City College,” Mitchell’s painting featured in the Edwards’ dining room in “Forever,” is modeled after his father. For Mitchell, the work represents a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Making the painting in his Baltimore studio less than a mile away from City College, where his father attended high school, felt like a full-circle moment.

Seeing the work on television only adds to the significance.

“One of my goals is to always promote those who work in ink because it’s not a traditional medium,” he said, pointing to tattoo artists Jun Cha and Mister Cartoon as inspirations. “So for it to be seen on television, it lends credence to, ‘Hey, we’re doing something special as well.’”

Edwin Marcelin, 50

Marcelin’s first job as a teenager was at Stüssy, a Laguna Beach streetwear brand founded in the early 1980s. Minimalist graphic design, a trademark of Stüssy as well as brands Supreme and Undefeated, has always informed his art.

“Everything usually is about engagement, confrontation or affection,” said Marcelin. “Those are things that I tend to generate towards by using very minimal strokes.”

During his time at the California College of the Arts — then called the California College of Arts and Crafts — Marcelin was drawn to Bauhaus, a German school of art that melds functionality and design. Marcelin applies those abstract Bauhaus fundamentals and adds the element of movement.

“If it ain’t moving, it ain’t me,” said the L.A.-born-and-raised artist.

Marcelin said his emphasis on motion lends itself well to the screen — his piece “Clarity,” a dynamic painting of Michael Jordan taking flight, hangs in basketball-loving Justin’s bedroom in “Forever.”

“I think Black folks in Los Angeles are dynamic, so I try to keep dynamic images, people doing things, not standing there, and I think that translates to film very well,” said Marcelin.

“Clarity” is part of a 23-painting series titled “Black Jesus.” Each image in the series, which took Marcelin about five months to complete in its entirety, references Jordan, who Marcelin said is disappearing visually from pop culture. Case in point: He said his 19- and 16-year-old sons may recognize the Jumpman logo, but they wouldn’t instantly recognize an image of Jordan himself.

“There’ll be more basketball players, but I wanted to do something that was completely abstract representing him because he has so many moments that are fantastically beautiful,” said Marcelin.

Corey Pemberton, 34

With a background in collage, glassblowing and painting, Pemberton’s large mixed-media works — of a man singing into his toothbrush in the bathroom, a naked woman smoking marijuana in bed, a man devouring a plate of his mother’s food — are both intimate and mundane.

“At a certain point, I turned an interest to those who had been marginalized by society in some way, whether it was because of the color of their skin or their gender expression or their socioeconomic status, and developed an interest in depicting those people in a way that both celebrated them but also gave them some space to just exist,” he said.

Such themes of ownership and viewership are etched into Pemberton’s work. For example, he depicts the space and objects around his figures in vivid detail. Objects are important, he said, because they carry memories of “the people who created them or gave them to us or lived with them before us.”

Similarly, his painting “The Collector” celebrates “a young black person who’s making a concerted effort to own and conserve our culture, which is so often falling into the hands of people who don’t care about us on a deeper level.” And in many of Pemberton’s pieces, miniature renderings of his previous works can be found on the walls of his subjects’ homes.

“I think when you see a work presented that way, it sort of brings a heightened level of importance,” said Pemberton.

“I Used to Cook More”

(Corey Pemberton)

So it’s doubly significant that Pemberton’s work is on display in the wealthy Edwards’ home in “Forever.” The art in question, “I Used to Cook More,” can be found in the family’s kitchen and depicts Pemberton’s friend and fellow collector Jared Culp eating out of a white takeout container.

“We were talking about all of the takeout that we now consume as busy young Black creatives in L.A. trying to claw our way to the top of something,” said Pemberton.

But success in the art world has been easier to come by in L.A., where he relocated to after six years in rural North Carolina, said Pemberton.

“When I moved to Los Angeles, not only was I selling work but I was selling work to people with shared experience,” he said. “I was getting feedback that not only were these works that people wanted to live with, but they were works that people saw themselves reflected in, and that I was doing something important or meaningful to more people than just myself.”

Charles A. Bibbs, 77

Bibbs worked in corporate America for 25 years before becoming an artist full time. For Bibbs, art — in a crosshatching style, in his case — is all about communicating universal ideas.

“I mix that crosshatching with different colors and paint, and it’s just one layer on top of another until you get your desired effect,” Bibbs said of his “spontaneous” way of creating that’s “almost like magic sometimes.”

Like many Black artists, Bibbs chose his subject matter out of necessity. As a young man, he encountered few Black artists, yet innately understood the power of positive images of the Black experience, especially in the home.

“It’s a very honorable occupation because you’re giving people a part of you that is changing their lives in an aesthetic way,” he said. “All of those things play into people proud to be who they are.”

“Daddy’s Love”

(Charles A. Bibbs)

In “Forever,” viewers may catch a glimpse of “Daddy’s Love,” a drawing of Bibbs’ father and Bibbs and his sister as children, on the wall outside Justin’s bedroom. But this isn’t the first time his work has made it to the screen. Bibbs is credited with the Black Madonna artwork on the honey jar central to the plot of the 2008 film “The Secret Life of Bees.” He said the experience underscored the importance of art, which he said touches the “subconscious mind.”

“[My work] was part of the presentation of the movie and in some way or another may have helped them understand what that movie was really all about.”

Texas psych-Americana band Lord Buffalo has canceled its upcoming European tour after it claims that drummer Yamal Said was taken off a plane by border patrol agents on Monday.

“We are heartbroken to announce we have to cancel our upcoming European tour. Our drummer, who is a Mexican citizen and lawful permanent resident of the United States (green card holder) was forcibly removed from our flight to Europe by Customs and Border Patrol at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport on Monday May 12,” the band said in a Wednesday social media post.

According to the group, Said has not been released from custody.

“We are currently working with an immigration lawyer to find out more information and to attempt to secure his release,” the band continued in its post. “We are devastated to cancel this tour, but we are focusing all of our energy and resources on Yamal’s safety and freedom. We are hopeful that this is a temporary setback and that it could be safe for us to reschedule this tour in the future.”

Lord Buffalo later updated the message to announce that Said has secured legal representation.

According to a CBP spokesperson, Said was detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection while aboard a May 12 flight heading outside of the U.S. due to allegedly having an active arrest warrant. He was subsequently turned over to local law enforcement.

The Times has reached out to Lord Buffalo for comment.

The Texas band is not the first musical act to claim they have needed to postpone or cancel shows due to immigration issues in recent months.

In April, British singer FKA twigs announced in an Instagram post that she had to cancel series of concerts for the month in North America — including a slot at Coachella 2025 — due to “ongoing visa issues.”

Earlier this month, Chicago’s Michelada Fest, a Spanish-language music festival that had acts scheduled from across the globe, was canceled due to concerns over artists’ visas.

“Due to the uncertainty surrounding artist visas and the rapidly changing political climate, we’re no longer able to guarantee the full experience we had dreamed up for you with all your favorite artists,” the festival’s organizers explained in a statement. “Although we tried to push through, it became clear that we wouldn’t be able to deliver the full lineup as planned.”

The organizers would go on to write that, as an independent outfit, Michelada Fest “can’t afford to take on a big risk with so much uncertainty ahead.”

Grupo Firme, Anitta, Danny Ocean, Tokischa and Luis R. Conriquez were scheduled to perform at the July festival.