L.A. Art Weekend Highlighted City's Bustling Art Scene

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L.A. Art Weekend Royal/T maid café opening

Despite what naysayers might tell you about the city and its cultural offerings (I'm looking at you, San Franciscans), Los Angeles has one of the most vibrant art scenes in the country; one need only drive down La Cienega in Culver City on a Saturday night to see the crowds taking advantage of the city's offerings. Rarely, though, does the scene see the solidarity brought by this month's first Los Angeles Art Weekend. Not only were the regular gallery-goers out in abundance, but the weekend seemed to draw large numbers of newcomers, perhaps drawn by the exuberance and accessibility of the scheduled events.

Art Weekend came about through collaboration with New York-based Black Frame and Los Angeles-based ForYourArt, and in many ways seemed an extension of the latter organization's recent work mapping and blogging about the city's cultural institutions. Events ranged from a release for Phaidon's new Jorge Pardo monograph in a bar space reinvented by the artist himself to Opening Ceremony's packed dance party at the Echoplex in celebration of the weekend and their local store expansion. While parties certainly lured in the crowds, the most interesting events were the ones that added new layers to the local art scene.

New York-based Storefront for Art and Architecture opened a pop-up store on Sunset; it seemed that the Soviet Union and Los Angeles have a bit in common. The theme of the exhibit (up until May) is titled "Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed," and consists entirely of photographs taken by the French photographer Frederic Chaubin in various states of the former Soviet Union. It would not be a huge leap for a viewer to walk into the exhibit and mistake the photographs for exaggerated Lautners or Neutras or Lloyd Wrights of this city. As Joseph Grima, the curator of the exhibit, put it, "We thought that bringing the project here would have an interesting resonance for the Los Angeles architectural community." If the packed pop-up space was any indication, the crowds seemed taken with the refreshing combination of art and architecture.

In a similarly packed space a night later, Art Weekend saw another opening of a rather more curious bent. Royal/T opened in Culver City in conjunction with the weekend's events as a permanent new art space, restaurant, and store, on a vacant stretch of Washington Boulevard. The first "maid café" in the United States entails Japanese waitresses dressed in maid costumes in a cavernous space surrounded by glassed in areas of art from artists as diverse as Yoshitomo Nara and John Currin as part of the current exhibit. The crowds, as might be expected, looked equal parts baffled and delighted by the juxtapositions of the space.

Overall, the success of the first Art Weekend seems encouraging in its ability to successfully introduce newcomers to the scene here, while maintaining the quality of events that art fans have come to expect.