An Art Show Pushes Boundaries
California Today
Friday: A museum exhibition in L.A. shows the work of incarcerated artists. Also: Warming temperatures, and a tiny chef.
new names
The letter-size pencil drawing on view at the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles shows two prison inmates in a locker room, wrapped in a furtive embrace.
“Familiar acts are beautiful through love,” the script caption reads.
Explicit without being pornographic, the drawing is one of many in the exhibition “On the Inside” that breaches one of the strongest taboos in a society that incarcerates more people than any other: the celebration of consensual sex in the prison system.
The artist is identified only as Stevie S., a person who is currently incarcerated in the United States and identifies as L.G.B.T.Q. The piece is titled “Acceptance.”
“On the Inside” opened during Pride month in Los Angeles in June, and might have fallen under the radar this summer for visitors and California art lovers. But the show packs an undeniable punch, pushing boundaries in both subject matter and curation. Prison art is usually associated with political prisoners, as well as the injustices and dangers of being incarcerated. Sexuality for its own sake is rarely a focus.
“You’re technically not allowed to have sex, but people in prison are. The institution deals with the rules but not the reality,” said Tatiana von Furstenberg, the L.A.-based filmmaker and producer who teamed up with Black and Pink, an online L.G.B.T.Q. inmate advocacy organization, to create the exhibition. It had its premiere in New York in 2016 and runs until Sept. 8 in Los Angeles.
“All the art is pretty much on letter-size paper. Those are the only materials available: pencils, Bic pens. That to me says it all,” she said. “That speaks to the resilience and the power of the human spirit in every way.”
Viewers can send Stevie S. and all the other artists in the show personal text messages, deliverable with a numerical code, to a telephone number listed on the opening wall. Every two weeks, the organizers of “On the Inside” print the messages and mail them to the incarcerated artists. It’s a nod to the pen-pal tradition of prison culture in the United States, which is increasingly being seen as a harm-reducing salve for those behind bars.
The ability to send messages to inmates adds an unusual and invigorating layer of intimacy between the artist and the viewer at the Craft Contemporary exhibit.
“People are really good,” Ms. von Furstenberg said. “It’s very personal.”
Here’s what else we’re following
— The push to teach ethnic studies in California’s schools faces a fundamental dilemma: Whose stories should be told? And how? [The New York Times]
— A temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius has become a kind of marker of extreme climate change. [The Washington Post]
— in almost a dozen cities in the Bay Area and Monterey County this week. [The Mercury News]
— About a year after Democratic groups called Representative Devin Nunes a “fake farmer,” He did not list any income from it. [The Fresno Bee]
— State . But they’re trying. [The New York Times]
— Rose Pak was a tireless advocate for San Francisco’s long-planned Central Subway. efforts to name the Chinatown station after her. [The San Francisco Chronicle]
— The Fresno Grizzlies canceled the World Taco Eating Championship after at the ballpark on Tuesday night. [The Fresno Bee]
California environments
— A bungalow in Belmont Shore with four bedrooms, two bathrooms and an upgraded kitchen. In Pennsylvania, you can get a secluded house designed by the Apple store architect, Peter Bohlin. [The New York Times]
— Retirement-age shoppers elbow one another to get to the Persian cucumbers. The foot traffic in one week — 200,000 people walk through the store — is enough for 10 nights at Staples Center. [The Los Angeles Times]
— If you missed it, here’s what that (Good or bad? Depends on how you feel about “influencers” and Fire Sauce.) [Los Angeles Magazine]
— From Hawthorne’s Cockatoo Inn to the Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood, [The New York Times]
— You know about how Johnny Cash performed at Folsom Prison in 1968. , and now the band has announced an album and documentary about its performance, and about the prison’s shifting population. [Capital Public Radio]
And Finally …
Tejal Rao
The first time I met the up-and-coming Instagram star known as the Tiny Chef, he was sitting in the palm of his creator Rachel Larsen, an animator you might know from her work on “Coraline” and “Isle of Dogs.”
The chef, known for his lispy, singsong, utterly joyful cooking videos, stood about six inches tall. He was a pale fuzzy green with a big round belly and long arms, and though I was visiting the Glendale studio as a reporter, I wanted to squeal, pick him up and run away. I didn’t!
I reported a story with Ms. Larsen and her team, Ozlem Akturk and Adam Reid, and tried to understand the Tiny Chef’s meteoric rise to fame, as well as our collective obsession with seeing ordinary foods replicated in miniature.
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