I took the kids to see an exhibit yesterday called Art in the Streets. It was housed in the Museum of Contemporary Art's downtown gallery in Little Tokyo.
The exhibit was outrageous -- colorful, iconic, iconoclastic, disturbing, exhilarating, fascinating, creepy, beautiful and above all, stimulating. The irony of wandering around an enclosed space with displays of graffiti and installations of actual subway cars and dirty, city corners was not lost on me. I've always felt slightly uncomfortable in museums, both enamored of the art and the history and a bit repelled by the display of temporal things. This exhibit had some cool documentation of social movements in southern California -- skateboarders, Venice beach, some pretty hard-core photography of the down and out. I'll never look at street art the same way again.
Take a stroll:
