Culture of Los Angeles

The Eastern Columbia Building is a well known Art Deco building in Downtown Los Angeles

Los Angeles has many different types of architectural styles scattered throughout the city and nearby satellite cities. Los Angeles has a rich, diverse history of architectural works, having been known throughout professional architectural circles as a testbed for architecture. The case study houses in particular revolutionized residential architecture. Architects such as Richard Neutra, Jack Charney, Pierre Koenig, John Lautner and Frank Lloyd Wright all have important works in the city. Some of the different types of architectural styles throughout the city and metropolitan area are mission revival, Spanish colonial revival, craftsman, Norman French provincial, French chateau, English Tudor, beaux arts, art deco, and streamline moderne.

In downtown Los Angeles, there are several buildings constructed in the Art Deco style. In recognition of this heritage, the recently built Metropolitan Transit Authority building incorporates subtle Art Deco characteristics.

Modern architecture in the city ranges from the works of pioneering African-American architect Paul Williams, to the iconoclastic deconstructivist forms of Frank Gehry, a long-time resident of the city. Charles Eames and his wife Ray Eames designed famous chairs and other domestic goods.

The plein air movement of impressionistic landscape painting found early adherents in the Los Angeles area. Instrumental in the development of the genre was the California Art Club (est. 1909) that provided numerous exhibitions and lectures. The art form continues to be recognized as a signature style of California art. Much of the energy in the city's art scene in the 1945 to 1980 stretch came from private collectors, artists' collectives, print shops, art schools and especially from commercial galleries.[10]

In the 1960s, Corita Kent, then known as Sister Mary Corita of Immaculate Heart College, created bright, bold serigraphs carrying the messages of love and peace.

See List of public art in Los Angeles

The oldest known public artwork in Los Angeles is the 1900 sculpture of a United States soldier by architects S. M. Goddard and Kilpatrick (no known sculptor), part of the , located in Pershing Square.[11] The 1926 Central Library designed by Bertram Goodhue was an architectural masterpiece incorporating murals and sculptures throughout, notably four rotunda murals by Dean Cornwell depicting California history.[12]

Artworks in the Central Library's rotunda include this 1932 mural The Era of Discovery by Dean Cornwell

Los Angeles is known for its murals, and many outdoor public art murals have been painted throughout the 20th century by early Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano art movement took a strong hold in Los Angeles. Much of the work produced followed the Mexican muralist tradition of sending potent social messages. Works produced in this era included East Los Streetscapers, Judy Baca and others. Chicano arts in Los Angeles also gave rise to the internationally renowned Self Help Graphics & Art, known for its Corita Kent-influenced serigraphs and its annual Día de los Muertos festival.

Public Art in the downtown area of Los Angeles during the 1970s was characterized by large abstract sculptures such as Herbert Bayer's Double Ascension (1973), and Alexander Calder's Four Arches (1973)[13] installed with the commercial redevelopment of Bunker Hill. In 1989 the City passed an ordinance requiring developers to contribute one percent of the cost of construction of new buildings to a public art fund. The resulting funds for public art and public art programs in the 1990s, coupled with substantial subway and light rail transit in the 1990s, created public art installations in new rail stations and public spaces throughout the city and beyond.

Chris Burden's Urban Light (2008) in front of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wilshire Boulevard attracts hundreds of visitors daily, has been featured in several films as an iconic image of Los Angeles, and has become a tourist destination and popular public space.[14]

See List of museums in Los Angeles

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

There are 841 museums and art galleries in Los Angeles County.[15] In fact, Los Angeles has more museums per capita than any other city in the world.[15] Some of the notable museums are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (the largest art museum in the Western United States[16]), the Getty Center (part of the larger J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's wealthiest art institution[17]), the Battleship Iowa, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. A significant number of art galleries are located on Gallery Row, and tens of thousands attend the monthly Downtown Art Walk there.[18]

In 1943, a community-run arts association in Pasadena merged with the better funded Pasadena Art Institute and moved into what is now the home of the Pacific Asia Museum. Renamed the Pasadena Art Museum, it organized some of the most adventurous and cutting edge shows of contemporary art in the region, notably, an early Pop art show in 1962, and a Marcel Duchamp retrospective in 1963. Although the city had a long tradition of visual arts supported by private collectors and galleries, Los Angeles did not have a comprehensive museum of art until 1965, when LACMA opened its doors. At about the same time, La Cienega Boulevard became home to many art galleries, most notably Ferus, featuring works by artists who lived in the area, Dwan Gallery, and Riko Mizuno Gallery.[10] Although Andy Warhol was based in New York, the famous "soup cans" were first exhibited at Ferus. A local exponent of pop art was Ed Ruscha, some of whose work was representational, others consisted of simple slogans or mottoes which were usually humorous, being so far out of the context where such statements would normally appear. An example of this is Nice Hot Vegetables Larry Bell, for example, explored the interaction of a sculpture to its environment, demonstrating that the boundaries are usually not entirely clear. David Hockney, an English immigrant, produced figurative paintings set in idyllic Southern California locales, such as swimming pools in the bright sunlight, belonging to modernist houses. Although these paintings are representational, they seem to be composed of small color patches, somewhat like collages. Finish Fetish—a style that emphasized gleaming surfaces—and Light and Space—art about perception—were other Ferus-bred styles that allowed L.A. to distinguish itself from the rest of the art world. It was during this period that the contemporary arts scene in Los Angeles began to command the attention of collectors and museum directors internationally.

Some of the most respected art museums in the world can be found in Los Angeles. They include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Broad, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Norton Simon Museum, the Huntington Library art collection and botanical gardens, and the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is known for its expansive collections of contemporary art- the Museum of Contemporary Art has three separate incarnations: the Geffen Contemporary, for larger installation pieces by more renowned artists, the MOCA Downtown, its standard collection, and the Pacific Palisades, a large, multi-purpose building in modernist style that houses offices as well as stores and showrooms for contemporary graphic design, architecture, and interior design. Other smaller art museums in the city include the Craft Contemporary, the California African American Museum, and many sculpture gardens throughout the city, including those at the American Jewish University and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. Private art collections that are open to the public are the ones by Eli Broad and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation. The growth of Los Angeles as an art capital was first comprehensively documented in a series of exhibitions partially funded and spearheaded by the Getty, but held at all major museums during the Fall of 2011. "The exhibitions, and the events that accompanied them as part of "Pacific Standard Time" demonstrated the pivotal role played by Southern California in national and international artistic movements since the middle of the 20th century. LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes (The culture square and arts museum) a Mexican-American museum and cultural center opened in April 2011.[19] The museum contains interactive exhibits designed by experience design expert Tali Krakowsky such as a reconstruction of a 1920s Main Street.[20] The museum shares the stories of the history, cultures, values, and traditions of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and all Latinos in Los Angeles and Southern California. Art institutions from Santa Barbara to San Diego are joining together to create programs that highlighted the region's vibrant artistic scene." Culver City's La Cienega Boulevard features one of the highest concentrations of fine art galleries and studios in Southern California. The trendy bohemian neighborhoods of Silver Lake and Los Feliz are home to numerous smaller galleries, showcasing local or underground art. Gallery Row downtown is known for its small DIY galleries, such as The Smell, which doubles as a punk and noise music venue.

Los Angeles County is home to three professional art colleges, Art Center College of Design, founded on 1930 in downtown Los Angeles as the Art Center School, Otis College of Art and Design, which was founded in 1917 as Otis Art Institute, and California Institute of the Arts, founded in 1961 as successor of the Chouinard Art Institute.

Hollywood is a neighborhood in the central region of Los Angeles, California. This ethnically diverse, densely populated neighborhood is notable as the home of the U.S. film industry, including several of its historic studios, and its name has come to be a shorthand reference for the industry and the people in it.

Although film production in Los Angeles remains the most important center for the medium, Hollywood has become more international, thus it faces increasing competition, however, from other parts of the United States and from the Canadian cities of Vancouver, British Columbia and Toronto, Ontario as well as numerous other countries around the world such as Romania and Australasia that provide Hollywood with lower production costs. The phenomenon of entertainment companies running away to other locales in search of lower labor and production costs is known as "runaway production" although the trend shows signs of reversing due to the state's current Film & Television Tax Credit Program administered by the California Film Commission.

The motion picture and TV industries have helped create the image that defines Los Angeles across the world. Many tourists flock to see Hollywood-related landmarks such as the Walk of Fame and the Hollywood Sign.

Los Angeles has provided fertile territory for writers of fiction with crime fiction being a common genre for stories about the city. During the 20th century, fiction portraying the city has highlighted the complexity of the city and the discontinuities between its public image and the reality of living there. The size and scale of the city have also provided crime writers with a suitably complex city against which to set their stories. Works that explore life in the city include:

• James Robert Baker, "Fuel-Injected Dreams", 1986; "Boy Wonder", 1988
• Raymond Chandler,The Big Sleep, 1939
• Raymond Chandler,Farewell My Lovely, 1940
• Raymond Chandler,The Long Goodbye, 1953
• Joan Didion, Play it As it Lays, 1970
• Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero, 1985
• James Ellroy, Black Dahlia, 1987
• James Ellroy, LA Confidential, 1990
• James Ellroy, White Jazz, 1992
• John Fante, Ask the Dust, 1939
• Roger L. Simon, The Moses Wine series, starting with The Big Fix, 1973
• Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, 1947.
• Nathanael West, Day of the Locust, 1939.
• Michael Connelly, Harry Bosch Series, starting with The Black Echo, 1992–present
• Gerald Jay Goldberg, Heart Payments, 1982.
• Gerald Jay Goldberg, 126 Days of Continuous Sunshine, 1972.
• Charles Bukowski, Post Office, 1971.
• Nina Revoyr, Southland, 2003.
• Héctor Tobar, The Barbarian Nurseries, 2011.
• Mary Helen Ponce, Hoyt Street: A Autobiography, 2006.
• Chester Himes, "If He Hollers Let Him Go", 1945.

Below is a list of many ethnic enclaves present in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, where their cultures contribute to the cosmopolitan nature of the city.

Los Angeles is also home to a couple of gay villages centered around the LGBTQ community in Los Angeles.