Arts & culture news for Santa Monica.
Often overlooked, Santa Monica’s Camera Obscura is a noteworthy relic of photographic history. Stepping into the attraction’s small, darkened space transports today’s media-saturated visitors to a time when the public viewed the projection of images on a screen as a…
Visiting the Third Street Promenade on any given day – let alone on a holiday weekend – it’s hard to imagine the three block stretch between Wilshire Boulevard and Broadway in Downtown Santa Monica was ever anything but a bustling…
Last year was a disappointing one for the music industry. Digital downloads were off, as were album sales. CDs look like a dying format, with sales plummeting last year by 15 percent. One segment of the music industry, however, was…
“The train is coming” was an oft-repeated phrase at Tuesday night’s meeting on the future of Bergamot Station, the roughly six-acre City-owned arts complex in the heart of SaMo’s former industrial corridor. Home to dozens of galleries and other creative…
The death of the printed book—you know, those bound volumes of static pages that you have to manually flip through to read—has been foretold for years. But like some creature from gothic literature, printed books refuse to die. And now…
A beach club suggests an exclusive world of privilege and private cabanas, a place where pampered elites camp under umbrellas and sip gin and tonics. Private beach clubs, once more abundant along the California coast, still exist. And then there’s…
In one photo, a family of four smiles toward the camera on Easter morning, while just off to the side grandpa is seen chugging a can of beer. In another shot, a young boy happily blows out candles on his…
It began as a grassroots effort to pretty up Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica by decorating it with colorful street murals. Now the Ocean Park group behind this project wants to take its paintbrushes and go global. “Ten thousand murals…
The community group fighting to keep the Paul Conrad’s mushroom cloud sculpture in Santa Monica’s Civic Center raised $50,000 this week, half of it coming from a donation from television producer Norman Lear. The other half came from a fundraising…
The Winter 2013/2014 edition of Seascape and Recscape (Santa Monica’s newsletter and programming guide respectively) has arrived in homes (download here) and there’s lots of programming I am excited about. I encourage you to check it out: Santa Monica Winter 2013 Recscape…
Glow is this Saturday (from 7:00pm into 3:00 am Sunday), and is one of the most unique public events in the city. Glow is held only once every other year, bringing together art, music, performance using the beach, the pier,…
Sunday afternoon was another beautiful Tour da Arts on an equally beautiful Santa Monica summer day. For 5 years, the Santa Monica Museum of Art has been putting the culture in bike culture by tying together local artists and performers…
