How did Los Angeles come to host what amounted to a Terry Allen festival? The Lubbock-raised, LA-schooled, and Santa Fe–based visual artist, musician, and writer was the subject of simultaneous solo exhibitions at LA Louver and the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Skirball Cultural Center produced his new play; and LACMA organized a conversation between Allen and art criticism’s great Texan Dave Hickey. Perhaps Allen’s completion of a multimedia opus several years in the making converged with a broadly felt need for a practice that, though inconsistent, is also genuinely unpredictable; maybe LA

David Bunn acquired the roughly seven million cards that made up the Los Angeles Central Library’s now-obsolete card catalogue in 1990. In 1993, he installed 9,506 of them in the library’s two new elevator shafts in such a way that they could be viewed through the passenger-car windows. Sometimes an artist’s source material turns out to be more compelling than his or her work, and knowing how many of those cards remained made me worry that for Bunn this problem might be right around the corner. But though a lesser artist might have turned into a one-trick pony engaged in an unengaging session

Of all the objets that thus far make up the baroque oeuvre of Pae White—from the zodiac-themed origami clocks to the cast-iron barbecues in the shape of owls and turtles; from the glazed ceramic bricks to the spider-assisted web drawings; from the cast-Plexiglas monochromes to her advertisements for herself—it is the Color-aid paper mobiles that have steadily assumed representative prominence. The delighted responses they so effectively coax from the public is largely attributable to a perceived discrepancy between the modesty of their materials and execution and the near-sublime luxuriance of

In 1969, after more than a decade of commercial design work, Robert Overby decided to become a full-time artist. The oft-cited turning point was an assignment to procure an art collection for the corporate offices of CBS. Working with a relatively tight budget, Overby came through with a remarkably rich and diverse body of work that ran the gamut of fine and applied art and included everything from a Picasso bookplate to a circuit board courtesy of Lockheed Electronics. And, famously, he cut corners in the original-painting department by making a few of them himself. There is no doubt that with