In the two and a half years Eungie Joo has been director and curator of the Gallery at REDCAT, she has created a cutting-edge contemporary program essentially from scratch, introducing emerging artists as well as art-world players new to Southern California. Her show ?White Noise,? for example, included up-and-comers like Sora Kim, Gimhongsok, Superflex, Taro Shinoda and the recent MacArthur fellow Julie Mehretu, none of whom had ever before shown in L.A. Upcoming shows include the first solo U.S. exhibitions for Mexican artist Dami?n Ortega and the Parisian Mathieu Briand.

By definition, REDCAT is an artistic laboratory, one part educational institution, one part creative haven and one part cultural resource. So, naturally, Joo has by art-world standards an unorthodox background: a B.A. in African-diaspora studies and a doctorate from UC Berkeley's ethnic-studies program. But she caught the contemporary-art bug during a two-year stint at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and credits her brother, artist Michael Joo, for inciting her interest in the production of new works.

Once upon a time, L.A. was an artistic hinterland, home to none but moviemakers and plein air painters, and an artist intent on making his fortune had no hope but to haul his talents across the country to the reigning mecca that was New York. In the 1960s, however, that began to change. There are many to thank for the shift, but few make for a handsomer hero than Ed Ruscha, who went west rather than east from his native Oklahoma, worked as a typesetter, glimpsed the secret poetry of billboards and elevated Los Angeles to the worthy status of artistic subject.

Israeli-born gallerist Rose Shoshana was a photographer herself when she decided to open the Gallery of Contemporary Photography at Edgemar Farms in 1991. The idea was to create a space to exhibit her own work, along with work by her friends, but that plan fell by the wayside in fairly short order. Shoshana's desire to bring photography that otherwise wouldn't be seen in Los Angeles to her gallery led to landmark exhibitions of work by Mexican masters Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide, and a growing reputation as the best photography dealer in town. Graced with integrity and a light touch that's rare in an art dealer, Shoshana has come to represent a stable of photographers that includes some of the best in the business ? William Eggleston, Bruce Davidson, Charles Brittin, Dorothea Lange and Susan Meiselas, to name a few.

Tyler Stallings is a thinking man's curator with an inquisitive eye for popular culture. His shows are intelligent without being academic; ambitious without being haughty; and playful, when appropriate, without being flippant. In his tenure as chief curator (and formerly director of programs) at the Laguna Art Museum, he's helped to elevate what might have happily remained a pleasant, provincial, small-town institution into one of the most valuable ? and refreshing ? arts centers in Southern California.

The artists he's showcased solo ? Deborah Aschheim, Sandow Birk, Simon Leung, Rub?n Ortiz Torres, Kara Walker and Robert Williams, among others ? are expansive thinkers, often politically minded and adept at the manipulation of boundaries. Group shows like ?Whiteness: A Wayward Construction? (2003) and ?Cyborg Manifesto, or the Joy of Artifice? (2001) reflect similar concerns on an ambitious, if occasionally unwieldy, scale. The boundary play, in particular, comes to the fore in his accessible but still rigorous surveys of popular culture: ?Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing? (2002), ?Margaret Keane and Keanabilia? (2000) and ?Grind: The Culture and Graphics f Skateboarding? (1995).

?Something dead in the street,? Robert Williams once wrote, ?commands more measured units of visual investigation than 100 Mona Lisas!? And be assured that visual investigation is what Williams wants from you: If death ? or blood or tits or chrome or guns or burgers or warty, veiny, slobbering, monstrous things ? is what it takes, so be it, he'll throw them in there. His paintings can be ugly, disturbing, disgusting, appalling, creepy, lecherous and maddeningly offensive ? but they're also funny, brilliantly executed and more resoundingly intelligent than most of what passes for clever in the mainstream art world today.

Rising from an art-director position in the studio of hot-rod guru Big Daddy Roth (where he was, by a truly canny stroke of providence, actually sent by an employment agency), through the halls of Robert Crumb's Zap Comics, Williams has become the revered godfather of the Lowbrow movement. (Indeed, he actually ? literally! ? owns a copyright on the term.) He is vocal in his antagonism toward the mainstream art world, and he can afford to be, as he probably sells a lot more than most of the reigning darlings of Artforum. His complaints, however, are far more astute than bitter, and rather than lapse into self-syndication or drift comfortably into the lucrative land of Lowbrow merchandising, he persists in making good old-fashioned, gallery-scale paintings that engage with not only art history but human history, science, literature, culture and the whole sticky mess of being alive.

There aren't many collectors like Diana Zlotnick, though there ought to be. Still going strong at 78, she has given over her modest home almost entirely to displaying and preserving the more than 600 artworks she's accumulated over the last 40-some years. In the late '50s, a magazine article drew her into the nascent Ferus Gallery, where she bought a Robert Irwin on the installment plan, then returned to trade it for a John Altoon.

Zlotnick ? a former schoolteacher and the wife of a veterinarian ? was hooked. With nothing to go on but her instincts (and whatever was left over in the modest household budget), she managed to acquire works by Warhol, Ruscha, Wallace Berman, Richard Pettibone, Llyn Foulkes, George Herms and many others. Even more than the objects themselves, Zlotnick valued exposure to the artists' milieu, and began to focus almost entirely on L.A. locals.

Not content to play the passive art consumer, she quickly began circumventing the gallery system, approaching artists directly ? visiting studios, exploring work in depth and developing real relationships. When Berman's famous obsolete Verifax machine crapped out in 1966, Zlotnick was able to supply him with another from her late father's office. Wanting to share her enthusiasm, she taught ?direct experience? art-appreciation classes and has published a sporadic newsletter since 1972.

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