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As visitors venture back to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, shuttered for a year because of COVID-19 and reopening Thursday, they will find many changes.
Some, but not all, are a result of the pandemic.
I visited during members’ previews. That afternoon, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters that she felt a sense of “impending doom,” given sudden infection spikes. That gave me pause.
To protect patrons’ health, familiar precautions are in place at LACMA. Ticket reservations made online or by phone are necessary to keep attendance at reduced levels. Masks are mandatory, health screening (including a temperature check) and contact tracing data are required, and traffic flow directions are in place inside galleries. Exhibition text panels have been replaced by QR codes.
Milford Graves (1941–2021)
Groundbreaking free-jazz percussionist and polymath Milford Graves died today of congestive heart failure at the age of seventy-nine, as reported by NPR’s Lars Gotrich. Described by composer and saxophonist John Zorn as “basically a twentieth-century shaman,” Graves possessed an astounding intellect that was matched only by his curiosity: Apart from contributing heavily to the emergence of free jazz, he was an accomplished martial artist, herbalist, inventor, and visual artist who for decades recorded his own heartbeats in order to study and manipulate them to various ends, including his own art and a patented medical procedure. Only two weeks ago did “Milford Graves: A Mind-Body Deal,” a major exhibition of his work at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, draw to a close after a five-month run.