Art in the Streets

Adventures of my point-and-shoot camera
(perhaps I'll do a few more like this sometime) 

I originally heard about the awesome Art in the Streets exhibit from a fellow photographer friend who went to see it a couple months ago - he came back with some really neat pics and so I had been curious about checking it out since then.  While the topic can be a bit controversial, you can't deny the art of it.

Then this past Sunday I saw a tweet about the Art in the Streets exhibit being free on Mondays!  Well golly gee, looks like that's what my son and I were going to do that Monday.  I decided we'd take the bus down to downtown L.A. as well just for the heck of it, save some gas and parking $$.  Turns out the L.A. buses can get pretty expensive anyways, so I think I pretty much just saved on parking money...oh well.

We took the bus to the MOCA museum which is where the exhibit is advertised at...turns out there's actually 2 locations for "MOCA" - the other one is called "The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA"....I had no idea there were 2 different spots, and of course we ended up at the wrong one.  Turns out I wasn't the only one though, several people ended up at the wrong place so I didn't feel too bad.

The Geffen was about 10 blocks away, so we walked it.  It ended up being right next to Little Tokyo of L.A. as well which I had been dying to go see forever now and the stars just never aligned.  So before we went into the museum, we walked around Little Tokyo and just window shopped for a few minutes.  Such a cute little area - reminded me of San Francisco's Japantown, but smaller.   Lots of little restaurants and sushi shops, a cute little bakery, of course some Sanrio stores and a massive comic book shop.  We didn't stay long, just passed through - I'll come back another time and check the area out in a little more depth.

We headed back towards the museum and walked right in.  We were greeted by a huge warehouse setup with large scale paintings everywhere you looked.  Most things were bright and colorful as street art often is, but the first big paintings were a bit out of the ordinary - a dead rabbit and a long painting of some kind of dead animal with doors that you could swing back and forth to see the internal organs drawn.....yea, a bit strange, but Caydan had fun swinging the doors back and forth, lol.

I only brought my point and shoot camera with me as I didn't feel like lugging my big camera around on the bus.  I also had the impression that I would have just been taking pictures of pictures so didn't see a huge point in bringing it, but it turns out there was actually a lot of 3-dimensional art to take photos of - bummer for me cause I could have gotten some really neat pics if I had my fancy schmancy camera.  Oh well - my point and shoot was gonna have to do.  They're a bit blurry as you're not allowed to use flash and my little point and shoot isn't so wonderful at low lighting.  And they're not the greatest pics as I wasn't really expecting to share them - but then decided I wanted to after the fact.

Here's a few of the neat things I saw.  I definitely recommend checking out the exhibit.  Great if you like art, street art, or just to see new things.  My 5 year old son even said he had fun (there were some neat glow in the dark exhibits and monster looking figures that he loved).