Last December the art world breathed a collective sigh of relief as Art Basel Miami beach got under way. The mood at the fair was noticeably cheerier than 2008, when all the air kisses, hand shakes and fake smiles could not disguise most participants’ fear of the coming apocalypse. Since the recession continued to batter the art market for most of 2009, this year’s fair was still more subdued than the all out bacchanals of years past, but as they say, “the show must go on,” and it did.

Bianca Kolonusz-Partee makes pictures of the things we ignore using pieces of the things we discard. Cezanne painted his Mont Sainte-Victoire over 60 times, Monet recreated his water lilies dozens more. The subject of industrial shipping ports may not seem so romantic, but to Bianca they are every bit as potent. Industrial ports are universal gateways, through which we receive nearly everything we use everyday. Not that we notice them. In fact, you might say we make a point of ignoring them. This is particularly easy in a city like Los Angeles, where the unpleasantness can be easily lost in the endless sprawl of our mega-city. Even in denser cities like New York and San Francisco, where the cranes and docks are unavoidable, most of us are so inured to the sight that it becomes part of the white noise of urban life. We tend to remember the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Bianca believes this is typical: “The average person in LA, unless they live in those areas doesn’t really think about [shipping ports] or see them.” And yet, according to the Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma, the amount of air pollution blowing inland every day from the Long Beach/Los Angeles ports is equal to that generated daily by three million cars. Children in Long Beach face some of the highest levels of asthma and permanent damage to lung development in Southern California. Diesel pollution from the ports’ trains, ships, cargo conveyors and trucks poses such significant risks to local residents as cancer and premature death. “There’s all this processing going on that you can visually see and smell. It’s causing the same amount of pollution and damage as it is in New Jersey, but the San Pedro and Long Beach ports seem more remote.”

Don Argott’s new film The Art of the Steal is closer to a conspiracy flick than institutional documentary. On the face of it, the film tells the tumultuous history of The Barnes Foundation, a maze of political and art world chicanery with twists and betrayals to rival a season of “Lost” – only at the end of the day, it all makes sense. The motive: money, over $25 billion to be exact, the estimated value of the late Albert Barnes’ unrivaled collection of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Early Modern masters. The crime: betraying the old man’s legal trust by hijacking the entire collection from its rightful home at an eccentric educational institution in Lower Merion County to a shiny new tourist hot-spot in downtown Philadelphia. But the most surprising element of the mystery is the culprit: the big business of big philanthropy.

We’ve all had the brief scare of having a white slip on our windshield — we’ve all had the relief of realizing it’s just an ad for Joe’s Eatery. But now, because of damage to cars and increased litter, the issue is going to the Supreme Court.

Reading Will Alexander’s poetry is like walking into a Jackson Pollock painting: you get lost in a maelstrom of colors, lulled by beautifully constructed metaphors, and unexpectedly shaken by the jarring sounds of each hard-handed stroke. Through Alexander’s work, words fill three-dimensional forms and talk back to you with distinct colors, voices and angles. An autodidact born and raised in South Central L.A., Alexander’s early work didn’t fit into conventional, academically defined structures. After years of carving out his own niche, Alexander is now internationally recognized as a leading literary figure. A poet, essayist, novelist and visual artist, his accomplishments include the Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002, and he was named by The International Biographical Centre in Cambridge as the Outstanding Scholar of the 20th Century. Alexander’s most recent collection of poetry, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, is a surreal adventure embedded with a lexicon all its own and laced with seemingly disconnected words applied to the page like that of smattered paint.