Angelique Julian, owner of one of the six homes that will be featured in the 11th annual Art & Architecture Home Tour, in one of their rooms that features art from local artist in conjunction with the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. (Daily Pilot photo by Steven Georges)

NEWPORT BEACH — When Paul and Angelique Julian purchased their 2,650-square-foot mid-century home in Dover Shores, they knew that they had found the perfect place to raise a family.

However, the early 1960s home on Nautilus Lane needed a renovation first.

The Julians hired Newport Beach-based Brion Jeannette Architecture to keep the original structure, a sprawling single-story, four-bedroom home laid out like a horseshoe around an expansive backyard, while gutting and upgrading the interior.

“Ninety-five percent of what you see is original to the home, so all we had to do was give it a fresh appearance,” said Amy Creager, principal architect with the firm. “It was in such good condition, just really well taken care of, that we were able to keep the original structure.”

The $1.5 million home is one of six in Newport Beach and Laguna Beach that make up the 11th Annual Art & Architecture Tour and post-party organized by the Orange County Museum of Art from 10 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

… Continue Reading OCMA’s 11th annual Art & Architecture Tour this Sunday

Andre Woodward of the Huntington Beach Art Center works to set up an art exhibit by Jennifer Vanderpool, which will be part of the new art show CALIdoscope, opening this weekend. (STEVEN GEORGES, HB Independent / October 12, 2011)

Curator Darlene DeAngelo hopes to stimulate the minds of Surf City citizens through a new show at the Huntington Beach Art Center.

“I am interested in showing this community really new and exciting work, things that you wouldn’t normally see in a beach community …” she says. “I think this community is really intelligent, so it needs things that will challenge them and make them more aware of what’s going on in the larger picture of the art world.”

On Saturday, the city-operated HBAC will open “CALIdoscope,” its main exhibition for the fall 2011 program. The center on Main Street will kick off the show with a reception at 7 p.m. Friday.

… Continue Reading Peer into CALIdoscope

Morgan Arevalo (Photo provided by Newport Beach Police Dept.)

Newport Beach police say they need the public’s help in finding a 28-year-old Balboa Peninsula woman reported missing on Oct. 2.

Friends of Morgan Arevalo, who lives in the 1000 block of West Balboa Boulevard, said she looked drunk and unable to take care of herself when she was last seen, police said in a news release issued Monday afternoon.

Detectives believe that a taxi picked her up and dropped her off in the vicinity of Newport Boulevard and 17th Street in Costa Mesa.

Arevalo is 5-foot-8, 120 pounds with long black hair and brown eyes, according to the release. She wore a gray jacket and dark blue jeans.

Anybody who has information about her whereabouts should contact Newport Beach Det. Ryan Peters at (949) 644-3779.

—Imran Vittachi

Artist George Herms works on an untitled piece that’s part of “Lemon Bar” assemblage sculpture. (Photo credit: Sue Henger)

George Herms has poured most of his 76 years into making art out of found objects.

His 1960 work, “The Librarian,” currently on display at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, is considered an icon of California’s school of Assemblage Art, which broke new terrain at the time by challenging the canon of traditional sculpture. Abandoned books and other unwanted objects that Herms had rummaged from a Bay Area dump were grist for his artistic hommage to a small-town librarian.

“The sculptors wanted to use everything they saw out on the street, and that was called Assemblage Art,” said Herms, who is noted as a founder of that school as well as a leading visual artist who emerged from the 1950s Beat movement.

“My whole trip is about values,” added the artist, who has been living at a friend’s house in Irvine for the past two years. “The things that are thrown away, I feel, still have life in art. They may not be functional but they still have another life — an aesthetic life.”

… Continue Reading ‘Two Schools of Cool’ at OCMA 

Terra Cotta Warriors, including the Figure of Kneeling Archer, are on display at the new exhibition “Warriors, Tombs and Temples” at the Bowers Museum. (SCOTT SMELTZER, Daily Pilot / September 29, 2011)

SANTA ANA — As a follow-up to its acclaimed 2008 “Terra Cotta Warriors” exhibition, the Bowers Museum on Saturday will open an entirely new one covering a much broader sweep of ancient Chinese history.

The museum plans to display artifacts that date back to as many as 2,300 years ago and have never before been seen in Orange County.

The “Warriors, Tombs and Temples: China’s Enduring Legacy” exiibition comprises some 150 artifacts unearthed from tombs of rulers from three imperial dynasties, which were concentrated in and around the city of Xi’an, in modern day Shaanxi Province: The Qin Dynasty (221 – 206 BCE), the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) and the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907 CE).

… Continue Reading ‘Warriors, Tombs and Temples’ at the Bowers

Before – After, Walter Wittel (1970) at Laguna Art Museum “Best Kept Secret” exhibition.

The UC Irvine art school’s role as an academic center on the West Coast for studying and experimenting with radical forms of creativity in the 1960s and ’70s will be evident at October exhibitions in Laguna Beach, Newport Beach and at UCI.

A roster of star UCI art program alums and teaching artists, who served on the faculty while riding that period’s new wave of so-called conceptualism, will be part of three Orange County exhibitions.

The Laguna Art Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art and the campus’s University Arts Gallery all will present exhibitions showcasing or encompassing the works of artists noted for their contributions to the Southern California arts scene from 1945 to 1980.

… Continue Reading UCI artists on Pacific Standard Time

Catherine Trieschmann (Courtesy of South Coast Repertory)

Plainview, Kan., exists in Catherine Trieschmann’s imagination.

But the playwright is no stranger to the actual fertile flatlands of the Great Plains, the threat of tornadoes that hangs above the American heartland’s sky and its charged social issues.

All of this inspired her to pen “How the World Began,” a one-act drama set in that fictional town making its global debut Friday night at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

For six years, Trieschmann and her husband have lived in the real town of Hays, Kan., halfway between Kansas City and Denver.

“I was inspired by getting at the root as to why people hold onto some of those ideas,” the playwright said in a phone interview.

She was referring to a long-running national debate about whether creationist ideas stemming from the Book of Genesis belong in American school textbooks alongside the teaching of evolutionary theory. The controversy around that discussion forms the plot line’s crux.

… Continue Reading ‘Gobbledy gook’ or fact?

Julie Wood – the executive director for the nonprofit, the International Princess Project – shows off a pair of PUNJAMMIES at the nonprofit’s headquarters in Costa Mesa. The nonprofit helps rescue Indian woman from the forced sex trade by giving them jobs. (Photo by SCOTT SMELTZER)

The International Princess Project headquarters near John Wayne Airport stocks thousands of pairs of brilliantly-colored, batik-style drawstring pants known as PUNJAMMIES.

This trademarked line of textile wear with an Indian twist targets Western women as a market, including the fashion-minded yoga set, through a word play on “pajamas.”

Women in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach and elsewhere in Orange County now promote IPP’s mission by hosting so-called “PUNJAMMY Parties” at their homes — all for a good cause, freeing women from the international sex trade.

The cotton pajamas bottoms are made by hand and push-pedal sewing machines operated by women in India, who are trying to put back together the seams of their own lives tattered by coercion into prostitution.

… Continue Reading ‘The fabric of freedom’