The lasting legacy of L.A.-born ceramicist Michael Frimkiss: L.A. arts and culture this weekend

Ceramicist Michael Frimkiss — who was born to a Jewish family in Boyle Heights in 1937 — died on Feb. 28 at 88, leaving a uniquely L.A. legacy of classical clay creations, as well as a family of artists in his wake.

Frimkiss’ wife is the Venezuelan-born ceramicist Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, who, received her first major museum retrospective last year at 95 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. His grandchildren — Sachi and Louie Moskowitz — are also artists. Born to Lelia Moskowitz, Frimkiss’ daughter from his first marriage, the Moskowitz siblings are currently staging an exhibition through July 27 titled “Made to Last” at Arcane Space gallery in Venice. Sachi is a ceramicist, like her grandfather, and Louie is a photographer.

The show is, in part, a tribute to Frimkiss and a nod to the artistic impulse passed down in the family through the generations.

As the family patriarch, Frimkiss distinguished himself as a uniquely Southern California artist who infused traditional clay vessels with pop culture aesthetics and cutting-edge social commentary.

Frimkiss’ father was also an artist who made his mark working in graphic design. He and his wife encouraged their son’s interest in art from an early age. After graduating from Hollywood High, Frimkiss won a scholarship to the school that would become known as Otis College of Art and Design. It was an exciting time for ceramics, with Peter Voulkos and his students creating a new Abstract Expressionist language for the art form.

In a 2000 interview with The Times, Frimkiss talked about how a peyote trip in 1956 ended with his decision to pursue the art of ceramics: “He describes being awake for 24 hours, then having a vision like ‘a glow in my forehead.’ What he saw was material being shaped into a vessel, a process that he had glimpsed at Otis but never tried. ‘I thought, that must be pottery. I must be throwing pots. That’s the answer,’ he says.”

Frimkiss went on to work in a ceramics factory in Italy, before moving back to L.A. In 1963 he met and married Magdalena, and the couple settled into a home and studio near Venice Beach. Frimkiss’ life was marked by a difficult decades-long battle with multiple sclerosis, but he went on to define himself as an iconoclastic artist noted for a no-water throwing technique that created wafer-thin pots with inimitable qualities.

Frimkiss’ work is in the Smithsonian, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, among others.

I’m arts and culture writer Jessica Gelt looking to get my hands in some clay. Here’s this week’s arts and culture rundown.

Best bets: On our radar this week

Jacqueline Misaye as Rosaline and Brent Charles as Berowne star in the Independent Shakespeare Co.’s outdoor production of William Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labour’s Lost.”

(Mike Ditz)

‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’
Romance is in the air as the Independent Shakespeare Co. launches its annual Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival. Four young gentlemen’s vow to devote themselves to the chaste study of academics is derailed by the arrival of four fetching noblewomen in the comedy “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Catch the final preview tonight or attend Saturday’s opening night. The festival second show, the Elizabethan tragedy, “Doctor Faustus” by Christopher Marlowe, debuts Aug. 6.
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays through July 27 (except July 4). Outdoors at the Dell at the top of the Old Zoo, Griffith Park. indieshakes.org

Kamasi Washington brings jazz to the new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

(Illustrations by Lindsey Made This; photograph by Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic)

Kamasi Washington Live
The jazz saxophonist and composer leads an ensemble 100-strong performing Washington’s six-movement suite, “Harmony of Difference,” in its entirety for the first time. The second two nights of a sold-out three-night stand (sign up for ticket availability alerts) marking the public’s first opportunity to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s new David Geffen Galleries prior to the installation of art. The Times will have boots on the ground reporting on the experience.
7 p.m. Friday and Saturday. David Geffen Galleries, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. lacma.org

‘Tombstone’
This premiere of a new 4K restoration of director George P. Cosmatos’ 1993 western about Wyatt Earp and that notorious shootout at the O.K. Corral also serves as tribute to actor Val Kilmer, who died earlier this year. The actor’s portrayal of John Henry “Doc” Holliday, which former Times film critic Peter Rainer called “a classic camp performance,” is one of the key reasons for the film’s longevity as a cult classic. Kurt Russell stars as Earp, with Bill Paxton and Sam Elliott as his brothers Morgan and Virgil.
7 p.m. Saturday. Academy Museum, David Geffen Theater, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

Takako Yamaguchi
In the third of its relaunched “MOCA Focus” exhibitions, which present an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles, the institution turns its attention to the 72-year-old Japanese-born painter, whose appropriation of diverse imagery challenges ideals of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. The show features “archly stylized” oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes that bring together her highly-crafted sense of “Eastern” and Western,” developed over 40 years. “The L.A.-based Yamaguchi either presents the canvas as if a sculptural element itself, painted with ridges and creases and layers of depth, or treats it as a neutral surface upon which she renders a form atop (parallelogram, eye, grid of circles), as though in shallow relief,” wrote Times contributor Leah Ollman in a 2019 review. “As she plays with illusion and dimension, these highly reduced images open up, their formal distillation yielding conceptual complexity.”
Sunday through Jan. 4. Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. moca.org

Tom Hulce in the Oscar-winning 1984 film “Amadeus.”

(Orion Pictures)

Ultra Cinematheque 70 Fest
Milos Forman’s “Amadeus,” Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs,” John McTiernan’s “Die Hard” and Ivan Reitman’s “Ghostbusters” headline this summer’s edition of the American Cinematheque homage to large-format films. The monthlong, 33-film series kicks off with Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” screening at 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday at the Aero. The festival wraps Aug. 4 with Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” also at the Aero.
Thursday through Aug. 4. Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica; Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd. americancinematheque.com

Yankee Dawg You Die
East West Players present a new production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s 1988 play about the challenges faced by Asian American actors in Hollywood, which, unfortunately, remains very timely. Jennifer Chang directs Kelvin Han Yee and Daniel J. Kim as two performers who meet at very different junctures in their respective careers. In a 2001 review of an earlier EWP revival, former Times staff writer Daryl H. Miller called the play, “gently comic and quietly powerful.”
Thursday through July 27. The David Henry Hwang Theater, 120 N. Judge John Aiso St., Little Tokyo. eastwestplayers.org

Culture news

LACMA has acquired Jeff Koons’ topiary “Split-Rocker,” pictured at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.

(Tom Powel)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced the acquisition of Jeff Koons’ monumental topiary sculpture “Split-Rocker” to anchor the east side of the campus at the new David Geffen Galleries building. The 37-foot-tall living sculpture, created in 2000, is designed to nurture more than 50,000 flowering plants. “I couldn’t be more thrilled than to have a piece of floral work in Los Angeles where — horticulturally — there’s such a wide variety of plants that can be used in its creation,” Koons said in a phone interview with Times staff writer Jessica Gelt from his New York studio. “I hope people going back and forth on Wilshire Boulevard, and people visiting the museum, are able to enjoy and experience the change in the piece.” The project will be seeded in August with the hope that it will be fully established by April, when architect Peter Zumthor’s new poured concrete building is scheduled to open to the public.

Anaheim police have located two giant sculptures valued at a combined $2.1 million that were stolen from an Anaheim Hills warehouse reports Times staff writer Andrew J. Campos. The theft of the pieces, “Icarus Within” and “Quantum Mechanics: Homme,” by artist and filmmaker Daniel Winn, apparently happened June 14 or 15 and were recovered a week later in a trailer parked at an Anaheim residence, according to police. Composed of thousands of pounds of bronze and stainless steel, the sculptures typically require “about a dozen men and two forklifts to move” Winn said. “This is not an easy task.” No arrests have been made.

Italian artist Arnaldo Pomodoro died at home in Milan on June 22, the eve of his 99th birthday. A renowned sculptor whose art was publicly displayed around the world, including at the LADWP’s John F. Ferraro Building downtown, Pomodoro’s most famous works involved large “wounded” spheres made of bronze. He taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and Mills College in the 1960s and his “Rotante dal Foro Centrale,” part of the “Sfera con Sfera” series, can be found at the west entrance of the Berkeley campus.

The SoCal scene

James Van Der Zee, “Untitled,” 1927, gelatin silver print

(J. Paul Getty Museum)

“Queer Lens: A History of Photography,” the J. Paul Getty Museum’s newest exhibition, “is provocative and important, and the timing packs a wallop,” according to Times art critic Christopher Knight in his review of the show. The survey contains more than 270 works from the last two centuries and examines the ways “cameras transformed the expression of gender and sexuality.” Well-known artists such as Berenice Abbott, Anthony Friedkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray and Edmund Teske are featured alongside many unknowns. “These days,” wrote Knight, citing the present anti-LGBTQ+ fervor in statehouses across the country and Washington, D.C., “the Getty is probably the only major art museum in America that could open an exhibition like ‘Queer Lens.’ Others wouldn’t dare.”

The Tony-winning revival of “Parade” tells the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man in Georgia, who in 1913 was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan in a gross miscarriage of justice. His sentence was later commuted by the governor, but Frank was kidnapped and lynched by an angry mob. “This dark chapter in American history might not seem suitable for musical treatment,” wrote Times theater critic Charles McNulty in his review of the production currently at the Ahmanson Theatre. “Docudrama would be the safer way to go, given the gravity of the material. But playwright Alfred Uhry and composer and lyricist Jason Robert Brown had a vision of what they could uniquely bring to the retelling of Frank’s story.”

It may be summer in L.A., but Times classical music critic Mark Swed found the dance scene in full bloom. “I sampled three very different dance programs last weekend at three distinctive venues in three disparate cities and for three kinds of audiences,” wrote Swed. “The range was enormous but the connections, illuminating.” In an expansive few days, he witnessed the Miami City Ballet’s production of “Swan Lake” at Segerstrom Hall in Costa Mesa; the American Contemporary Ballet performing George Balanchine’s modernist classic “Serenade,” alongside new work by the company’s founder, choreographer Lincoln Jones, on a soundstage at Television City in the Fairfax district; and violinist Vijay Gupta and dancer Yamini Kalluri combining Bach and Indian Kuchipudi dance at the 99-seat Sierra Madre Playhouse. Still to come, Boston Ballet makes its Music Center debut, dancing “Swan Lake” at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion this weekend; and the L.A. Phil’s “Tchaikovsky Spectacular with Fireworks,” July 18 at the Hollywood Bowl, will feature the San Francisco Ballet dancing excerpts from “Swan Lake” and Balanchine’s “Diamonds” Pas de Deux.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles is under construction and is expected to open its doors in 2026.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

In case you missed it, Times contributor Sam Lubell wrote about the landscape design of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open in 2026. “George Lucas and wife Mellody Hobson chose Mia Lehrer and her L.A. firm, Studio-MLA, to design the 11 acres of landscape around — and on top of — MAD Architects’ swirling, otherworldly, billion-dollar building,” wrote Lubell. “The driving forces behind the Lucas Museum made it clear that the landscape had to tell a story too.” That narrative is more than enhanced by the stunning photography of The Times’ Myung J. Chun.

“I like the idea of giving life to the objects I create,” ceramicist Rami Kim said in a recent interview with Times staff writer Lisa Boone. “They’re my imaginary friends.” Korean-born and raised, Kim attended CalArts, earned a master of fine arts from UCLA and later worked in the animation industry. She discovered clay while making figures for stop-motion animation. Drawn to the tactile sensation of the medium, Kim began working characters into various ceramic forms. “Built by hand, their faces emerge from planters, ceramic dishes and slip-cast mugs like the cast of an animated Hayao Miyazaki movie,” wrote Boone in a compelling profile about how the artist began creating custom animal figurines for clients, many of whom, like Kim, have lost their pets.

— Kevin Crust

And last but not least

Looking for a Saturday complement to the Essential Arts newsletter? Try our weekly books newsletter. Enjoy interviews with authors, such as this one with Susan Gubar, who spoke to Times contributor Marc Weingarten about her new book, “Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists” — which profiles seven creators who found a second wind in their advancing years — plus news about the latest releases, the local literary scene and our favorite bookstores.