The Marciano Art Foundation renovated the old Masonic Lodge on Wilshire Boulevard at Lucerne and it is beautifully run. Millard Sheets has a beautiful mosaic on the third floor covering a whole wall.
Millard Sheets MAF
The main exhibit during Deborah Cohen’s UCLA Osher class visit was Ai Weiwei’s work including his Sunflower Seeds, 2010—the grey bed are the sunflower seeds and the cream bed are the spouts of teapots.
Ai Weiwei
And then I read in Edmund de Waal’s The White Road: Journey into an Obsession, 2015, “Last year, says my guide, you could buy the rejects of Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds in this market for 200 yuan a kilo, little conical heaps of grey seeds that he had commissioned from the small workshops of Jingdezhen for his vast installation at the Tate Modern in London. They were press-moulded by the million, and you could go and collect a bag of them from a depot and paint a stripe of iron along each side and get paid by weight. There were 100 million made, 150 tons of seeds, and they kept workshops busy for a couple of years.
This year you can’t find Ai Weiwei seeds.”