Cheryl Johnson

Thomas Coleman is an associate and former client, but more importantly, a good friend.

He has written a fascinating account of his life and times as an advocate for family diversity and equal rights.

Follow this link to The Domino Effect's web site

Be sure to read the Outtakes!

Capoeira under a full moon is a magical, mystical experience:  The pulsing rhythm, the chanted song, the electric energy of the movements.

Here is some video from Capoeira Brasil Eagle Rock // Xtreme Training Center's demonstration of Capoeira Brasil at the Eagle Rock Music Festival, October 3, 2009.

The Avenue 50 Studio Beautification Committee welcomes you to join a community input meeting Sunday, October 4, 2009. We will use the community's feedback to develop a design for a Highland Park Gateway Park outside of Ave. 50 Studio, for which we will then apply for a City of LA Community Beautification Grant. Come be heard and participate in this exciting project!

RSVP at our evite -
http://www.evite.com/app/publicUrl/XGCTGXBYPFNBDPJHWLUP/highlandparkgatewaypark

Feel free to forward invite.
Kathy Gallegos
Avenue 50 Studio
131 No. Avenue 50 Highland Park, CA 90042
(323) 258-1435

You are cordially invited to the "Happy Docent Hour" mixer October 1, 2009 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at Avenue 50 studio. Join Avenue 50 and the artist for the closing of "East of the River", Polaroid photographic prints by John Tapia Urquiza.

"John says polaroids are a journey filled with the stillness and the suspense of a Jim Jarmusch film." -Santa Sugiyama, director, winner Palm D'or for advertising

"Pearblossom Highway" 1989

Photography has played a major role in the development of modern society. It has so permeated our culture and consciousness that photography is in danger of being trivialized and lost. Its ability and the ease in which it can reproduce realism leaves, the untrained viewer unable to discern between their own vision and the photographer's voice. In its early days photography was a science and tool for documentation. In 1902 all that changed when Alfred Stieglitz known historically as a photographer, gallerist and husband to Georgia O'keefe held the first photography exhibition for the Secessionists. This growing movement of European and American photographers decidedly took photography from a documentary way of perceiving the world to a more expressive and emotional medium.

In that tradition Urquiza presents his Polaroids. The images of landscapes and vignettes of a past life are reduced to three by three-inch windows into time. The southwest prints evoke an era long past while the objects and scenes of East Los Angeles recall childhood memories. The more recent images of the river itself still haunt our present day with questions of how time has changed little.

Please RSVP to Kathy Gallegos at Avenue 50 Studios.
ave50studio @ sbcglobal.net

"East of the River"
September 12-October 4, 2009

Avenue 50 Studio, Inc.
A 501(c)(3) non-profit art gallery
131 north avenue 50
323.258.1435

I spent a little time at Heritage Square Museum yesterday.

The docent brought up an interesting point. The Perry Mansion, (the white home on the left) built in 1876, cost considerably more to build than the Hale House, (on the right) built in 1887.

And contributing factors to that change in cost, were that in the intervening span of 11 years, huge progress was made in the ability to transport raw materials from one point to another cross country; and equally huge progress was made in the ability to mass-produce materials.

We often talk about the enormous, mind boggling changes in technology and business that have occured in the last ten years. I'm thinking the people living in the 1876 to 1887 period might have felt the same way.