News from Somewhere

To paraphrase Bill Hader’s SNL character Stefon, Los Angeles’s hottest club is Marta. Appropriately east of Western Avenue (the dividing line, for some, between the staid west and the artistic east of the city); run
by Benjamin Crittenden and Heidi Korsavong; and with every opening as full of kids and their Rachel Comey–wearing parents as they are of the local design cognoscenti (spotted this time were lighting designer Brendan Ravenhill, SCI-Arc’s Anna Neimark, and more), Marta has become the place to see good art and even better people. The latest reason for everyone to dust off their dresses and put their kids in party pinafores was an astonishing new exhibition, A Garden Of…

Anchored by a giant metal structure/sculpture/thing some people wanted to climb (a greenhouse, according to the source text), the show is fun and generous and smart and perceptive. “Beautiful work,” said Ravenhill, keeping an eye on his eight-year-old, when cornered by a writer and her baby. Also cornered was the architect Michael Meredith, cofounder, with Hilary Sample, of MOS, the Harlem-b…