Fire engulfed a two-story building in the garment district of downtown Los Angeles early this morning.

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles exhibits works by Henry Coombes running from June 12 to September 7, 2008.

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles presents an exhibition of works by running from July 11 to October 12, 2008.

John Lautner (1911-94), one of the most important and influential architects of the twentieth century, had a remarkable career spanning nearly six decades. Residing and working in Los Angeles during much of that time, his designs are known for their radical innovation with specific attention to materiality, space and a consciousness of the natural environment.

Tomma Abts creates small, severe paintings that provide an intriguing antidote to the florid figuration that has dominated the contemporary painting discourse in the last decade. The exhibition, organized for the New Museum in New York by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, includes fourteen paintings, all of them the same size (19.8 x 15 inches), made over the past ten years.

UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles will exhibit works by Mungo Thomson running from June 20 to December 4, 2008.

There is a large fire at Universal Studios. The fire started around 5:15 AM PT on the New York sound stage and has continued to spread.

The evolving practice of antiquities conservation is the focus of The Hope Hygieia: Restoring a Statue’s History, a new exhibition on view through September 8, 2008 at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa.

Two illuminated manuscripts of extraordinary importance, along with books, prints, maps, watercolors, and photographs that illustrate the history and culture of Peru will be on display in The Marvel and Measure of Peru: Three Centuries of Artists’ Histories, 1550–1880, at the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Center, July 8–October 19, 2008.

One of the greatest examples of French medieval manuscript illumination will go on view in its unbound form in the exhibition The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the luxurious Book of Hours was commissioned by Jean de France, duc de Berry (1340-1416), in the early 15th century.

Visitors to the elegant J. Paul Getty Museum wouldn’t be surprised to find pastoral scenes of shepherds tending their grazing flocks. But they’d expect them to be painted on canvas and hanging in frames—not wandering the hillside overlooking the 405.

Medieval and Renaissance images of Christ provided visual accounts of the historical Christ described in the Gospels and powerful entry points to prayer. Imagining Christ at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center, through July 27, 2008 will display manuscripts from the Getty’s permanent collection that demonstrate the ways in which Christ was understood by the medieval and Renaissance faithful.