Jessica Gelt

6 days ago | latimes.com | Jessica Gelt |Ashley Lee

Art Spiegelman, with microphone, at a PEN rally in 2017. “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” is now streaming on PBS. “Art Spiegelman is one of the most important cartoonists in the world working today.

1 week ago | latimes.com | Jessica Gelt |Ashley Lee

Spring break is here and I’m cooped up at home alongside a kid with the flu. Like the cloudless sky, I am blue — and searching for silver linings. I found one in a memory: a recent trip to Walt Disney Concert Hall with a close friend to see folk singer Gregory Alan Isakov perform to a packed house with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Isakov is one of my friend’s favorite artists, and she found great solace in his music in the devastating days after January’s fires.

1 week ago | latimes.com | Jessica Gelt |Ashley Lee

Since learning that the great composer-lyricist William Finn — who wrote “A New Brain” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” — died Monday, I’ve been revisiting a cast recording of “Falsettos,” his 1992 musical comedy about family and friendship in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

2 weeks ago | latimes.com | Jessica Gelt |Ashley Lee

Mercedes Genoveva de Maria Pedrero Setzer holds a bag she designed in the Tumbao store in New York. The “no tariffs” lettering was made with cut-out letters from magazines. Art is a global business. While it might make sense to urge consumers to buy local when it comes to eggs and lettuce, buying exclusively local is not typically a thing when it comes to art institutions. Neither is buying only American-made art.

2 weeks ago | latimes.com | Jessica Gelt

Pasadena Playhouse was designated the State Theatre of California by the Legislature in 1937. The Los Angeles Times declared the Pasadena Playhouse a “theater of unusual beauty” when it opened May 18, 1925, and for the next hundred years it was a home for pure drama, onstage and off. Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald staged world premieres, and Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman roamed the hallways of architect Elmer Grey’s Spanish Colonial Revival landmark.