By Victoria Thomas Altadena-based artist James Griffith greets me at his studio, located in a refurbished 1920s firehouse diagonally across the street from the gleaming silver lagomorph of the restored Bunny Museum, by saying "Hi, I just started putting a galaxy in the armpit of a penguin." Great cities announce their identities through their monuments. New York City has the Statue of Liberty, St. Louis the Gateway Arch, Chicago the Cloud Gate, Philadelphia the original LOVE

By Betty Ann Brown "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."—Sol LeWitt Dean De Cocker creates richly conceived, exquisitely crafted, and visually delightful artworks that shuttle between abstraction and conceptual representation. He has long been drawn to machines, from bicycles to motorcycles, cars to airplanes, and formal echoes of these devices appear in his current body of work, exhibited at the Visual Arts Center in the small Central California town of Visalia. W

By Victoria Thomas Photographer and ceramic artist Catherine (Cathy) Opie first shocked and rocked the fine art world with her self-portraits during the late 1990s. Today, her decades of work — often termed confessional — now serve as context for the far more enigmatic Holding Blue installation, on view at Regen Projects through July 3. The Los Angeles-based artist identifies as a leather dyke, lesbian cowboy, an elder, and as "Mama Cathy," with a mustachioed male alter-ego n