July 2026

If you've been following this blog or my days in general, you probably know my current between lives work situation gives me one day off each week, so I do my best to make Tuesdays interesting and momentous with an activity like a museum visit. Here's the rundown for July.


• Tuesday 07 July

This didn't count as momentous, but I enjoyed hanging out at the Century City Mall. In an unusual configuration, you enter from the Santa Monica Boulevard sidewalk (there's also an attached parkade), and once you're inside the mall two floors of shops, department stores, and eateries open up.

Unlike many shopping centers, this one is alive, well, and a cool place to chill. It's larger and not as upscale as The Grove, and it's slightly less plebeian than shopping centers like Culver City that's also a Westfield. The LA Westside neighborhood of Century City claims pride of place in between the municipality of Beverly Hills and the Westwood hood where UCLA resides.

Because there was a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf I had to have a hazelnut frappe; did you know CB&TL does hazelnut much better than anywhere else?

With Subway's current meal of the day rotation featuring Tuna on Tuesdays, you know what I got.


• Tuesday14 July

• Village Square at LACMA.


• Tuesday 21 July

• Getty Center again because they had some new exhibits I intended to view, but instead of visiting them I sat around various spots inside and out and took some pictures.


• Tuesday 28 July

Again this time, I didn't write a separate blog for the last Tuesday of the month. I went back to the Getty and into the Research Institute building where I visited Lost, Found, Returned about the provenance of a particular drawing and Stendahl's World—Marketing Ancient Mexico and Modern Art in Los Angeles. I'd seen the word "provenance" before, but I didn't know the meaning. Provenance is where something originates (pro+venire=comes from), along with its journey if it has one beyond place of birth. In many ways tracing provenance is like tracking the title trail for a real property—especially legal aspects of both.

I don't link to the exhibitions on museum websites because they'll be gone as soon as the art in question is gone, but I strongly encourage you to check out Earl L. Stendahl's acquisitions, exhibitions, and sales, particularly when he got into Mesoamerican art and artifacts that became a trend and a status symbol. Everything wasn't genuine, and he left devastation behind at the excavation sites.

Wikipedia says, "He sold Mexican and Central American antiquities that were often stolen, looted, or assembled from disparate fragments. Often sold to Hollywood collectors, to museums, and even department stores." To think it happened during the century we just left!