'The Pitt' Star Noah Wyle Visits the LA Museum Founded by His Grandmother _ Architectural Digest

My grandmother really felt that art should be a democratic thing and she wanted to demythologize art being an institutional concept and really put it into environments where communities and everyday people could experience and appreciate it. So that was the intention behind this museum was to make it tactile, available, inclusive, and reflective of Los Angeles's population. This place is amazing. We are in the California Craft Contemporary Museum which is where my grandmother back in 1965 founded an art gallery salon called the Egg in the Eye and then that later became the Crafted Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles. So I spent most of my childhood in this building. It's an extremely sentimental both to me as Edith Wiley's grandson but also it's sort of got cultural significance to the city of Los Angeles. My grandmother was a classically trained artist and she was a protege to a well-known painter named Rico Lebrun and because of her Russian Jewish upbringing and the sort of almost anarchistic political views of our family they were really unconventional people. It's really a lovely thing to drive down Wilshire Boulevard and see the plaque that's elevated that says this is Edith Wiley Square. It means a lot not just to me but I have a 10-year-old daughter who was doing a class project last year on Los Angeles landmarks and she saw that the California Craft Contemporary was one of the choices so she chose it. She got to research her own family and our family's contributions to the city. It's now become a perennial trip for her school. I think that's one of the other things that I just love about this place is it's constantly trying to figure out ways of making itself more relevant and more accessible to the community whether that's bringing in school groups or having classes here for adults or children or doing these exhibits that reflect either old messaging, new messaging, new cultures, new artists mixed with old influences. It feels extremely active again and that's very exciting. I couldn't be more pleased at the administration that's here now because they have a real appreciation for the museum's history and the intentionality behind its founding. Hello I'm Freda Cano. I'm the senior curator at Craft Contemporary. Welcome. Part of what we do here is listening to the architecture and based on that we curate and we design the flow and the intention of what we do. So on this side we have our egg and the eye at Craft Contemporary shop. So you'll see a curated selection of handmade objects from different parts of the world. On this side of the window we have a very beautiful display. It has eggs and an eye. That is referencing the original name that Edith Wiley used. A very playful one by the way. The egg because it was a restaurant an omelet restaurant and of course the eye because it enchanted the eye with the objects in the gallery. By the way if you're looking for a last minute gift idea the gift shop you will always find the perfect thing. It will be unlike any other gift that's given at that party and will be incredibly unique. I worked in that gift shop when I was a teenager. We all worked in that gift shop when we were teenagers. California-based artist Shrine designed and painted the facade of our building. He took all the elements that are featured in this Neo-Georgian style and incorporated those into his designs. This is like a shrine basically dedicated to the contemporary art. So it's very much in synchronicity his work and what we do here at Craft Contemporary. My grandmother's office was just over here and those dormer windows that you can see from the facade the middle one was her office window and I remember sitting in that dormer window and staring out across the La Brea Tar Pits which are directly across the street at those huge mastodons that are stuck in tar. She would give me art supplies to draw and while away the hours while she and and those are some of my fondest memories. My grandparents are gone. Their home is gone. Pretty much everything's been changed. The fact that this is still here and I can still touch this floor and look at these beams and remember my grandmother's office and remember the time we slid down the banister. Remember the time my grandfather put the strong arm to me when I got on the yard and said you should put an elevator in the museum Noah. You should really put the elevator in the museum Noah. You should pay for that. So I did. That's my elevator. Occasionally it breaks but right now it's functioning. My wife teases me that every time I drive around with her I go oh you know what that used to be oh you know what that was oh that was you know what that was I used to go that over there and we watch iconic landmarks get bulldozed over to build high rises constantly and then during the fires we lose you know significant pieces of history like the Will Rogers house and how close we almost lost the Getty for example. This city's fragile so to have this building be here still means a lot to me. Its original design was for a bakery and this is where my grandmother used to come to buy the birthday cakes for her children my father and his two sisters and then after the bakery closed this was Arthur Murray's dance studio and then my grandmother took it over in 1965 with the egg in the eye and that lasted until she opened the Crafted Folk Art Museum and it's just been going ever since. So from the second floor you will find a very beautiful thing. There are some cracks and we had a show based on Kintsugi. Inspired by the exhibition we actually fixed the cracks on our staircase. We wanted to make sure that the cracks are part of the whole history of the museum. We are telling a story with it. This effort that we have here that we co-create at Craft Contemporary are actually like love letters to the people who live here in Los Angeles but also beyond. It's like love letters from Los Angeles to the world. I think Los Angeles has always been you know it's funny the La Brea Tar Pits are sort of want to talk about early early early Los Angeles history. It sort of begins here anciently and is is being exhumed all the time across the street. I always thought it was ironic that the Screen Actors Guild is also right across the street also beckoning people to this Shangri-La only to find out that it's really a tar pit that sucks you in. This is such a transplant city you know everybody comes here from someplace else to do something very specific but it's very rare when you come across somebody who's actually born and bred here. I think Angelenos by nature are as cool as they come and as temperate as the climate and extremely broad-minded in terms of embracing other cultures other ideas. This is a melting pot and always has been and the fact that we pull off this miracle of the city every day as well as we do is a testament to the character of its inhabitants. So I'm really proud to be an Angeleno.