Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Journal of Alta California

Jim Marshall’s genius lay in capturing images whose stories stretch far beyond their frames. Jimi Hendrix smiling down at his flame-engulfed guitar during the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival defines not only that iconic artist but also the legendary festival and the gilded age of rock itself. “He called himself ‘a reporter with a camera,’” says Marshall’s longtime assistant Amelia Davis. Davis worked with Marshall for 13 years before he passed away in 2010, leaving his estate to her. “He always said that his children were his photographs. His life was his photography,” says Davis. Marshall was self-taught; he bought his first Leica camera in 1959, when he started taking pictures of jazz musicians in San Francisco’s North Beach. He used an inconspicuous, easy-to-carry camera with a quiet shutter as he…

PAM HOUSTON Author, Deep Creek Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family (Scribner) details the experience of being poor and black in Portland, Oregon, one of America’s whitest cities, and how he “composed a father from the men at hand,” absorbing love whenever and wherever it was offered. Stephanie Land’s Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive (Hachette) is an unapologetic and deeply affecting memoir of a single mother’s fight to feed and house herself and her child—and also a searing critique of how the American economy is stacked against anyone below the poverty line. Amy Irvine’s Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness (Torrey House Press) offers a talk-back to Edward Abbey, and a prayer that we can come together on…

Rachel Monroe is not letting herself off the hook. Her book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession, may address women’s fascination with crime, but her first object of study is herself. “Over the years,” she writes, “I’ve read thousands of pages about various varieties of Killer (Zodiac, Green River, BTK, Lonely Hearts) and Strangler (Hillside, Boston); don’t even get me started on the time I’ve devoted to goofy little Charlie Manson. My brothers can have entire conversations just tossing baseball statistics back and forth; certain friends and I do the same thing with serial murderers.” The book is funny, unflinching, and brilliant. Ultimately, Monroe’s examination yields a surprising outcome: an unsentimental empathy for crime fans, victims, and even the killers themselves. How did you come to…

PETER ORNER Author, Maggie Brown & Others The greatest American short story writer you’ve never read is a Californian: Gina Berriault (1926–1999). I reread her often to remember why I try to do what I do. Every time I open Women in Their Beds (Counterpoint Press), I become immersed in the lives of her people, who have become as familiar (and as mysterious) as members of my family. And my God, her sentences: “The immensity of light—the glare from the winter sky and the reflected glare from the ocean—shocked her asleep at noon.” Nona Caspers’s recent novel The Fifth Woman (Sarabande Books) is outstanding. An intimate and devastating examination of love in all its forms, written as if with a scalpel. Fat City by Leonard Gardner (New York Review Books).…

KIMI EISELE Author, The Lightest Object in the Universe Kira Jane Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom (Grand Central Publishing) is narrated by a crow named S.T., the pet of a sports fan who, with all the other humans, falls into zombie-dom. This postapocalyptic novel offers deep insights about human nature, pop culture, and what it means to cooperate with those who are different. Americans must tell the truth in Ben H. Winters’s Golden State (Mulholland Books). Speculative Service member Laszlo Ratesic enforces this law by using special powers and surveillance that will make you think twice about Google and Alexa. While cleaning her grandfather’s house, Casiopea Tun unleashes the Mayan god of death, who needs her help to regain his throne from his twin brother. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow…

ISHMAEL REED Author, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico The poems in Adam Soldofsky’s Memory Foam (Disorder Press) take a scalpel to the fat. “For a long time,” he writes, “I wanted to be called a / lawbreaker and a mad dog / that I might be thought wiser, I / became a lonesome celebrant / and you, are you moneyed / and unheard of / are you worn / around the neck like a friend.” In his first book, Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press), Vernon Keeve III writes about being queer and black in a part of the nation that still acts like a separate country with its own flag and heroes. In one poem, an old slave auction block serves as a plaything for white kids. The highlight…

JEFFREY DEITCH Since opening a West Coast outpost in 2018, New York–based Jeffrey Deitch has put on shows featuring work by Ai Weiwei and Judy Chicago, among others. 925 N. Orange Dr., Los Angeles, deitch.com/los-angeles THUMBPRINT GALLERY Upscale La Jolla has a home for the lowbrow street art and pop surrealism of local artists. 920 Kline St., La Jolla, thumbprintgallery.com 29 PALMS CREATIVE CENTER & GALLERY Not far from Joshua Tree National Park, 29 Palms sells paintings, ceramics, and jewelry that reflect High Desert traditions. 6847 Adobe Rd., 29 Palms, 29palmsart.com…

Can’t get to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert for Burning Man? Then visit OMCA to see scores of massive community-driven sculptures and installations—including a 40-foot-tall temple crafted by lauded Bay Area sculptor David Best (whose work is often ritually set afire at the end of the weeklong art-centric celebration). The exhibition, which originated at the Smithsonian, also includes a companion show: City of Dust: The Evolution of Burning Man traces Burning Man from its countercultural origins in the San Francisco Bay Area to the world-renowned city in the desert it is today. What a long, strange trip it’s been for blue jeans—from utilitarian denim work pants created by Bavarian-born Levi Strauss in 1873 in San Francisco all the way to his namesake company’s IPO in early 2019. Levi Strauss is a…

In the mid-’90s, Portland’s contemporary arts scene was nearly nonexistent. Artist Kristy Edmunds filled the void by founding the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, an organization dedicated to showcasing what it describes as “vital and provocative” work from experimental artists. Edmunds couldn’t have gotten PICA off the ground without Victoria Frey, who, in her 18 years at PICA, has helped turn Portland into a hub of progressive art and activism. Frey spent her childhood on a peach orchard outside Medford, Oregon, until her family moved to Portland when she was in sixth grade. After stints in New York and Los Angeles during her late teens and early 20s, she moved back home and fell headfirst into the city’s budding arts community. In 1984, Frey opened PDXS, an alternative space that…

In 1953, Life magazine dubbed a group including Guy Anderson, Mark Tobey, and Morris Graves as the Northwest School of artists. Palette reimagines their work by examining the ways their sexual and emotional identities informed their styles of production. This exhibition, featuring paintings, drawings, photography, and ceramic objects by the aforementioned school as well as by artists Sarah Spurgeon and Virginia Weisel, honors the output of gay artists in the Pacific Northwest while also recognizing the hostility and discrimination they long faced. It is the first exhibition of its kind to explore the region’s gay artists. The works of 19 indigenous artists, including Wendy Red Star, Meryl McMaster, and Gregg Deal, are on display in this ambitious group exhibition that seeks to upend the legacy of non-Native painters and photographers…

The most popular American writer of his too-brief heyday, Jack London died just over a century ago at the age of 40, his health seriously deteriorated by the long-term wear of alcohol, tropical maladies, and other ails. Yet he proved to be a very modern celebrity, using every tool available—including film—to expand his brand. During the last half of his life, motion pictures outgrew their initial identity as a presumedly short-term novelty. The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, greatly advancing “flickers” as both an art form and a political lightning rod. By then, the media-savvy writer had appeared on-screen several times, and movie versions of his stories were already ubiquitous. This year will bring two high-profile adaptations of London’s work—both very different from anything he could have…

One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. —JAMES JOYCE, “THE DEAD” The October issue of Alta featured painter Russell Chatham in what would become his final interview: “You’re an Artist. That’s What You Do.” Sadly, Russ died a few weeks after the edition came out. With his passing, we have promoted him on our masthead from our Editorial Board to a position on the Our Inspiration roll. This list recognizes people who have shaped the arts, culture, and life of the West, and whose contributions help guide our editorial ambitions. The western sensibility is like the Grand Canyon, built up layer by layer from those who came before…

Floyd C. Covington was exceptionally good at his job. When he identified a white businessman open to his ideas, Covington would correspond or meet with the man for weeks, sometimes months—however long it would take for the white man to employ black workers. As executive director of the Los Angeles Urban League in the 1930s and ’40s, Covington preached the gospel of what he termed “the Negro Market.” Using statistics, hard sales numbers, boycotts, and old-fashioned man-to-man conversations, he worked relentlessly to convince white business owners that ending their discriminatory hiring policies would benefit their bottom lines. He called upon Goodyear Tires, Thrifty Drugstores, Bank of America, and many others, persuading them to consider hiring black Angelenos. And not for just any jobs. He wanted African Americans to move beyond…

Thomas Pynchon has never, ever granted an interview. This titanically talented writer guards his privacy like a flight risk. The National Enquirer recently stalked Pynchon for six months before stealing a photograph of him as he voted at his local polling place, which, to some of us, was like shooting a GI in the act of raising the American flag. Pynchon’s stance is that of every private writer: let the books speak for themselves. The following Q&A takes very literally this reticent author’s plea. Here is the story of Pynchon’s life and work, with a particular focus on California, as told via his nine books. His answers are his own words, taken verbatim, one book at a time, from V. up through Bleeding Edge. A fine writer and his characters…

In mid-20th-century Southern California, Dorothy Hall kept records of her family—her husband and “four drifty children.” She tracked them in her diary and in rolls of Kodak film. She made scrapbooks in which she constructed, out of her memories, a story as sunny, she hoped, as its West Coast setting. After Hall’s death in 2008, her daughter, the actor Diane Keaton, became the family documentarian. She acquired her mother’s 32 journals, 15 scrapbooks, 20 photo albums, and hundreds of letters. She would also absorb her now-dying younger brother Randy’s archive of poetry, notebooks, and journals. “I want to understand that mystery,” Keaton writes in her vivid memoir Brother & Sister. “Or at least try to understand the complexity of loving someone so different.” Reexamining photos, reading between the lines of…

DENISE HAMILTON Author, Damage Control The cop in Ben H. Winters’s dystopic Golden State (Mulholland Books) pursues liars in a future where, after an apocalypse exacerbated by fake news, falsehoods are illegal. This love child of George Orwell and Jim Thompson explores what’s lost when truth is enshrined at the cost of creative thought. In Nina Revoyr’s A Student of History (Akashic Books), a grad student takes a job with an enigmatic matriarch in Los Angeles and discovers a long-buried secret. Like all the best mysteries, the novel illuminates society and its dark corners. Serial killer Israel Keyes grew up in hate-filled doomsday cults. Later he roamed Alaska and the Lower 48, murdering and stashing “kill kits.” Maureen Callahan tells his story in American Predator: The Hunt for the Most…

After the success of his 2010 novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu turned his attention to Hollywood, working in television for Westworld and Here and Now as a writer and story editor. He is hardly the first novelist to make that move. Faulkner and Fitzgerald did it; Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury too. Recently, Michael Chabon became the showrunner of Star Trek: Picard. Still, in the words of Dennis Lehane, screenwriting and novel writing are “apples and giraffes. Completely different, outside of their core narrative DNA.” Yu’s new book, Interior Chinatown, seeks to splice the mediums. Nominally, it is a novel, but it borrows the form, style, and argot of a screenplay. In some ways, this makes sense, for it tells the story of a…

No matter how dynamic I find Los Angeles, sometimes it feels like part of the furniture. What I mean is that even when you love a place, it can be hard to see. This is the appeal of three new books that offer a series of unexpected takes on the city and its vernacular. Considered together, they yield surprising parallels and intersections, overlapping like the railway lines on one of the Huntington Library’s yellowed maps of the city of a century ago. Nineteen Nineteen, edited by Huntington curators James Glisson and Jennifer A. Watts, takes a global view of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens’ founding year by pulling disparate artifacts—women’s-suffrage posters, wage ledgers, World War I relics—from the institution’s collections. Published to accompany the Huntington Centennial Celebration’s…

SUSAN STRAIGHT Author, In the Country of Women Erosion: Essays of Undoing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Terry Tempest Williams brings us to the giant sequoias of Yosemite National Park’s Mariposa Grove. Humans love Yosemite, but Williams reminds us we aren’t more important than the trees, rivers, or other animals. Outdoor adventure can be hard in a city, but Wild LA: Explore the Amazing Nature in and Around Los Angeles (Timber Press) by Lila Higgins and Gregory B. Pauly, along with Charles Hood and Alta contributor Jason G. Goldman, reveals trails and more than 100 species of plants and animals, including bats, and native trees and flowers. I loved Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country (W.W. Norton), about a beloved ranch in Colorado, the animals the…

Bettina Korek is the executive director of Frieze Los Angeles, a branch of the prestigious London-based art fair (you can catch it in New York, too). A longtime evangelist for the Southern California art scene and founder of the art advocacy organization For-YourArt, Korek surprised doubters last February with the success of Frieze’s first West Coast appearance. Long regarded as too sprawling or provincial to support an international art fair on the scale of Miami Beach’s Art Basel or the Armory Show in New York City, Los Angeles, it turned out, was ripe and ready for exactly that (30,000 people passed through over four days). Here, Korek shares what we can expect from Frieze round two, which will be at Paramount Pictures Studios from February 14 to 16. —SCOTT TIMBERG…

FRAENKEL GALLERY This revered gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with Long Story Short, a survey of photography from the daguerreotype to the digital era. 49 Geary St., 4th Fl., San Francisco, fraenkelgallery.com PIER 24 PHOTOGRAPHY The nonprofit Pilara Foundation’s permanent collection includes a breadth of portrait work. Pier 24, the Embarcadero, San Francisco, pier24.org UC BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE The art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive is home to more than 23,000 works of art and 17,500 films and videos. 2155 Center St., Berkeley, bampfa.org…

HALLIE FORD MUSEUM OF ART It might surprise you, but Willamette University’s museum is the third largest in Oregon. Stop in for permanent exhibitions spotlighting artists of the Pacific Northwest, Asia, and the Americas. (From January 7 through April 26, catch a unique show about chess sets.) 700 State St., Salem, willamette.edu/arts/hfma/index.html JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART In the early aughts, Jordan D. Schnitzer donated a large sum to help expand what was formerly known as the University of Oregon Museum of Art (hence the name change). Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and American artworks are staples, while masterpieces by Keith Haring, Marc Chagall, and others often find their way onto gallery walls. 1430 Johnson Ln., Eugene, jsma.uoregon.edu…

WA NA WARI This new kid on the block is a collaboratively curated space for exhibitions, artist talks, and performances that primarily champions the work of black contemporary artists. 911 24th Ave., Seattle, wanawari.org HENRY ART GALLERY The University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery consists of more than 28,500 objects, from sculpture and paintings to costumes and textiles. 15th Ave. NE and NE 41st St., University of Washington, Seattle, henryart.org METHOD GALLERY Known for their appreciation of quirky materials and concepts, the artists of Method seek to engage the Pioneer Square community in nontraditional aesthetics you won’t see in commercial galleries. 106 3rd Ave. S., Seattle, methodgallery.com…

On a recent evening at the restaurant Dear John’s in Culver City, Frank Sinatra’s supple baritone crooned its way across crowded dining room tables laden with steaks and martinis. Sliding onto an empty stool, I asked the bartender if the packed house was standard for a Tuesday night. He barely looked up from the Manhattan he was stirring: “This is one of the slowest nights we’ve had since we opened.” Dear John’s, the recent reboot of a steakhouse that dates to 1962, has been booked solid throughout its first six months of business, a level of success that has surprised even its veteran operators, Hans Röckenwagner and Josiah Citrin, two chef-restaurateurs with nearly six decades of experience between them, and Röckenwagner’s wife, Patti, an entertainment executive and co-owner. But there…

Drab images of walls, fences, barbed wire, and lookout towers flash across the screen. A chyron displays the name of the fearsome prison. Inmates talk about solitude and the abandonment by friends and family they must deal with while doing time. But then comes salvation in the form of one of America’s greatest musical acts, dressed head to toe in black, greeting prisoners in their cells, ready to bring a voice to these voiceless with a concert. You’ve heard this one before, of course. But no, you haven’t. Fifty years ago, Johnny Cash recorded the live album At Folsom Prison not just to sell records but also to bear witness to this country’s inhumane penal system. To honor that storied performance, conjunto norteño legends Los Tigres del Norte followed in…

Someone invented this. If a personpees on a wall so painted,the pee splashes back,wets the pants, soaks the shoes. Surprise! the wall says. Someone thought this a good solution.Someone gave it a color. FROM LEDGER, BY JANE HIRSHFIELD, FORTHCOMING FROM KNOPF IN MARCH 2020 Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight poetry books, including The Beauty and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has been honored with the Poetry Center Book Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets.…

The essay is experiencing a renaissance. At the same time, there’s quite a lot of confusion about what an essay is and what it does. Often, when people talk about “an essay,” it’s actually an op-ed or some opinion-driven riff that employs the first person. Must a so-called essay truly be an essay? Does it matter if it’s some other form? Such questions arise in regard to the work of Rebecca Solnit, who in recent years has published five collections of topical nonfiction. One, Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), was long-listed for a 2018 National Book Award. Their component pieces, originally published in venues such as Literary Hub, the Guardian, and Harper’s, are mostly commentary written in response to current events. In book form, they…

DAVID KIPEN Editor, Dear Los Angeles Palm Springs should host a Postmodernism Week, and Gere Kavanaugh should be its queen. Her Day-Glo designs are a trapdoor into 1960s California. Louise Sandhaus and Kat Catmur’s A Colorful Life: Gere Kavanaugh, Designer (Princeton Architectural Press) is as lovely as fuchsia—and long overdue. Shawn Levy’s The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont (Doubleday) uses fluent prose, careful observation, and dishy anecdotes to tell the story of Los Angeles’s most decadently homey hotel. In Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, a Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State (Counterpoint Press), Nick Neely retraces the Portolá expedition through California 250 years ago. Traveling from the Mexican border to Los Angeles and the Bay, Neely reveals…

Back in the days of the first Muslim ban—that catastrophe, a million catastrophes ago, at the onset of the current administration—people on social media started to post lists of the many remarkable things that immigrants (and Muslim immigrants specifically) have done in the United States, across every field. Lifesaving doctors, innovative leaders, great teachers. Steve Jobs, even. It was a bighearted impulse. Yet some of us thought, uneasily, Well, sure, that’s great, but what about the Muslim kid in a basement in San Jose getting stoned and playing Call of Duty? The president wasn’t trying to turn Americans against Islam out of a belief that the religion inhibits individual achievement. He was doing it because most Muslims have brown skin. This, of course, is not a thing anybody could, or…

The Captain and the Glory is a farce in the tradition of the great satirists. An unqualified leader rises to power on a ship once helmed by a great man. The boat’s passengers elect this “known moron” because he has promised to shake things up. The leader fires the experienced crew, surrounds himself with sycophants and criminals, and installs his daughter in a position of authority. You can see where this is headed. In this short novel, Dave Eggers takes aim at feckless commanders and their followers, but it is the Kindly Mutineers who come out worst: those who stand by wringing their hands as the captain bends his knee to despots and murders the innocent. —HEATHER SCOTT PARTINGTON Mark Z. Danielewski’s parable The Little Blue Kite insists that the…

I always thought that big, epic poem-cycles like Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues, William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You were attempts to articulate in “real-time” the poet’s psychic “news feed,” but I’ve never had that sense so emphatically as with Tommy Pico’s Feed. Perhaps because of its showcasing of anti-academic hipster registers, configured through pop culture allusions (accompanied, of course, by a playlist). It’s a breakup poem, bicoastal queer POC experience declaimed from the High Line, interpolated in an Eleni Sikelianos/Juan Felipe Herrera flow. —SESSHU FOSTER Jake Skeets’s Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is marked by a sublime and mournful rupturing. The collection interrogates masculinity; positions queerness…

JOEL SARTORE Founder, Photo Ark In Day to Night (Taschen), Stephen Wilkes captures the passage of time in photographic images that are themselves each composed of some 1,500 smaller images. Wilkes spent nearly 10 years putting this work together and incorporates everything from animals at a water hole in the Serengeti to taxis in Times Square. Along the way, he allows us to see the world anew. Women: The National Geographic Image Collection (National Geographic) comes just in time for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, and it is gorgeous from front to back. And why not? It is National Geographic, after all. Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns’s Country Music: An Illustrated History (Knopf)—the companion volume to Burns’s PBS series—is a detailed celebration of a truly American musical form.…

It’s fitting that a mimeograph of R. Buckminster Fuller’s cautionary 4D Time World is the first image one sees upon entering the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s eclectic, exuberant exhibition Far Out: Suits, Habs, and Labs for Outer Space. The futurist designer-architect’s chaotic print from 1928 warns of a planet plagued by strained resources and exploding population growth, where “2,000,000,000 new homes will be required in the next 80 years.” “With all the collective buzz about the 50th anniversary of the historic moon landing and so much attention being paid to advances in human habitation in space, this felt like an important moment of looking back, but also a moment of looking forward,” says SFMOMA associate curator of architecture and design Joseph Becker, who brought the exhibition to life…

When it opened in 1972, the Portland Center for the Visual Arts was hailed as a triumph. Created by artists for artists, the space played host to progressive (and impressive) behemoths, including Joan Jonas, Robert Irwin, Meredith Monk, and Bruce Nauman. After struggling financially, the PCVA closed in 1987. This show asks whether an institution that propagated art-world biases was ever socially conscious. Composed of works from the maverick curatorial agency Triple Candie—none of which are “art” but all of which are “unfaithful…reproductions, surrogates, models, stage-sets, or common objects”—Being Present sets out to celebrate PCVA’s legacy while also examining its contradictions. Marlon Mullen is on the autism spectrum and rarely or never uses words to communicate—unless he’s painting. The Richmond, California–based artist takes found photography and headlines, often from publications…

Art has long been a powerful tool in moving culture forward on issues of social justice, but it has a lousy history of gender inequity: a 2019 analysis by ArtNet, an art market website, found that only 11 percent of works acquired by top museums in the United States between 2008 and 2018 were by women. Three exhibitions in the Seattle area suggest refreshing ways to rewrite this troublesome narrative. BODY LANGUAGE Unsettling Femininity: Selections from the Frye Art Museum Collection features oil-on-canvas works by many artists—Franz von Stuck, Gustav Majer, Lillian Genth, Ludwig Knaus, and others—all of which tackle perceptions of the female form. Naomi Hume, an associate professor of art history at Seattle University, guest-curated the show and divided it into four chapters: judgment, morality, performance, and artifice.…

Driving along California Highway 41 toward Paso Robles, you can’t help but be struck by the waves of golden foothills that surround the two-lane blacktop. But continue on and you’ll be rewarded with an even more astonishing sight at Sensorio: Bruce Munro: Field of Light, 15 acres of land filled with more than 58,000 colorful fiber-optic “flowers.” The work was consciously created to be an immersive experience—which is to say, it’s prime Instagram fodder. And that makes it the most modern kind of art. As Instagram continues its meteoric rise in popularity—the photo-sharing app had one billion active monthly users as of 2018—there has been a similar uptick in pop-up museums and exhibitions across the West (and all over the world) that have been built strictly for the social media set…

Step into Hedley & Bennett’s headquarters in the industrial town of Vernon, in southeast Los Angeles, for the first time and you may mistake the place for a kid’s gym gearing up for a six-year-old’s birthday party. There’s a tree house, a sinuous slide, and awesome, free ice cream. But walk farther inside and you’ll see a wildly successful chefs’ wear company in full swing. About 20 workers are bent over their sewing machines, stitching together denim aprons. Inspirational quotes from Julia Child and Walt Disney are painted on the sun-drenched walls. And on the other side of the building, aprons and chef coats in indigo, mustard, sky blue, and San Marzano red decorate an airy showroom, while adult- and child-size mannequins in matching crimson aprons stand on a pedestal…