California
‘There’s so much beauty’: artists celebrate California in the wake of tragedy
The California artist Dashiell Manley had been at work for over a year on the paintings he was to exhibit at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s elegant new show California Is Somewhere Else when fate intervened. In early January, he set the works to dry in his studio in Altadena – and two days later nearby Eaton Canyon was engulfed in flames, part of recent California wildfires. “My sense of security was shattered around 11pm on January 7th,” Manley told me via video interview. “I went in the studio and it was smoky, and all the paintings were wet.”
That night, Manley’s thoughts were more preoccupied with protecting his family and grabbing on to what precious mementoes he could take with him as he fled the fires. His studio was ultimately spared, but the paintings were not: smoke and other particles embedded into the still-wet surface, ruining the pieces. “I don’t know that I’ve processed that these 10 paintings that I’ve spent a year working on are gone,” he told me. “They smell like a camp fire, and there’s lead particles in the surface – I don’t want to touch them. It’s weird how they’re gone but they’re not.”
In lieu of those works, Manley is showing a suite of vibrantly colorful, intricately layered oil pieces, in which he uses a palette knife to painstakingly carve innumerable overlapping objects resembling a folding fan into the paint. Using the back of his hand for a palette, Manley works quickly, layering up color upon color on to the linen canvass.
“I go back into them multiple times, it’s a very additive and layered process,” he said. “It’s largely muscle memory and intuition at this point. I could duplicate the painting but I couldn’t tell you how.”
The resultant pieces have a structural quality reminiscent of the layered paintings of Jay DeFeo. There are many points for the eye to access them, pleasurably wandering around throughout the intricate networks of color and texture. “I’ve always wanted to make work that has as many entry points to the viewer as possible,” Manley said.
The colors comprising Manley’s paintings are analogous to those that encompass the tones of a southern California sky from dawn to dusk: a range of blues, reds, oranges and yellows. Flecks of green are mixed in, along with veins and pops of black that provide structure and weight to the overall composition. “I’ve been struck by beauty being a counterpoint to grief,” he said. “Working on these paintings has become a kind of routine, in a good way. I noticed how meaningful that routine was for me after the Eaton fire, and how this is something I can never really stop doing.”
The Haas Brothers’ gorgeous, art nouveau Moon Towers sit comfortably alongside Dashiell Manley’s paintings in the exhibition. Nikolai Haas and his twin brother, Simon, have always felt deeply influenced by the southern California landscape and way of life. Together, they create dreamy, tactile sculptures informed by a lifelong connection to the California way of being.
“It’s just like, things come from nothing here,” Nikolai told me while musing on the feeling of being a Californian. “There’s something about the landscape and the vibe and the energy here. There’s something about California being so geographically removed from rest of the US historically, it being so difficult to get here. It’s its own kind of place.”
The Moon Towers are inspired by actual streetlights that were a common part of cityscapes throughout the 1800s but that went into decline around the turn of the century. A few such streetlights still existed in Austin in the 1990s, where the Haas Brothers spent several youthful years. Once they returned to California, they brought memories of the towers with them and began working on their own takes on the structures. “In the 90s, Austin was at the top of its alt moment,” Nikolai said. “It was a very 90s, grunge stoner culture. For us the Moon Tower is the hero of that moment in our upbringing. Going back home, we wanted to make something that signified our creative growing up.”
Simon added: “If I could city plan Los Angeles, I’d do a lot of things, and one would be to install Moon Towers. They’re so big that they light up whole neighborhoods, but the lighting is low-key, moonlike. We’re trying to capture that feeling and pay homage to this different perspective. Moodwise we’re leaning into this dreaminess, the safety and fantasy and sheer LA of it.”
Inspired by snowbells, the pieces rise up in lithe, sinuous columns of jade green, then droop over at the top, where a lightbulb is inserted, casting a carefully chosen hue. Some of them rise up to almost 9ft in height, while others would fit comfortably on to an end table. The brothers worked carefully to find just the right temperature of lightbulb to give their sculptures a transportive glow for any who stand within their light. “We want to create an experience,” said Nikolai. “Something to take someone a little out of their reality.”
The show is rounded out by Anthony Pearson’s minimalist sculpture, whose seeming simplicity belies an exacting technique that leaves the surfaces of his pieces covered in networks of densely worked texture. These are deeply meditative works that draw in a viewer’s eye with their beguiling plays of light, and that reward careful, lengthy examination. As Taney Roniger put it in The Brooklyn Rail: “the strongest unifying thread here is the sense of mystery and wonder that these works exude … [T]hese pieces encourage a shift away from discursive reason toward deeper, more intuitive reflection, and the effect is a rich contemplative experience.”
What makes California Is Somewhere Else such a remarkable success is how its works so effortlessly showcase the sublimity that lives in California – both in its landscape and its cityscape – and that is a key ingredient in the psyche of the Golden state. A place of excesses and enormities, it nonetheless inspires a sense of safety and familiarity that gives rise to fantastic flights of artistic fancy. As Manley put it: “When I feel like I’m out of my body, I go to the mountains, I have this hike with these giant rocks. I lay on these rocks, and everything that is so monumentally large in those moments becomes small. I feel small, everything becomes small. There’s so much beauty in this experience.”
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As the nation prepares for its 250th Independence Day celebration, a decades-long California Fourth of July fireworks tradition that has raised millions for local children’s programs is going dark this year after the California Coastal Commission rejected a final effort to keep it alive, citing environmental concerns to protect the bay.
“We’ve raised over the past 14 years $2 million for kids programs here in Long Beach,” event organizer John Morris told Fox News Digital, adding the July 3 event is fully funded by the local community.
“This community pays for everything — everything. City fees, and the city doesn’t give us a break. We pay $20,000 to the city for police and fire, which I’m fine with, because there’s 100,000 people enjoying the fireworks,” said Morris, a Long Beach resident and business owner.
Morris, who owns the Boathouse on the Bay restaurant, had planned a scaled-up fireworks display this year to mark America’s 250th Independence Day.
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Long Beach residents have enjoyed the fireworks organized by John Morris for over a decade. (Scott Varley/MediaNews Group/Torrance Daily Breeze via Getty Images)
In January, Coastal Commission staff rejected the proposal, and last week commissioners unanimously upheld that decision despite an appeal backed by local, state and federal officials.
Regulators warned Morris last year that 2025 would likely be the final year for fireworks at the event, as they continue pushing organizers to switch to drone shows they say are more environmentally friendly.
The decision stands in contrast to other approvals by the commission, including a permit granted to SeaWorld allowing up to 40 nights of fireworks.
“They get 40 nights in Mission Bay. All I’m asking for is 20 minutes — it doesn’t make any sense,” Morris said.
Morris, 78, also pushed back on the environmental concerns cited by the commission, pointing to years of testing around the event.
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Due to the lack of fireworks, Morris has decided to cancel the July 3rd celebration.
“We’ve had 10 years of environmental studies,” Morris said. “We test the water before and after the fireworks and send a robotic camera into the bay to check for debris — there’s never been any. It’s been spotless.
“We’ve also had eight years of bird reports to make sure we’re not harming wildlife. We’ve never had an issue. We’ve never been written up one time. So what is it really about?”
Joshua Smith, a spokesman for the California Coastal Commission, told Fox News Digital that permits are determined on a case-by-case basis, citing environmental concerns to “protect the bay.”
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Organizer John Morris said environmental studies are regularly conducted to measure the impact of the fireworks show on the bay. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Smith said Morris was approved for a permit to hold a drone show in lieu of fireworks. Morris told Fox News Digital such a show would cost about $200,000 — roughly four times more than traditional fireworks.
Smith confirmed that SeaWorld received a permit allowing 40 nights of fireworks. When pressed on the discrepancy, he reiterated that decisions are made individually and declined to provide further details.
Morris said the loss of the fireworks show will be felt across the community, from local businesses to families who have made the event an annual tradition.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — In the wide-open race for California governor, billionaire Tom Steyer is on a spending binge.
The hedge fund manager-turned-liberal activist is using his personal fortune to saturate TV screens and mobile phones with advertising, while his competitors accuse him of trying to use his vast wealth to buy the state’s most powerful job.
Steyer’s ads — in which he promises to bring down household costs or rails against federal immigration raids — appear inescapable at times in heavily Democratic Los Angeles, the state’s largest media market. Data compiled by advertising tracker AdImpact show Steyer has spent or booked over $115 million in ads for broadcast TV, cable and radio — nearly 30 times the amount of his nearest Democratic rival.
If he makes it through the June 2 primary election, Steyer could easily eclipse the 2010 record set by Republican Meg Whitman, who spent $178.5 million in a losing bid for governor, much of it her own money. At the time, it was the costliest campaign for statewide office in the nation’s history.
Even when ad buys from all his major competitors are combined, along with ad purchases by independent committees supporting candidates, Steyer is outspending the field by tens of millions of dollars.
“Billionaire money is flooding our state in an attempt to buy this election,” former U.S. Rep. Katie Porter, one of Steyer’s chief rivals, warned her supporters this month.
Mail-in ballots are set to go out to voters next month. Steyer is among a crowd of candidates hoping to seize a spotlight after former Democratic U.S. Rep. Eric Swalwell’s dramatic departure from the race following sexual assault allegations that he denies.
But while Steyer has ticked up in polling amid his spending splurge, he has not broken away from the field, leaving some wondering if he’s getting value for his dollars.
“If your first round of ads doesn’t move you dramatically (in the polls), the third, fourth, fifth, six, seventh and eighth rounds won’t either,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, who for years advised the late Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “There is something inherently holding Steyer back.”
In recent prior campaigns for governor, at this stage a leading candidate was taking control of the race. This year, voters appear to be shrugging at a contest that lacks a star candidate among seven leading Democrats and two Republicans.
“Somehow the campaign is frozen,” Carrick added.
History shows that money doesn’t always translate into votes.
Billionaire developer Rick Caruso spent over $100 million in 2022 in his bid to become Los Angeles mayor, much of it his own money, but he was handily defeated by Mayor Karen Bass, who spent a fraction of Caruso’s total. Billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg spent more than $1 billion of his own money on his 2020 presidential bid before dropping out. And Steyer’s money was unable to lift him into contention in the 2020 presidential contest, when he dropped out early in the year after a poor finish in the South Carolina primary.
Steyer has never held elected office.
In a 2019 interview with The Associated Press, Steyer was asked what he would say to people who think he’s trying to buy the presidency.
“I don’t think that’s possible,” Steyer said at the time, before adding, “I’m never going to apologize for succeeding in business. That’s America, right?”
His campaign did not respond directly when asked about similar criticism facing his run for governor.
“Tom now stands as the only Democrat with the grassroots energy, institutional backing and resources to advance to the general election,” spokesperson Kevin Liao said in a statement.
The governor’s race was recently reordered by two developments: Swalwell, a leading Democrat, abruptly withdrew from the race then resigned from Congress, following sexual assault allegations. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump endorsed conservative commentator Steve Hilton.
Still, there is no clear leader.
Polling in late March and early April by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found a cluster of candidates in close competition: Democrats Steyer and Porter, Republicans Hilton and Chad Bianco, and Swalwell. Other candidates were trailing. The polling was conducted before Swalwell withdrew.
Democrats have feared the party’s large number of candidates could lead to them getting shut out of the general election in November. That’s because California has a primary system in which only the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of party.
Leading Democrats are all claiming to have picked up support since Swalwell’s exit. Steyer nabbed one plum endorsement, when the influential California Teachers Association, which previously backed Swalwell, recommended him.
In his ads, Steyer promises to “abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been staging raids across California. In another, he laments the state’s punishing cost of housing, “Everybody needs an affordable place to live,” he says.
Rapper was stabbed 16 times by fellow inmate in May 2025 while 10-year sentence in Megan Thee Stallion shooting case
Tory Lanez has filed a $100 million lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections stemming from a May 2025 incident where the rapper was stabbed in prison.
Lanez — born Daystar Peterson and currently serving a 10-year sentence after being found guilty in the Megan Thee Stallion shooting case — also sued the warden and guards at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, where the rapper was stabbed 16 times in an “unprovoked life-threatening attack” by another inmate, the lawsuit states.
Peterson was hospitalized following the May 2025 incident, suffering a collapsed lung among stab wounds to his back, torso, and head.
According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit criticized the Department of Corrections for housing Peterson with fellow inmate and alleged attacker Santino Casio, who was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. “The choice to house Casio with Peterson was known or should have been a known danger,” the lawsuit said, adding that Tory Lanez’ “high-profile celebrity status” made him a target.
The lawsuit also said that prison guards were slow to respond to the shanking, and didn’t employ flash grenades or other measures to halt Casio’s attack.; Casio was not charged for stabbing Peterson, the Associated Press notes.
Lanez, who following his hospitalization was transferred to San Luis Obispo County’s California Men’s Colony, also alleges in the lawsuit that he never received his possessions from the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, including songbooks filled with lyrics to his unreleased music.
Lanez is serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the foot during a confrontation in the summer of 2020. He was eventually convicted on several firearms charges, including assault with a firearm, in December 2022. In November 2025, his appeal was denied by a three-judge panel, and the 10-year sentence was upheld.
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