Noah Wyle Visits the LA Museum Founded by His Grandmother

[calm ambient music]

My grandmother really felt

that art should be a democratic thing,

and she wanted to de-mythologize 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.

[pensive piano music]

We are in the California Craft Contemporary Museum,

which is where my grandmother, back in 1965,

founded an art gallery salon called The Egg and The Eye,

and then that later became the Craft and Folk

Art Museum of Los Angeles.

So, I spent most of my childhood in this building.

It's extremely sentimental,

both to me as Edith Wyle'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 politic views

of our family,

they were really unconventional people.

[soft ambient music]

It's really a lovely thing to drive down Wilshire Boulevard

and see the plaque that's elevated, that says,

This is Edith Wyle Square.

It means a lot, not just to me,

but I have a 10-year-old daughter

who is 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,

and 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 reflects either old messaging,

new messaging, new cultures,

new artists mixed with old influences.

It feels extremely active again, and that's very exciting.

[calm music]

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.

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Hello, I am Frida Cano.

I'm the senior career 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 Wyle 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.

[gentle piano music]

California-based artist, Shrine,

the scion 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 Patrick Ela worked,

and those are some of my fondest memories.

[soft ethereal music]

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 ER 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 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 was 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 and The Eye, and that lasted

until she opened the Craft and Folk Art Museum,

and it's just been going ever since.

[calm piano music]

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 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.

[gentle piano music]

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 wanna talk

about early, early, early Los Angeles history.

It sort of begins here anciently,

and 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 some place 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.

[gentle piano music continues]