The ladies of the PAA sure can pivot and pirouette! More than 65 members met downtown on November 3, 2025 for an early lunch, followed by an afternoon meeting at MOCA and tour of MOCA Focus: Takao Yamaguchi. Gathering beforehand at Bottega Louie, members enjoyed a delicious family-style lunch of salad, ceci de pepi pasta and margarita pizza.

The meeting was full of news regarding exciting activities in the coming months. PAA will celebrate its 23rd Biennial Art Auction on Saturday, May 2, 2026 at The Pit in Los Angeles. Traditionally, the PAA invites donations from emerging and established artists whose generosity helps support a vibrant contemporary arts community. All proceeds will directly fund the PAA Grant Program. Since our last Art Auction in 2024, over $635,000 has been awarded to help fund over 60 exhibitions, projects and scholarships to non-profit organizations in the greater Los Angeles area. Patron Chairs Stephanie Fox and Susan Reynolds asked members to identify people to add to the mailing list and to participate in the patron letter personalization and mailing which will be held January 13 and 14 at Stephanie’s home in Pasadena.

This year’s member trip was unveiled in a skit by Jessica Korzenecki, Deedie McCarthy, Andrea Nagata, and a facsimile of Ben Franklin! The Ed Outside of LA trip is to Philadelphia, April 7 – 11, 2026, with visits to private studios and collections including the Barnes Foundation, Nakashima estate, and the newly opened Calder Garden. Participants, limited to 20-25, will stay in the Rittenhouse Square area.

After the meeting, members enjoyed a walk-through of the exhibition with Curator Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo. Takako Yamaguchi is the third exhibition in the recently relaunched MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist’s first solo museum show in Los Angeles. Born in Okayama, Japan, in 1952, Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. in the early 1970s and began to appropriate imagery from sources as diverse as Mexican muralism, Renaissance art, Japanese Nihonga, and Art Nouveau in ornate paintings that pose a challenge to rigid notions of ethnic identity and cultural ownership. At age seventy-two, the Los Angeles–based artist is synthesizing the motifs she has developed over the past forty years in a series of archly stylized oil-and-bronze-leaf seascapes featured in this exhibition.

~ Shelley Sackett