Last weekend, I was in LA to check out some of the exhibitions in Pacific Standard Time—I especially wanted to get past Cool School worship and into some surprises.

In Doin' it in Public: Feminism and Art at the Woman's Building at Otis, I found this photomural, the size of a billboard, spanning two gallery walls across a corner. It's called Mother Art Cleans Up Again, and it was made recently after performances in the '70s and '80s in which Mother Art, a collective of women artists, literally cleaned up at banks and city hall.

Their performance was prompted by the fact that they'd been attacked by Ronald Reagan and the LA Times for exemplifying government waste: They spent a California Arts Council grant of $700 to fund performances in LA laundromats. Apparently, laundromats were considered an unsuitable location for Art. The women responded by taking their cleaning supplies to the places where they saw actual waste in the public and private sectors, linking to a longer history of women cleaning up as art (manifesto!)—and, now, inadvertently, to Occupy. We thought the image would go well with Lawrence Weschler's loan-strike manifesto. Here's more on Mother Art.