London’s newest cultural institutionThe Museum of Everything opened its third exhibit this week. The museum is based on the idea that self-taught, unintentional, anonymous curators would be able to showcase obscure folk, marginal and non-traditional art. The first exhibit featured 500 pieces by 100 artists, with essays by Ed Ruscha, Annette Messager, Jarvis Cocker, Pete Townsend, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Grayson Perry. So far in one year the museum has displayed works by over 250 unknown artists. Exhibit #3 highlights the massive collection of oddities amassed by Sir Peter Blake, who is often called the Peter Pan of British Pop Art. His collection includes Walter Potter, a self-taught Victorian craftsman and taxidermist who created woodland dioaramas and kitten tea parties alongside Harry Vernon, a vaudeville entertainer who create papier mache Punch and Judy puppets, Arthur Windley, a retired farmer who created an entire city of miniature fairgrounds in his house and Ted Willcox, an ex-serviceman who embroidered pin-up girls. Best of all might be Cheeta, a chimpanzee who starred in Tarzan films and took up painting at age sixty-four. Yeah, you read that right. They really meant it when they said marginalized folk art.

Exhibition #3 is on view at The Museum of Everything through December 24.

Wall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha, currently on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, is an homage to one of America’s most beloved artists. Named after Ruscha’s celebrated canvas, Wall Rockets (2000), which sits front-and-center at the elevator entry, the exhibition includes a multi-media mixture of works by over seventy international artists — including John Baldessari, Tom Friedman, Juergen Teller and Mark Bradford, among others — who were influenced, in one way or another, by Ruscha’s iconic pop art style. (The vernacular of Southern California and Los Angeles in particular have played a major role in Ruscha’s oeuvre.)

Highlights include what the curator once referred to during the installation process as the “Los Angeles wall” (the long wall in the gallery’s main space that’s guilty, in a good way, of horror vacui), where one can find Israeli artist Nir Hod’s intoxicating, “The Night You Left” (2007) (pictured above).

Despite leaving her director’s position at the Guggenheim for Sotheby’s Auction House, Lisa Dennison, the show’s curator, seems to have lost none of her mojo. She did a seamless job organizing the show between two floors as well as the 9^th floor terrace, where resides a gorgeous Ugo Rondinone tree sculpture.

The FLAG Art Foundation can be found on the 9^th and 10^th floors of the Chelsea Arts Tower, which boasts interminable views of the city. (I personally like to think of the FLAG as a precious, unadulterated gem as well as the-best-New-York-City-art-gallery-that-you’ve-never-heard-of!)

For a bit of background, New York-based art collector Glenn Fuhrman founded the FLAG in January of 2008 as a space to showcase emerging contemporary artwork. The FLAG makes a practice, however, of only displaying works from private collections. This is its third-ever exhibition. The FLAG’s previous show, Attention to Detail, which was curated by none other than Chuck Close, received critical acclaim.

Image: Nir Hod, The Night You Left, 2007, oil on black mirror, 47 x 64 inches. Courtesy of the Collection of John and Amy Phelan.