This Weekend, Glendale's Art Is About Glendale
November 5, 2026
November 5, 2026
The small gas station at 1020 E. Palmer Ave. has four glass walls, so you can see everything inside it. Since Oct. 6, the inside has held lightweight reflective fabric hung from strings attached to the ceiling. The fabric falls into loose, rounded forms that suggest the mountains and canyons around the city, and fuzzy textiles and color-shifting lights fill the space between them. The building is a Streamline Moderne station built in 1936. It went vacant in the 1970s and began to deteriorate. The rehabilitated station and the Adams Square mini-park around it were finished in 2007, and the station was landmarked in 2015.
On Sunday afternoon, the neighborhood association is holding a reception there for the artist. A day earlier and about two miles west, the Museum of Neon Art opens a show built around a Glendale bowling alley from 1959. On Sunday night, the Glendale Youth Orchestra plays the world premiere of a piece by one of its former members at the Alex Theatre. Over Nov. 7 and 8, Glendale's arts calendar is largely about Glendale: its buildings, its signs and the people who grew up here.
The Museum of Neon Art at 216 S. Brand Blvd. opens "Wonder Lanes: The Signs and Style of Mid-Century Bowling" on Saturday, Nov. 7, with a reception from 4 to 7 p.m. The show looks at how postwar Googie architecture and neon design in Southern California made bowling a family activity that ran around the clock. It includes historic neon signs, vintage ephemera, items from Disney Imagineering, and video interviews with preservationists and pop-culture historians. Lucky Strike Entertainment is a sponsor, and the exhibition runs through summer 2027.
Covina Bowl, Java Lanes, Arena Bowl, Wonder Bowl and Crenshaw's Holiday Bowl are all part of it. The local piece is Grand Central Bowl. When it opened in 1959 at Sonora Avenue and Flower Street, it was a $1 million bowling center with a restaurant and a children's playroom, according to a Glendale News-Press history column. According to Walt Disney Imagineering, the 60-lane public center became an Imagineering building in 1990. The site is now part of the Walt Disney Creative Campus, and its original Googie exterior is still standing. According to the Glendale News-Press preview, Disney also kept a scoring table, a ball return, balls, pins and a pinsetter, and several of those pieces will be on display at MONA.
The pinsetter is a key part of the story. The exhibition presents the automatic pinsetter as the invention that made the 24-hour bowling boom possible. That means one of the machines central to the show's argument comes from a building a few minutes' drive from the museum.
"The great bowling centers of the mid-century era were destinations. They brought together architecture, neon, fashion, food, entertainment and community in a way that reflected the optimism and design sensibility of their time."
MONA executive director Corrie Siegel gave that description to the Glendale News-Press. The show was curated by Steve Spiegel, Kathy Kikkert and Chris Nichols.
General admission is $10. Glendale residents who show ID pay $5, and admission is free for members, veterans and children 12 and under. The museum is open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 7 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. If you'd rather skip the reception crowd, you can go back any weekend through next summer.
Brand Library & Art Center has "Artifacts from an Unborn Empire" on view through Dec. 31. The library is open noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and closed on Sunday, so this show only fits into the Saturday half of the weekend. If you plan to see it and make MONA's opening, go to Brand early in the afternoon and head to the museum around 4.
On Sunday the weekend shifts from a museum built around a landmark to a landmark that serves as the gallery. Yuntao Xu is a Los Angeles architect and co-founder of Studio KOMA. His installation, "Estranged Landscape," was made specifically for the Adams Square Mini Park Gas Station, and the City of Glendale's announcement describes Glendale as a city "where urban life meets natural landscape." The Glendale Arts & Culture Commission sponsored the work through its Urban Art Program, with support from Glendale Library, Arts & Culture, Glendale Community Services & Parks, and the Adams Hill Neighborhood Association.
The station has four glass walls, and the Arts & Culture Commission told the Glendale News-Press it wants exhibits there that people can view from any angle. Because it's built that way, you don't need a ticket or a reception to see the piece. The city lists the mini-park's hours as 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Since the installation uses color-shifting light, it's worth walking past again after dark.
Sunday in order:
Most of the Glendale Youth Orchestra's program is familiar American repertoire. It includes Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, "From the New World," Ives's "Variations on 'America'" as orchestrated by William Schuman, and the overture to Bernstein's "West Side Story." The fourth piece is new. "Memoriam" by Jabe Bell, a former member of the orchestra, gets its world premiere at this concert. At a concert called "My Country 'Tis of Thee," the newest work on the program is by a musician who came up through the same Glendale orchestra.
According to the Glendale News-Press, tickets cost $18 for general admission and $16 for students and seniors. That's the same price range as a weekend matinee movie, and you're hearing a Dvořák symphony in a historic theater.
Mek Contemporary, a private gallery at 416 E. Colorado St., held its first reception on Sept. 24 for Rafael Megall's "Idols In Bloom." The Glendale News-Press reported that more than 300 people came, including Mayor Ardy Kassakhian. The gallery shows its works without titles or descriptions on the walls. Director Vic Hovsepian explained the location choice to the paper by saying that "Glendale felt personal to us," with "a strong identity and sense of community while remaining closely connected to the broader Los Angeles art world."
The gallery's next show, "Regard," runs Nov. 13 through Dec. 19. Rachel Hakimian Emenaker curated it as a group exhibition of women artists from Southwest Asia and North Africa and their diasporas, focused on place, memory and inheritance. It opens six days after "Wonder Lanes." From late November into early December, the gallery and MONA are both showing new work within a few blocks of each other, one on Brand and one on Colorado.
Several pieces of this weekend stay up into the holidays. Brand Library's show runs through Dec. 31. "Regard" closes Dec. 19, and the Adams Square installation closes Jan. 8, 2027. The city's Holiday Tree Lighting Ceremony is Thursday, Dec. 3, from 6 to 8 p.m. at City Hall's Perkins Plaza, 141 N. Glendale Ave. From Perkins Plaza it's a short drive southeast to Palmer Avenue, where the gas station will still be lit up in the evening.
Many Glendale homes carry the same kind of history as the Grand Central Bowl and the Adams Square station, and that history often shows up in a home's value. If you'd like to know how your home's character and condition compare with nearby sales, Trevino Properties can give you a clear, local read. Get a Free Home Valuation.
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