Greetings! I’m a historian, writer, editor, and sommelier based in Los Angeles, my hometown. I write about all kinds of topics ranging from art and architecture to food and wine to cities and what makes them tick.

My first book, Electric Moons: A Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles came out in 2023. and have another, 88 City Halls, in the hopper. Scroll down to learn more.

Aurora Projects

Aurora Projects is an interdisciplinary art and publishing collective based in Altadena, California founded in 2023.

Previous shows

Vincent Cruege flyer — Vincent Cruege

Vincent Cruege is a French painter who explores the effects of light, space, rhythm, and balance on sensory perception. Much as a great winemaker doesn’t try to alter nature but only to capture it in bottled form, Cruege transposes places and emotions into rich yet fragile expressions of space suspended in time.
Inspired by the 2023 book of the same name, this exhibition debuted at B.A.G. Gallery in Bordeaux, France in July 2025. It investigated the everyday lamppost as a “flashlight” into our own unstable faculties of perception –– a tradition practiced by artists ranging from Giacomo Balla to L.S. Lowry to Martin Kippenberger. Rendered in his unique pointillistic style achieved with dabs of acrylic paint, Cruege strips away backgrounds, contexts, and identifying details of his subjects until we are faced with spare, sculptural, and portrait-like forms that immerse the viewer in the universal ingredient of all artistic production –– light –– itself.

Motti Shulman

Google him. Follow him. Plan a pilgrimage out to his hideaway in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Ask around. Pinch yourself. Who is Motti Shulman?
To some, he is an influential music executive who helped cultivate some of the greatest talent of our time (think LL Cool J, Method Man and Redman, Jay Z, EPMD, Montell Jordan, Yung Joc, Ty Dolla $ign, Jack Harlow, and more).
To others, he is a collector, connoisseur, and philanthropist.
For me, he’s a guy I met on a yacht back in 2017. This chance encounter sparked a friendship fueled by a shared love of wine. Over several years –– glass by glass, and bottle by bottle –– I began to understand how the unfettered pursuit of beauty has shaped the contours of his life.

Electric Moons:

The Social History of Street Lighting in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is famous for many things: its traffic jams, its taco trucks, the palm trees, the sunshine. Electric Moons explores one of its most overlooked architectural legacies: its streetlights.

Today we may not give streetlights much thought; after all, they’re virtually everywhere. But Los Angeles was once known for its breadth of unusual and innovative designs. From the early calls of the 1880s (when the newly launched Los Angeles Times salivated over San Jose’s 150-foot ‘moon tower’) to the 1920s renaissance in ornamental lamp designs (a result of crafty imagineering and an explosive housing boom) to the 1950s invasion of the utilitarian cobra-heads (which illuminated a metastasizing freeway system), streetlights have shaped the way we navigate the built environment.

Developers equated them with progress: stimulating commerce and deterring crime. They marked social, economic, and racial boundaries: framing debates about equity and public space. Straddling the worlds of art and utility, streetlights are synecdoches for urban experience, standing for power and progress, romance and solitude, nostalgia and hope. Timeless and modern, venerated and mundane, they bring the heavens to human scale.

Published by Hat & Beard Press

Buy on Amazon

Follow @streetlampilluminati on Instagram for updates.

Press

Los Angeles streetlights studied in new book, Larchmont Chronicle, August 29, 2024

Los Angeles’ heavenly lights, PRINT Magazine, June 24, 2024

Leave the street lights alone, Get a Grip on Lighting, June 3, 2024

How LA’s streetlights serve as beacons to the city’s past, LAist, April 9, 2024

LA’s streetlights are kinda a big deal, KPCC, April 5, 2024

A guide to LA’s most overlooked design legacy: streetlights, Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2024

Review: Urban Light, Alta Journal, February 19, 2024

The 37 best books about Los Angeles culture (and beyond) published in 2023, LA TACO, December 22, 2023

Streetlights parallel the history of Los Angeles in ‘Electric Moons,’ Circling the News, December 18, 2023

I brake for streetlights, Tom Bertolotti Design, September 28, 2023

Shining a light on the rediscovered art of Vermonica, Spectrum News, March 31, 2021

The future of the streetlight might be in the past, CityLab, November 20, 2019

88 City Halls

Pasadena City Hall. Photo by Tom Bertolotti

Check out a map of Los Angeles County and you’ll see a checkerboard made out of 88 cities. Try to name them, though, and most of us wouldn’t know where to begin. 88 city halls is a book of essays and documentary photography that explores the architecture of local government in order to explore our region’s past, present, and future. A collaboration among local government expert Mark Dierking, photographer/humanist Tom Bertolotti, and yours truly, this book zeroes in on city hall buildings to examine the ways in which notions of civic heritage, local identity, and political participation are evolving before our eyes. By taking a closer look at the architectural features shared among these 88 municipal buildings, this book provides new insights into what community means here in Southern California.

Follow us on Instagram: @88cityhalls

Forthcoming with Hat & Beard Press in Fall 2026