"Mexico is truly the promised land for abstract art." Anni & Josef Albers, 1936 “Mexico is the most surrealist country in the world.” Andre Breton, 1938 Why Mexico? It was not only that Mexico was nearby and easily accessible to U.S.–based artists, although that was...
Catherine Opie enunciates the intentions and ideas behind her current body of 2012-2013 works with the first two images the viewer encounters—one a portrait, the other an abstracted landscape that could loosely be described as meditative. Lawrence (the conceptual...
Sonic Fountain, the centerpiece of Doug Aitken’s show (all works 2013) includes a large, round hole jack-hammered into the cement floor and filled with water. From above, a system of pipes with five spigots drips water into this small pool. The drops fall in...
Dorothea Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, set designer, writer and poet who died last year at the age of 101. Best known for her enigmatic works of the 1940s and 1950s, which feature women and girls involved with strange animals and animated swaths of...
Richard Jackson is a maniac with paint. His current retrospective is a testament to the gargantuan ambitions and massive amounts of energy he has displayed over a 40-plus-year career. The exhibition’s title, “Ain’t Painting a Pain,” is indicative of his commitment to...
Fans of Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus can be forgiven for writing off Spiegelman as a one-hit wonder. After all, before producing the two volumes of the Holocaust memoir, which almost single-handedly turned the lowly comic book into a serious literary...
“The artist comes first,” says Marika Wachtmeister, referring to the core philosophy of Wanås, one of the most remarkable contemporary art venues in the world, which she founded in 1987. Located in southern Sweden, Wanås is unlike anywhere else . . .
The Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach calls itself, “The only museum in the United States exclusively dedicated to modern and contemporary Latin American art.” Yet its permanent collection is comprised largely of works from Mexico, with exhibitions often...
“Abstraction talks her head off. She has a lot to say.” You might not hear her right away, but Jennifer Wynne Reeves does. “I tune out or listen,” she adds, in the penciled text within a painting, “rattled by her noisy silence.” She is also silently talking back. She...
Not so long ago on a return flight to LA, I was sitting next to a young Boston couple who had never been to the West Coast before. I asked them what the first thing they wanted to do was when they landed. They said they wanted to eat at Del Taco. I tried to hide my...
Throughout his 1982 book All That is Solid Melts Into Air, Marshall Berman returns over and over to a single passage from Marx’s Communist Manifesto: All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept...
It was in 2009, while teaching art workshops in Ciudad Juárez, that artist Elina Chauvet became aware of the numbers of women and girls disappearing from the city’s streets. She was shocked by the many posters on phone poles and boards pleading for help locating...
In the 20th century there has long been a long tradition of artists extending their visions beyond the studio walls to encompass a wider range of ideas and modes of thinking, wherein artists like Wallace Berman with his magazine Semina in the ’60s, or much later in...
Meeting Marycarmen Arroyo Macias in MexiCali was a fortuitous event; she lent me her camera in a pinch to photograph potential performance locations for the MexiCali Biennial 13, in which we were both included. When I asked about her work for the show, she told me the...
Miguel Osuna’s grandly decaying storefront studio at 4th and Spring streets is a workshop, a think tank, a popular spot on the monthly downtown art walk and a place where skateboarders get exposed to the ’70s electronic sounds of Jean Michel Jarre—what he might be...
Geographical border zones figure prominently in the work of Julio César Morales, particularly those separating the U.S., where he lives, from Mexico, where he was born. In “Undocumented Interventions,” an ongoing series of watercolor and ink drawings, Morales presents...
Challenging assumptions about figure and ground, nature and industry, Robert Ortbal’s “Hide and Seek” reveals the instincts of a scientist exploring quirky bits of flotsam that speak to our human condition. Ortbal’s hybrid constructions mesh organic and man-made...
Kelly Barrie’s hybrid process at first seems antithetical to photography and its ability to stop time, yet it is through his improvisations—like the nimbleness required by a skater or graffiti writer—that his work ingeniously engages a series of paradoxes. Rather than...