If you follow current art world news, no doubt you’ve noticed the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation popping up more frequently. Two of their initiatives, the Emerging Curator Competition and the Artist as Activist grant program opened for submissions in September and...
The Permeability of the (Art) World
Art Basel is a world unto itself; as the 13th year of the art fair rolled through Miami in early December to strong sales, completing a re-bound from the 2008 market drop, its massive influx of cash, glamour, international speculators and celebrity have triumphantly...
An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle
There has long been a history of poets and painters collaborating, and in many instances, as was the case with poet Robert Duncan and Jess, sharing their lives together. Michael Duncan’s recent curatorial efforts on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art have...
Dan McCleary
Dan McCleary has long been a favorite artist of mine. My father even owns one of his drawings! His recent exhibition at Craig Krull features a series of paintings that employ masterful painting strategies like the Golden Mean while also imbuing his images with...
Where the Focus Falls (2) – Transparent Streets and Performance Identities
It was not by accident that the ‘hub’ of the 2014 FotoFocus biennial in Cincinnati was given over to Instagram, augmented by satellite displays throughout the city, including Cincinnati’s Memorial Hall and the hotel where I stayed during my visit there. (The actual...
Miami Abuzz
The hoopla at Art Basel Miami is winding down. Whew. What a week of VIP this, VIP that, gale force rain and untold millions of dollars of museum quality art being sold from inside tents. If you tire of the big mama fair, there are others to discover, depending on your...
We’ve all come to look for America – Souvenirs of a lost American Vision
It has not escaped me that the order of these posts keeps keeps getting juggled as one thing or another interrupts the chronological flow. (Or perhaps it’s the ‘controversial’ flow—as controversy is what frequently drives this conversation forward.) But occasionally...
Matt Rosenquist
Remember Wood Shop? Well, Matt Rosenquist certainly does. And he has created an incredibly appealing, often humorous group of sculptures at the Glike Gallery in Culver City. With titles like Suburban Punk Rock Girl (2014), these works are rough around the edges for...
Jim Hodges
I will not lie, Jim Hodges is one of my favorite artists, and the reasons why are innumerable. Like the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning once wrote, allow me to “count the ways.” His recent retrospective at the Hammer Museum, entitled "Give More Than You Take"...
LOOKING A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Don Vito Corleone to Johnny Fontane, The Godfather (Paramount, 1972) written by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, from the novel by Mario Puzo, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. As visitors to this blog are aware,...
Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch seem to have channeled the Bauhaus’ Oskar Schlemmer—not an easy task, but one certainly worth considering. Working in the vein of sculptural theater, Fitch and Trecartin have created a strangely alluring alternate universe using “a...
“Racial Imaginary” at Pitzer College
Pitzer College's exhibition, "Racial Imaginary," the visual art component of a larger project that includes a book of essays, musings and poems, demonstrates the fecundity of race and identity for artists of all media and aesthetic proclivities. The featured artists...
Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gallery
"New Works: Paintings by Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gallery, September 18, 2014" From Carole Bayer Sager at William Turner Gall. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 11/17/2014 (13 items) Carole Bayer Sager New Works Katherine Ross and Michael Govan attend as the...
Blur and conquer: How Hello Kitty made pets of us all
In case you didn’t notice, Hello Kitty invaded Los Angeles last month. If you were anywhere near Little Tokyo, you could scarcely escape the impression that not only that neighborhood, but half the population of this side of Los Angeles had been initiated into the...
Hurricane Blues
During the summer of 2012, artists Eddie Rehm and Kenneth Ian Husband were enjoying something of a personal Golden Age in their tiny shared studio in Patchogue, a working class town on Long Island, New York. The studio itself was little more than a shed in the yard of...
Robert Olson
Robert Olson was a colleague and fellow art world traveler. From the beginning his work was marked with a deep sense of isolation, and it this deeply private motivation that suffuses his retrospective at the Luckman Art Center. Spanning a twenty-year period, the show...
I’m A Stranger Here Myself: Soundtracks for scary screens and scarred landscapes
The center of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Friday evening program was a shimmering pulsation of musical color, both harmonic and timbral, in a field of black and white. Both Susan Graham’s rendering of a suite of Kurt Weill songs and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s own suite...
The Michelle Andrade Story of My Life
There was a moment between the late 1960s and early 1970s when mainstream American mass culture seemed to heave a collective sigh of relief. With the first major convulsions of the American civil rights movement and the trauma of recent political assassinations...