Twenty miles outside of Los Angeles there happens to be one of the best shows of the season. "Another Thing Coming," the Torrance Art Museum's group show of new sculpture from 15 Los Angeles-based artists is a remarkably successful and compelling show. At first...
Ronald Ventura at Tyler Rollins Fine Art
Internationally acclaimed artist Ronald Ventura’s third solo exhibition “E.R. (Endless Resurrection)” at Tyler Rollins Fine Art gallery in New York is his strongest yet. Taking on the deep-set rituals of Catholicism in his native Philippines, Ventura’s combination of...
The Way We Live Now
As I rush to post this, I’m already thinking the title is either an overstatement or understatement and outrageously disingenuous either way. Let me step back for a second (I’m going to be stepping back all the way through this, so just get used to it). This is about...
The Miaz Brothers
No doubt The Miaz Brothers (from Venice, Italy) believe in ghosts, weirdly seductive apparitions, or at the very least “antimatter perception.” Indeed the latest installment of their unique vision achieves a fuzzy gratification, deliberately blurring large format...
“Sponsored Video”
Caribbean Dreams
Here's a little fun—a whiskey dream starring Jude Law and Giancarlo Gianini, shot for Johnnie Walker Blue Label. It opens aboard an antique yacht in the British Virgin Islands, and follows Jude Law down urban alleyways that reek of another century. He's painting...
Rashid Johnson
Rashid Johnson’s newest effort, "Islands," like subsequent exhibitions of his work at the David Kordansky Gallery encompasses a difficult, if necessary journey into and beyond a constructed human identity. In this case, Johnson takes inspiration from the exceptional...
Art Nowhere
If you have been in any number of major cities this summer across the U.S., you might have seen a billboard with the hashtag caption #ArtEveryWhere alongside a reproduction of a famous work of art. According to the tagline on the #ArtEveryWhereUS website, this is “A...
Double Trouble
The art of successful collaboration involves the ability to transcend the individual vision in favor of the project as a whole, and Rochelle Botello and Marion Lane have certainly done just that in their exhibition, aptly titled Double Trouble. Lane’s elegant...
Two or Three Things I Know About Her – The Narrative Art of Mary Woronov
Narrative art has been displaced in recent decades, not simply from the modern art canon but from serious consideration in the contemporary fine art context, generally—which is somewhat ironic, since it dominates the Western art historical canon through the 16th...
Night Train
While we’re all trying to tear ourselves away from LACMA (where the lush summer acreage of masterpiece exhibitions seems to hold us captive) for a last glimpse at our faves (or misses) in the Made in L.A. 2014 show at The Hammer (or maybe Elvis Costello at the...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers,Lately I’ve been getting wistful for the past. It’s not that I want to go back, never to return. It’s more that I yearn for more simple and innocent times; I’m not sure I prefer wisdom to naiveté.It’s the direction art has been going that has made me...
Some Assembly Required
Upsize, supersize, largesize, megasize—there are most likely a dozen more of these contemporarily fabricated verbs that are necessitated by our want/need to consume at the current unprecedented rates. The commerce-based art world, not unlike the modern fast-food...
The (Charles) Long Road Home
One artist who is returning to his roots after spending the last several years working on massive projects is sculptor Charles Long. For his next major exhibition “Up Land,” at his gallery Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Long is embracing his personal style of hands-on...
Hired Gun: Chas Smith
The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and...
Christian Tedeschi: Opposites Attract
Up-and-coming Los Angeles-based artist Christian Tedeschi describes his former boss, Nancy Rubins as “a tornado—so much energy.” The 40-year-old assistant professor and head of sculpture at Cal State Northridge recalls his experience as a studio assistant with a...
Rebecca Ripple and Kim Abeles’ Shared Journey
Many young artists, especially those coming right out of school, find working as a studio assistant to be a valuable intermediary step. If they are lucky, they learn practical skills—and perhaps even more importantly—they make significant connections with more...
Nicholas Bowers: Second in Command
Yes, Shepard Fairey is a street art superstar, a highly collectible blue-chip artist, and a household name worthy of museum retrospectives. Fairey’s also a multiple-city muralist, a curator of talent with his own Subliminal Gallery and most recently a co-producer of...
Unsung Hero
Unbeknownst to many, the majority of sculptors that are known for creating large sculptures in bronze, never actually work with the material. Rather they sculpt in some alternative natural—such as clay or wax—then when the final aesthetic is reached, the object is...