Today is the last day to witness iwitness—a large scale public art installation made up of asymmetrical cubic photographs on display in downtown LA's Grand Park by artists Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian. It immediately recalls graffiti artist JR’s black-and-white...
Refresh the screen: Anthony Caro at the Gagosian Gallery
File this under ‘better too late than never’ (i.e., of a piece with the story of my life). You have only two days to see this show; but if you’re in the Beverly Hills vicinity, I encourage you to run to it. This is a fabulous, albeit extremely compact, show in the...
Travis Collinson
Travis Collinson continues his investigation into his signature style of spare and oblique personas in his second exhibition at Maloney Fine Art. Utilizing a sparseness of space, form and gesture simultaneously, Collinson manages to compress, through this highly...
A Few Good Reasons to Drop Out of Art School
The New Yorker Nestled among the exhibition reviews and auction reports in contemporary-art journalism last week were scattered items about the Roski School of Art and Design, at the University of Southern California. On Friday, the first-year students in the school’s...
COLA Award Recipients
Every year the Dept of Cultural Affairs grants awards to Los Angeles based artists whose work reflects the ideologies and concerns of its residents. This year’s exhibition is particularly provocative with artists like Jeff Colson, Miyoshi Barosh and Alexandra...
Straight From Cuba
“Straight from Cuba” at Lois Lambert Gallery, is an unexpectedly compelling exhibition. To subsist as a contemporary artist in present-day Cuba is no small feat. With little to no resources at their disposal in the way of art materials and economic support, and...
Toxic Sublime
The philosophy of the sublime was first manifested in art through 19th century Romantic painters’ vast and awe-inspiring landscapes that emphasized mankind’s diminutiveness in the face of God’s treacherously beautiful creation. It was updated in the mid-20th century...
Best in Show: Frieze Fair
For this year’s Frieze Art Fair at Randall’s Island in New York City, I tried to avoid the usual fair fatigue one can experience at a show of this magnitude and went on a scavenger hunt for the best painting I could find. Location was sometimes important, as...
Charlie Rubin
There is a stunning archival pigment print in Charlie Rubin’s new exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery titled All Your Dreams Belong To Us. The image, while simple and elegant, is complex in the very best sense of the word. Could it be a tree bleeding real human blood, or a...
Nostalgia at Paris Photo LA
“Nostalgia,” the successful, albeit subconscious underlying theme of this year’s Paris Photo LA art fair has, by now, turned upon itself. The memory of the event may be faded, but there are a few talents and galleries that proved they will have a bright future. Paris...
Dancing In the Flames – Ruven Afanador at Fahey/Klein
Even under the crowded, frenzied conditions of a gallery opening, where you know collectors, other artists (and additionally, professional photographers in this instance), the usual Hollywood smattering of celebrities, supermodels and beautiful people, and die-hard...
Mineo Mizuno
Mineo Mizuno explores the hybridized relationship between the elements as expressed in his uniquely compelling understanding of his materials, both film and ceramics. The unglazed porcelain vessels (atop a raw wood pedestal) in this exhibition do not so much as...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers In this issue we take a look “Inside Art”—what’s inside the art world, other than art. This is a theme that has interested us for some time now, but it really hit home after I interviewed abstract painter James Hayward for our last issue on painting. One...
LACMA’s Michael Govan
Michael Govan has given a lot of thought to Los Angeles’ identity as a center for culture. While it may go without saying the opportunity to reshape an institution brought him to LA in 2006, if he is successful in revitalizing the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he...
Building Bridges: Glenn Kaino
After dodging the reporters and cameramen that were shooting footage of Leonard Nimoy’s star for memorial news coverage on Hollywood Boulevard, I was buzzed into Glenn Kaino’s studio and escorted up to the second floor by an assistant. Once face to face with the...
Power to the Artists: Cliff Benjamin
For 11 years, Cliff Benjamin and Erin Kermanikian have co-owned Western Project in Culver City. Together they exhibit work that’s consistently challenging and boundary-breaking, representing artists like Tom of Finland (before he was MOCA-acceptable), Bob Flanagan and...
LA’s Home for Outsiders
“I understand and appreciate clean-made art, but what I’m mostly attracted to is something raw and more guttural. That’s what brought me to the outsider art world. Plus there’s no other gallery in LA that’s showcasing outsider art,” says Paige Wery, erstwhile golfer,...
Auction House MVP
The auction market, and in particular the salerooms of the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have long been a proving ground for the marketplace maturity of every kind of specialty commodity, including fine art. Auction houses have aggressively...