Artists and curators Ron Athey and James Spooner know that Los Angeles has become the art world omphalos and so decided to convert last Saturday’s Broad Happening into a 21st century Oracle of Delphi. Hosted in alignment with the Broad’s current multimedia show...
CAAM Summer Nights and The Institute for Art and Olfaction
I linked up with my homegirl and creative partner, filmmaker Niki Williams, and we Uber Pool-ed it to CAAM to check out their event “Summer Nights” and the silent films they’re screening as part of their “African American Women in Silent Race Films” exhibit. I had the...
William Turner Gallery: : Peter Lodato and Eric Johnson
We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
Nick Lowe
Straddling all sorts of categories, Nick Lowe's pictures are defined by their byzantine intermediacy between stretched canvases and works on paper, paintings and drawings, fanciful dreamscapes and pedestrian scenes. Lowe possesses an uncanny knack for agglomerating...
Hot Time, Summer in the City
Group shows are like parties: overarching themes can help ensure memorable experiences; but sometimes the most engaging are those where unexpected connections form fortuitously among diverse invitees, rather than being engineered. "Hot Time, Summer in the City"...
“Passage to the Future: Art from a New Generation in Japan” at Arena 1 Gallery
In a former hanger at the Santa Monica Airport, now home to the perfectly stationed Arena 1 Gallery, the question of the evening—Because who doesn’t appreciate repurposed space? —quickly ran its course, giving way to considerations of how the past intersects with the...
Ibid Gallery – Los Angeles: : Timo Fahler
With three distinct exhibition spaces within its massive Boyle Heights gallery, Ibid Gallery has reserved its smallest space, a jewel box of a venue, for the most engaging work on view, an exhibition entitled “slow relief” (the title of this show and all of the works...
Ethnocinema at the Echo Park Film Center
Can cinema be a safe space? This is the question that drove filmmaker and PhD candidate Nerve Valerio to curate the Action! Cinema as Sanctuary series at the Echo Park Film Center in the heart of Echo Park. Following the election of President Trump, Valerio, like many...
Julia Haft-Candell
In timeless spirit and simple form, Julia Haft-Candell's ceramic sculptures recall the mystical austerity of primeval petroglyphs, carved totems and cave paintings. Yet their painted embellishments and surface textures are unmistakably modern, evoking graphic novel...
Walter Maciel Gallery: : Andy Kolar
Abstract but character-driven, tertiary and bright, super flat and deeply funny, the paintings and sculptural installations in Andy Kolar’s “Easy now.” speak to conceptual and material concerns in a uniquely satisfying, engaging dialect of modern color theory. The...
Steve Gunn at the Getty Center
The current seasonal treat being enjoyed by local Angelenos and tourists alike is the free evening concerts happening at several art institutions across Los Angeles, including the Getty Center. Deciding to visit a museum on a summer weekend can an ominous...
Frantic Melancholy: Second Summer Broad Happening
Have you ever been at a party, laughing convulsively while draining your second glass of prosecco, and then suddenly, with a cold, horrified shiver, thought—wait, oh no, someday I’m going to be dead? That’s what the work of Takashi Murakami is like. Murakami, the...
Chagall: Fantasies for the Stage
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s...
Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles: : Monika Sosnowska
Alluding to the postmodern architecture of her Polish homeland, Monika Sosnowska’s first solo show at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles is comprised of six structural installations, which despite their rigid physicality and mass, are warped with drama, yet seem...