There has never been a year in Los Angeles—certainly not in this century, more probably the last 30 years—when our artists haven’t delivered something surprising, extraordinary, something to change the way we talk and think about and look at the world. This year was...
The Cheech Is Here While many museums are opening exhibitions long delayed by COVID, one is unveiling a completely renovated building with a new focus. That would be the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, or The Cheech, in Riverside. Part of the...
Me You "Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You." is a classic Barbara Kruger experience. The exhibition serves as an introduction to those who may be unfamiliar with her work, yet also engages with seasoned viewers by re-presenting older works in grand, high tech and...
For a museum that has torn down all of the buildings on its original campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been putting up some pretty interesting exhibitions in one of only two exhibition spaces that are left. The two photography exhibitions I’m thinking...
One of the most uncanny things about the photographs in Vera Lutter's exhibition Museum in the Camera, is the fact that many of the galleries depicted, as well as the buildings themselves are no longer there. Lutter shot on site at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art...
Digital Art Happening In April there was a moment when Yours Truly realized we were finally, at long last, emerging from the pandemic that has shut us in for over a year. It was Saturday night, and we were lured downtown by “LUMINEX: Dialogues of Light,” a one-night...
Andy Warhol predicted, “Someday, all department stores will become museums, and all museums will become department stores.” If that’s the case, then there’s a new museum in Hollywood that needs to be added to the list of L.A.’s tourist attractions. Funko, a company...
I confess that I’m not sure why I particularly care, or at what point I might have begun to see this as something larger than simply the loss of a theatre or auditorium space (i.e., LACMA’s Bing Theatre, which was a part of the original LACMA complex), or the razing...
As we move forward into 2018, we recognize a bit more concretely how our experiences in 2017 and immediately prior influenced and began to reshape our perception of the larger (and certainly the political) world. This is nothing new. Radical cultural change (or its...
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...
Not more than a year ago, I was writing about a show at LACMA with a transcendental dimension – not merely transcending its materials, approach and style, but whose visionary qualities might potentially carry the dedicated viewer to a place of transcendence. Only a...
Ed Ruscha may have summed it up best in one of his little books of photographs, Thirtyfour Parking Lots – specifically the aerial photograph of that umbilicus carved into Chavez Ravine we know as Dodger Stadium (and its surrounding parking lots). (A little ironic that...
If there is a single word that could sum up the the career of László Moholy-Nagy, it would probably be refraction. The refraction of light is an obvious key, both with respect to Moholy’s overall formal approach and technical approach to his preferred media (and not...
Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when...
It’s Halloween and it’s about time I finished my walk-through of Guillermo del Toro’s reconfigured ‘Bleak House’ home/office/inspiration space in the Art of the Americas Building at LACMA. What, after all, could have been keeping me so long? Maybe I simply needed a...
There are some artists you know are great immediately because they provoke such disparate and conflicting emotions simultaneously that they practically throw you physically off balance. John Altoon is one such artist. The most feral of the Ferus Gallery Cool School,...
The beginning of another arts and culture season also marks a point where we really start to feel the impact of everything we’ve been experiencing over the preceding orbital/calendar year and start to take its measure. Events move swiftly; you can feel as if you’re...
So I’m at brunch at Figaro (on Vermont) with two of my best (and one of my oldest) friends from out-of-town; and we’re actually sitting outside on the hottest day of the year (I’m imagining the wait-staff making bets on my imminent demise). There’s a very...
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