Articles
ARTIST TAKEOVER
FAIR AND SQUARE Post-Fair Brings Equitability to Santa Monica
Last week, during Los Angeles Art Week, I saw James Franco everywhere. I saw James Franco at Felix at the Hollywood Roosevelt, where the David Hockney-painted pool was closed because a man had had a heart attack inside it the day before. I saw James Franco at the Karma party at Ghengis Cohen, his trucker hat popping up behind a psychic and very beautiful astrologer. I saw James Franco at Frieze,...
LESS THAN ZERO On Risk and Art in Los Angeles
I’m at a bar in Palmdale and it’s nearly empty. From where I am sitting, I can see two men playing chess. Or, rather, they’re not really playing—they’re afraid to make a move. It’s Pawn to E4, followed by the all-too-familiar analysis paralysis: finger steadies the piece, eyes tighten, neck cranes and turtles to check for danger, and then…Pawn back to E2. Let’s start again. Every move never...
FASHION AT FRIEZE
COLLISION ENSURES REACTION Getty PST: Art and Science Collide
This past fall, I saw over twenty PST ART exhibitions offering contrasting visions of how “art’ and “science” might collide or collaborate. The shows addressed topics from surveillance to biotech to space exploration with dives into artificial intelligence, Indigenous textile-based technologies of the early modern era, and reflections on the environmental precarity of Los Angeles. There were as...
DUELLING REVIEWS: Doug Aitken at Regen Projects and the Marciano Art Foundation
Gallery Dogs & Cats
STAYING SANE(ish) WITH DR. TRAINWRECK Ask Dr. Trainwreck
Trying to Navigate LA Dear Dr. Trainwreck, Can you talk about chasing fame and how that affects friendship? I’m from the Midwest and came out to California for art school. I’m fresh out of school (one year) and was able to get pretty good gallery representation early on so I count myself lucky. But a classmate that graduated at the same time keeps asking me how I did it. I’m happy to share. I’m...
In Search of a City
“Loa Angeles is 72 Suburbs in Search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker January is always a quiet month for the Los Angeles art world, but it was made even quieter this year by natural disaster—the fires shut down many art institutions while the city grappled with destruction—and the gloom of the national political situation, which depressed an already down-and-out town. There were fire fundraisers, of...
ROLL CALL
Reviews
DUELLING REVIEWS: Doug Aitken at Regen Projects and the Marciano Art Foundation
PAUL THEK at Hannah Hoffman
I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the...
ANGELYNE at Melrose Botanical Garden
As I fought through crosstown traffic, the messages came in fast and furious. Hurry up!... Where are you?!... She’s about to arrive!... You’re gonna miss her corvette pull up! When I finally parked and made it to Melrose Botanical Garden, the crowd was spilling onto...
FAYE DRISCOLL at REDCAT
I’ve always said that I have a crush on dance—on the medium itself, its libidinousness, its structural uninhibitedness, the insanity of memorizing your body’s movements on command and then repeating them. As a writer, I cling to permanence on the page, but dance...
PIPPA GARNER at STARS
The artist died during the run of her exhibition, just a few days before the new year. It is fitting given that Pippa Garner used her body as a sort of extended art project, something she worked on for years—altering it with surgeries, tattoos and piercings. The...
ORDINARY PEOPLE at MOCA
MOCA’s “Ordinary People” manages to tell a story about photorealism that is eclectic, diverse, condescending and drab. Homage to the People of the Bronx: Double Dutch at Kelly Street - La Freeda, Jevette, Towana, Staice (1981–1982) by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres’...
RUBY ZARSKY at Ceradon
Goddesses once etched into stone tablets and later deified in oil paintings now live another immortal existence: nude or scantily clad, wet and voluptuous, digitally rendered and plastered across Reddit or X, they resemble magical beasts or aliens. Some have had their...
WILLIAM KENTRIDGE at The Wallis
In his monumental displays of structure, history, movement and sound—operatic compositions that unabashedly aspire to the now-“traditional” status of Gesamtkunstwerk, William Kentridge has become a leading voice not only in contemporary art but in the world’s cultural...
REFRAMING DIORAMAS Natural History Museum of Los Angeles
This beautiful show grapples with the history and purpose of habitat dioramas—those eerily lifelike tableaus found in darkened museum halls—and, by extension, questions the past and present life of natural history museums. What is the role of a natural history museum...
François Pain at JOAN
What is art without the asylum (from classical Latin asȳlum: refuge, sanctuary)? In François Pain’s first solo show in the US, three video displays, a mini-bookstore, and a vitrine of pamphlets compete for the viewer's attention. At the center is a 2025 video...