Heaven’s gate doesn’t separate life and death like the U.S.-Mexican border. And if the rhetoric and rifles weren’t forcibly obvious symbols, the new pedestrian crossing from San Ysidro into Tijuana is unambiguously penal. A cattle stockade. While the debate over the...
Yoshua Okón came to prominence in the blossoming Mexico City art scene of the 1990s. In partnership with Miguel Calderón, another rising star of Mexican art, they founded La Panadería, an artist’s residency and gallery space in a four-story building and former bakery...
The idea of using film to expose natural forces other than light remains a curious pursuit. Jeremy Bolen is one of a few artists who have taken the sacred medium and, as innovators such as Fontana, Klein, Duchamp and Broodthaers have done, subjected it to varying...
Photo by Leonard Nadel, 1956 “Bracero workers being fumigated at border town Hidalgo, Texas”, Courtesy Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History
Years ago, my good friend Eddy took me to meet his friends in Mexico City. It was my first big trip outside of the States. One of the highlights was going to visit Frida Kahlo’s’ house, The Blue House as it’s called. It’s in the borough of Coyoacán where she was born,...
Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia loves to create objects expressing hybridized meanings, calling attention to how things are not as simple as they first appear. For “by Deborah Calderwood,” his first solo exhibition at CB1 gallery in downtown Los Angeles, he presented...
This 35-year retrospective, consisting of 52 sculptures (some presented in small editions) and nine digital photographs, offers a revealing cross section of Charles Tatum’s work dating from 1973 until 2008, the year the artist passed. Consistent throughout the...
JJ PEET’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles is a well-installed show that offers a beguiling look at the New York-based artist’s practice. Three sculptural works from the “Floating Heads” series (2012-13) are sparingly placed in the darkened main gallery,...
The most interesting thing about Mexican superheroes is that the super is short for supernatural. Where such people in the English-speaking world might inhabit a science fiction, their Mexican counterparts exist in the realm of Magical Realism.
We all know that for a long time artists used to use the Greek myths as an excuse to paint nudes, confident that men never tire of female flesh being offered up in various religious costumes, but what about the other audience—women? Men are always promised things in...
The contemporary German artist Rosemarie Trockel, calls her current exhibition: “A Cosmos.” It’s a bold claim to announce that you have created a universe (though the title does take the indefinite article as opposed to the definite). Pre-Socratic thinkers used the...
Last year’s James Franco–curated “Rebel” show at the Joel Cohen/MOCA space included a collaboration between Hollywood’s polymathic heartthrob and indie enfant terrible Harmony Korine, in the form of a video entitled CAPUT. The rooftop rumble between bare-naked gang...
Eric C. Shiner says one contributing factor to his career in the art world is coming from a family of “tireless collectors.” Andy Warhol, another tireless collector, provided lots of material to enhance Shiner’s job these days as the director of the Andy Warhol Museum...
Gerard BYRne works from the premise that what constitutes the historic is constantly shifting and that there are a series of presents. In his artistic practice the interview and conversation become scripts to be performed in order to open up a number of critical...
My previous column ended with a quote by French graffiti artist Tilt: “The pop culture war is over. America, you won,” along with my wish “Let’s just hope we lose the street art war.” Far from being a Francophile (I don’t love Paris), I harangued against the sameness...
Ever since 1912, when Picasso and Braque first collaged actual newspaper clippings and trompe-l’oeil woodgrain fragments into the first Synthetic Cubist oil paintings, the confusion between mass media and fine art has been one of the central engines of contemporary...
The first time I saw Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait it was in my mother’s bedroom, hanging on the wall opposite the two Gauguins that hung over her bed. I liked the Gauguins—they seemed happy and far away—but the Van Gogh was problematic. He didn’t look like a nice man and...