I met Sheldon Figoten in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. We were just a couple of ambitious young artists from Los Angeles on sabbatical in California’s northern hemisphere at the time. After returning to SoCal, Figoten settled in Venice and over the years has become...
Liat Yossifor
Propped against the wall of her second-story Hollywood Boulevard studio, three of Liat Yossifor’s gray paintings—each about seven feet by five feet—in various stages of completion sit perched on low wood supports. Yossifor’s high-ceilinged studio feels spacious, if...
Can I Get a Witness
The early 20th-century’s turn towards modernism in painting was a decisive shift in interest away from artistic representation of acts of witnessing. Abstract art—which now seems to dominate many visual demesnes including the decorative and graphic design, and sets...
The Forever Now
Curated by Laura Hoptman and on view at MoMA through April 5, “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” attempts to identify a distinctly current impulse to select and recombine styles, materials, iconography and other references from a broad...
It’s For the Birds
Nestled in an upscale residential community in Montecito, Lotusland is a 37-acre nonprofit botanical nirvana filled with over 950 species of exotic plants arranged in nearly 20 gardens. It’s also the historic estate of the late Polish opera singer and socialite Madame...
The Here and Now, From A to Z
I had never heard of Lancaster, let alone gone there, before I drove up the 405 and the 14 last November to see “Being Here and There” at the Museum of Art and History. It was “worth the trip,” as the Guide Michelin says of exceptional destinations. Almost all the 26...
FIVE QUESTIONS
JANE CHAFIN owns and operates Offramp Gallery with life partner Chaz Alexander out of their historic home in Pasadena, California. ARTILLERY: You grew up in West Virginia as a descendent of the feuding Hatfield family and your grandfather was an infamous union-busting...
GUEST LECTURE
It is a basic human impulse to make things: the basic and poignant idea of surrounding oneself with plenitude, making it harder for death to penetrate. Connecting the great arc of maker and collector/consumer, no one is spared this inevitability. It is crucial that we...
JANE CHAFIN
Technically, a grande dame is a highly respected elderly or middle-aged woman who has extensive experience in her field. Although gallerist Jane Chafin is certainly not elderly, she is highly respected and experienced in our art business. And she is building a...
ART BRIEF
Art Basel Miami was such a social swirl (what did that Miley Cyrus concert at the Raleigh Hotel have to do with art?), that it’s hard to remember the actual works of art that were on display. Collectors jostled to be seen at the first Art Basel viewing at 11 a.m. You...
LONDON CALLING
“To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was,” wrote Walter Benjamin. “It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” Dexter Dalwood, a previous nominee for the Turner Prize, examines in this new...
PRIVATE EYE
Inge Reist is the director of the Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection, New York. She plays additional roles as chief of research collections, which includes the Frick photo archive, and choosing...
Shooting Stars
"STEFANO TONCHI & MILEY CYRUS HOST W MAGAZINE'S Shooting Stars Exhibit Opening in LA with HUGO BOSS and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas" From Shooting Stars. Posted by Artillery Magazine on 3/04/2015 (16 items) STEFANO TONCHI & MILEY CYRUS HOST W MAGAZINE'S Shooting...
ASK BABS
Dear Babs, I’m an art student about to graduate with a BFA in photography at one of the best art schools in the Los Angeles area. Is it okay to work in a commercial photography field while showing artwork in galleries? Besides presenting two separate portfolios/series...
RETROSPECT
Narrative art is art that holds a story in it. It is as old as a simple clay bowl that holds life-giving water. The narrative art that most effected me, at a tender age and for the rest of my life, were the pictures by Kay Nielsen that I saw in my fairy tale book,...
BUNKER VISION
» Now that binge-watching is officially a thing, it’s getting easier to convince people to sample Jacques Rivette. A three-hour film by Rivette is considered average to short. His longest film (Out: One) runs over 12 hours. The length of his films is more than a...
SHOPTALK
GALLERY MOVESIn and Out, Back and ForthTwo of our longtime Los Angeles galleries are closing: Angles Gallery is shutting down its La Cienega space, and Frank Lloyd has vacated Bergamot Station with its final show—of two legendary figures in postwar LA art, Peter...
Word & Music Made Architectural
There were moments in the recent James Darrah directed production of the Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, conducted by Michael Tilson-Thomas (a co-production with the San Francisco Symphony, in celebration of Tilson-Thomas’ 70th...