How do we put this? A Guy’s gotta paint! And the Guy who’s gotta paint has clearly gotta be obsessed about it! And maybe a few other things besides painting… like SEX! I mean a Guy’s gotta be inspired to paint! And then he’s gotta get through the stuff that fuels,...
Lauren Halsey
When I first saw Lauren Halsey’s work-in-progress during her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, I was stupefied. The installation was genuinely a new experience, challenging my notion of visual and spatial aesthetics. It was exhilarating and puzzling, but...
FIELD REPORT: Springfield, Missouri
The grassy plains of southern Missouri came into view as the plane prepared to land in Springfield, a small city on the edge of the Ozarks. I grew up in a much smaller town not far from there. Springfield was the big city where Mom took us to buy new school clothes....
Rocío Aranda-Alvarado
I recently interviewed curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado of New York’s El Museo del Barrio at the opening of Site Santa Fe’s current biennial, “Much Wider Than A Line.” Rocío was part of a team of five curators for this Site’s ongoing focus on contemporary art from the...
DECODER
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, located right in the middle of the Walk of Fame, isn’t just a rare example of a nonprofit contemporary art space right out where the public can get to it. For many up-and-coming artists, a well-reviewed show at LACE can mean the...
Doug Aiken: Looking In
I have seen Doug Aitken’s video work Electric Earth many times over the last 15 years, but seeing it recently at his sprawling new retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, I suddenly grasped that the piece is presenting something new. The only...
UNDER THE RADAR
Installation artist and drone improviser Gabie Strong has been a playa in the surprisingly vigorous Los Angeles experimental music community for some time, with her radio show Crystal Morphologies as one of the anchors of pirate radio KCHUNG’s programming lineup for...
RETROSPECT: Macbeth
Macbeth is the story of a villain who people understand and have pity for—when the story is told correctly. Both Macbeth and his wife have the difficult task of being evil and asking for our sympathy. They are tortured souls not because they are losing the battle but...
BUNKER VISION: The Magic Christian
You’re sitting at an art fair (on what you hope is a chair) while your spouse has another look around. They handed you a magazine before they left, and you’re already back here. You can afford anything in the place, but everything was covered in hold stickers when the...
ASK BABS
SOLD! (NOT!)Dear Babs, In my art practice, I gravitate toward using ephemeral media and creating installations. Sometimes my work deals with "difficult" subject matter. Do most gallery owners steer clear of those qualities in art because it is challenging to sell? Is...
SHOPTALK
POP-UPS WORTH YOUR WHILE Hospital Happening and a TraphouseKudos to art consultant John Wolf for throwing together one of the most ambitious and giddy art projects this year—“Human Condition,” a pop-up gallery at a former hospital, the LA Metropolitan Medical Center...
733 LA Women in the Here and Now
When Kim Schoenstadt first asked me if I would photograph “Now Be Here LA 2016”—the historic group photograph of hundreds of LA-based women artists that she was organizing at Hauser, Wirth, & Schimmel—I simultaneously felt flattered and out of my depth. I’m an...
FILM: Sky Ladder
It is now official: awe is an essential human emotion. Yes, awe—a sense of wonder at something that is greater or beyond any single individual. “Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings,” writes Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
DEAD OR ALIVE: De Chirico
RECONNOITER
Gerard O’Brien founded The Landing a year ago and is the owner of Reform Gallery in Los Angeles, a store that quickly became a leading source for furnishings, crafts and accessories in the California Modern style.ARTILLERY: You’ve gotten a lot of admiration and good...
Looking At Doug Aitken
Exiting Electric Earth, Doug Aitken’s immersive, multichannel narrative installation first presented in 1999 and immediately confronting Twilight (2016), an eerie, translucent ghost-like freestanding replica of a now obsolete pay phone that pulsates from light to dark...
Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor has described his figurative painting, which is not infrequently straight portraiture, as landscape; and to press the point, he has taken the further step of mounting the work within a gallery prepared from the floor up, in effect treating the space as...