Mar is sitting in his Marina Del Rey studio, wearing a pair of ripped, paint-splattered jeans. Behind him is the largest piece featured in his upcoming solo exhibition at Art Angels: a 6x6-foot color-wheel whirlpool. Mar points directly across from him to a painting...
Pussy Riot Goes Hawaiian
Artist Masami Teraoka said, “Let’s make art!” and they did. Pure art rumbles, bubbles and springs forth, like the eruption of a magnificent geyser. As the plume spray drifts and evaporates in the wind, the beauty of the gesture is the impermanent purpose. A...
Cindy Bernard – Things Change, Things Stay the Same
Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
Sippin’ 2-Buck & Chillin’
The hot Santa Ana winds whipped around our bare legs as we searched for The Lodge on Western Ave Saturday evening. Inside, a zillion children were engaged in hide-and-seek and overall hyperactivity, while the adults, mid-career artists, mingled in summer dresses,...
Kohn Gallery: : Dean Byington
Simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, utopian and dystopian, Dean Byington's complex canvases are the result of a meticulously refined process that is both digital and analog. Byington begins by collaging photocopies of his own drawings in parallel with fragments...
Art Hamptons and Art Southampton Cancel 2017
Two major Hamptons fine art fairs are not returning in 2017: Art Hamptons and Art Southampton. Organizers of both suspended events attributed the cancellations to market conditions and buyer fatigue. Rick Friedman, the founder of Hamptons Expo Group, put on the...
Honoring our Legends Now
My art-sister-in-arms and I headed out to Craft and Folk Art Museum Saturday evening to take in their survey show of Betye Saar’s washboard assemblages. Spanning the course of 20 years, from 1997 to present, this specific exhibition references the domestic, spiritual...
California African American Museum: Derrick Adams
Mercifully averted, the television writers’ strike was urgent news in Los Angeles, where total triviality-immersion is our raison d’être, and its media coverage was breathless. This would have wryly charmed Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. His 1985...
Material As Metaphor and Betye Saar
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...