What is Chinatown, and what does it mean to a younger generation who can’t even speak Chinese? The play “King of the Yees” (through August 6) makes an attempt to address that issue, via the story of a father-daughter relationship at the crossroads. It is also about...
Past and Present: LA Art in the ’90s
The recognized History of Art is marked by a movement, our blue-chip Art Stars and our institutions. Often more interesting and dynamic, the smaller histories of a regional art community are established by the galleries, art spaces and the people who support them. The...
CURRENT EVENTS: documenta 14
Every five years the sedate city of Kassel, Germany, launches an art expo that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of our times, documenta. This 14th edition was an ambitious one, costing over $36 million, with one part opening in Athens, Greece, in April (ending July...
Alice Cooper Discovers $10 Million Lost Warhol
Alice Cooper has discovered an Andy Warhol artwork, more than 40 years after it was given to him as a gift. The rock musician had forgotten about the work, which was being kept in storage, until it was found "rolled up in a tube" in a locker along with a collection...
“Creatives” Gather at Art of Freelance
So, the event I’m about to gossip with you about was brought to you by Art of Freelance —a “10-week online course for creatives who want to push themselves to the next level.” I feel obligated to say the following; the emergence of the word “creative” as a title to...
Face to Face: Los Angeles Collects Portraiture
As noted in an Artillery Pick quite recently, portraiture is the oldest form of ‘identity art’, and moreover, representation itself. It is ‘naming’ in the largest sense – placing, identifying, classifying, narrating, and implicitly conceptualizing, though without...
KENNY SCHARF
"Kenny Scharf: Blox and Bax" at Honor Fraser gallery in Culver City this past spring. This was Scharf's fifth exhibition with Honor Fraser, featuring back-by-popular-demand performance artist and BFF Ann Magnuson. The crowd was abuzz, art stars aligned, vivid colors...
Waters World
Film director John Waters is best known for his trilogy of ’60s and ’70s transgressive cult cinema classics Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. These films used a repeating troupe of actors, the most famous being the stars Divine, Mink Stole, and...
Pasadena Museum of California Art: : Interstitial
Collectively, the works that make up “Interstitial,” now on view at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, read like the detritus one might find in an abandoned time capsule. Curated by John David O'Brien (a regular Artillery contributor), the exhibition houses an...
Salvador Dali Corpse Exhumed In Paternity Case Media Circus
She is suing the Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation and the Spanish state, which inherited the surrealist painter’s works in a bid to claim a quarter of his fortune. A Spanish judge ordered the exhumation of Dalí’s body to enable samples to be taken from his teeth and...
80/50 Quiet Storm
We read history for perspective on advancing and collapsing civilizations and their impacts on planetary life and (hopefully) an understanding of historical cycles and a sense of where we might all be headed (besides other planets). Art exhibitions, historical and...
Chinatown Art Buffet
Chung King Road was a buffet of openings Saturday night, with a variety of gallerygoers overflowing into the street. Like a high school party, there were definite discrepancies between the crowds: academics and LA art stars at Charlie James Gallery; mid-careers with...
LACMA: : Alejandro G. Iñárritu: CARNE y ARENA
Only one visitor enters Alejandro Iñárritu’s installation CARNE y ARENA at a time. If you’re lucky enough to get a ticket, you’ll begin in a startlingly cold room lit by hard fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Beat-up sneakers and water bottles lie underneath metal...
Over the Rainbow
The title of the show is as ironic as it is aspirational. Most of us find ourselves in a place far more culturally fractured than we imagined less than a year ago, and pressing forward into an ever-more dystopian reality. Which is why it is as important as ever to...
Sprints for the Arts
Sprints. They’re good for the body, in short and intermittent bursts. Are they good for the arts? 90x90LA was a series of inclusive literary events held 90 days in a row in 2014, hosted by Writ Large Press. They’re back at it again this year with a focus on cultural...
Sprüth Magers: : Analia Saban
The strategic manipulation and disorientation of material: concrete, paper, ink, and fiber, link the four distinct series displayed in Analia Saban’s “Folds and Faults.” As the exhibition title alludes, each work either weaves these materials together or ruptures them...
Burning Incense and Fireworks
A precariously long holiday weekend can lead to overcommitting, being noncommittal, or not knowing which exhibitions to see while catching up with family, friends, and maybe some if not a lot of fireworks. At the top of my list this weekend was the opening of "Home...
The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts
Not more than a year ago, I was writing about a show at LACMA with a transcendental dimension – not merely transcending its materials, approach and style, but whose visionary qualities might potentially carry the dedicated viewer to a place of transcendence. Only a...