Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft...
Guadalajara artist Jose Dávila moves around LA
When I heard the title of Jose Dávila’s recent book, Daylight Found Me with No Answer, it sounded familiar. During the years I was living in Guadalajara, I frequently talked with Dávila and other mutual friends at endless parties that lasted until dawn. But I hadn’t...
The courageous photography of Laura Aguilar
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
PST: LA/LA Artillery Recommendations
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an...
Galerías en LA/LA
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm:...
GUEST LECTURE
“Before I went to the U.K. I had already decided to make a dress called Queen to honor the journey.” In the wake of LACMA’s highly successful retrospective (2011) “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987,” Asco founding member Patssi Valdez was invited...
ART BRIEF
In the past two years two art museums endowed by Los Angeles billionaires have opened. Eli Broad opened The Broad museum in 2015 and the owners of Guess Jeans, the Marciano Brothers, opened the Marciano Art Foundation in May of this year. While this is a huge boost to...
DECODER
“Regrettably, the provocative nature of your content is likely unsuitable for our audience at this time.” It may shock you to discover that artists still get told this. It may shock you to discover that—in the fine arts, in Los Angeles, California, in 2017—shock still...
UNDER THE RADAR
Avant-garde artistic movements have a funny way of morphing into the mainstream—witness the fridge-magnet ubiquity of Impressionist paintings, or the integral role of appropriated samples in contemporary pop music. Perhaps the least-known but most influential of these...
RETROSPECT
Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...
BUNKER VISION
With all of the recent hysteria about immigration, it seemed like a good time to explore the original American immigrants. There is quite a rich history of movies about settlers (a word that is still used in some parts of the world) doing battle with people who were...
Ask Babs
I GET NO KICK FROM CHAMPAGNE Dear Babs, Recently I was invited to a private art preview and cocktail party, co-hosted by a prestigious Los Angeles gallery and art museum. The event was in the desert, so most likely attendees would be traveling at least two hours from...
SHOPTALK
PST & NEW ART PRESS OK, Stalwarts, here comes... ARTMAGEDDON 3! That is, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, with some 70 arts organizations participating, plus about the same number of commercial galleries mounting theme-related shows. The marathon officially gets...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
DEAD OR ALIVE: Danny Balsz
RECONNOITER
Dr. Lourdes I. Ramos was recently appointed as President and CEO of the Museum of Latin American Art in May. Previously, she served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico for 12 years. She is the first Latina to hold the position...
Jim Shaw
In his short video Tales from the Wig Museum (2017), on view at Blum & Poe gallery, Jim Shaw appropriates the style of the opening narration from Rod Serling’s television series The Twilight Zone. In this piece, a wig-wearing narrator delights in relating alluring...
Edgar Arceneaux
There are a number of emotional responses to walking through a graveyard: firstly, satisfaction that one is walking at all and not an insensate resident; another, for those seduced by death and rejected by the quick, is the camaraderie of obliging, complementary...