Current Issue
Table of Contents
January/February 2024
DIGITAL EDITION
COMPASSIONATE VISIONS The Los Angeles Poverty Department Brings Attention to Skid Row Artists
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA), founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los...
BEYOND PORTRAITURE Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens
High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights....
ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration
Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists...
THE HERE AND NOW OF IT Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape
You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The...
THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer
They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce...
ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT "William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty
William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the...
BUNKER VISION Are We Not Men?
Decades before there was a public internet, people were using the post office and self-published magazines to build communities. An interesting example of this was heterosexual men who liked to cross-dress. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was completely illegal for men to...
ART BRIEF The Curious Case of Collector Leon Black
Billionaire founder of private equity firm Apollo Management, Leon Black, was at the top of his game in 2021 both as a Wall Street financier and as one of the world’s leading art collectors, owning works valued at more than $1 billion (he paid $120 million for a...
A Moment for Synthetic Self-Reflection Analia Saban
As with most endings, there exists introspection. The show is done, the crates have been shipped, the pieces have been sold—or not. Regardless of the success or accolades, regardless of the critic’s opinions, reality is now filled with days of waking up sans deadline....
PEER REVIEW Ishi Glinsky on Kristopher Raos
A standout artist in 2023’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, Ishi Glinsky often plays with scale in his sculptures, paintings and drawings that reflect the customs of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fusing the past with the present, Glinsky examines pieces from his...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS L.A. Fairs in the New Year, The Artful Lunacy of Luna Luna, Over at the Huntington, Movies and Endings
L.A. FAIRS IN THE NEW YEAR The fairs are coming again, and the leader of the pack is, of course, Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 29–March 3, 2024), returning once more to the Santa Monica Airport. There will be more than 95 exhibitors, with about half from the greater LA...
LOOKING AT TOMORROW David Byrne Takes On the Housing Crisis in the Northwest
One wouldn’t expect the prelude to a screening of David Byrne’s American Utopia to be a conversation—facilitated by the polymath—on affordable housing, but that’s what happened this past November at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. For one hour Byrne, joined...
ASK BABS ACCESSIBLE ART?
Dear Babs, Dear Babs, How do you feel about an artist selling prints of an original artwork that hasn’t been shown or sold yet? Since it’s a print, the cost will be more affordable to the average buyer. Do you think this lowers the value of owning the actual piece of...
POEMS "Stealing Life" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Stealing Life Closer and closer to fifty, years turn months, weeks, days, and I have trouble staying asleep. Around two I get up to read in the living room, then lie down, this time on the couch, turning the transistor radio to KGO, distracting myself, returning, life...
COMICS Community Standard
CODE ORANGE January-February 2024 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Poul Lange and our finalists, Lange's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the January/February 2024 online edition Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our...
Teddy Sandoval Vincent Price Art Museum
The Vincent Price Art Museum has mounted an ambitious and idiosyncratic survey of a little-known slice of Los Angeles art history. “Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art,” curated by Dr. C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz, sheds light on the...
Kenwyn Crichlow Diane Rosenstein Gallery
With his first solo show in California, the Trinidadian painter Kenwyn Crichlow makes a memorable debut, displaying dynamic, reflective abstractions that engulf the viewer in a spectrum of sensations. Born in Trinidad and Tobago when it was still a British colony,...
Hanna Hur Kristina Kite Gallery
Like the checkerboard floor of the gallery in which they are displayed, the two largest works in Hanna Hur’s exhibition, “Two Angels,” are gridded and divided down the middle. However, unlike the somewhat haphazardly arranged gray, black and white tiles at Kristina...
Fred Wilson Pace Gallery
Over the past three decades, Fred Wilson has frequently exhibited objects in unexpected juxtapositions as a means for examining things in a new light. For his groundbreaking 1992 installation, “Mining the Museum,” he selected racially biased items from the collection...
Rosemary Mayer Hannah Hoffman; Marc Selwyn Fine Art
The act of writing is a process of appropriations. Words predate the user, who then borrows and deploys them. With each new text, these tools of communication are shuffled to embody another of their possible sequencings, attempting to connect the writer to their...
Richard Mensah Band of Vices
When writer and poet Peter J. Harris wrote in his poem Only Wine (2004): Blessed be the laughter of lovers for it separates the edges of the future / bless me with your laughter, Blessed be the music of lovers for it spices the taste of all creation / bless me with...
Keith Sonnier parrasch heijnen
Post-minimalist Keith Sonnier, who passed in 2020, was too prominent a figure to fall into the shadows, as have so many of his contemporaries. But given his striking originality, restless inventiveness and impact upon a broad range of peers and younger artists,...
Vishal Jugdeo Commonwealth and Council
Two men are talking in a car, as low green fields stream past the windows. “This used to all be fruit trees but the new owner tore them up,” says the driver. “And he planted rice?” the other man incredulously asks. The first man doesn’t answer but shakes his head in...