Articles

Jillian Mayer: Slumping Around Sculptures for a Digital Age
Miami-based, internationally shown, multi-disciplinary artist Jillian Mayer is responsible for the “Slumpies,” an ongoing sculptural series designed for a theoretical space. Put crudely, the “Slumpie” is an object meant to facilitate a more comfortable...

Safety First Pandemic Protocols Create New Positions
What sort of working environment will the Los Angeles arts workforce return to once the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is over? Or maybe a better question to ask is: How will we honor the skilled work of the preparators, installers, instructors, docents, assistants...

Poems "All the Paper in My Life" by Eve Wood; "Holding Pattern" by John Tottenham
All the Paper in My Life By Eve Wood We are born into paper— Our lives bookended in signatures, A certificate To prove you exist And another to prove you Do not, each day teeming With permits, credentials For entry and forms to depart, Passports, agendas, Records of...

COMICS Flash Matta Conquers the Universe

Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue March's Hue
Peacock Blue wishes to clarify once and for all that her name has little to do with vegetable matter and even less with genitalia, yet imagine going through life mistaken either for soup or a pecker! Such is the fate of Peacock Blue, who’s spent a lifetime in the jest...

Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU
When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles...

Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020
“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….” “I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way...

On Math Bass “Got a Light?”
If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The...

Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz
In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft...

The World Needs Dynasty Handbag A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain Times
I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social...

A Reckoning: Monument Lab, Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber
Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national...

Finding a Place (for art) in Skid Row The LA Poverty Department and The Box Gallery
The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual...

Decoder Just Give Me the Minimum
I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line...

Poems "Imagine That" by klipschutz; "The Poet’s Garden" by John Tottenham
Imagine That for YC By klipschutz Rachel Cusk flies first class and drives a hybrid. Waiting at the bus stop I raise my hand. If I change the names is it fiction? What if I keep the names and make up lies? Or is that like saying it’s a poem if it...

COMICS Art-Musement Park

Spiraling at Casa Orgánica Javier Senosiain's Architectural Oasis in Mexico
If a structure could imitate warmth and humanity, linking the innate wonder of nature to one’s need to inhibit it, Casa Orgánica by architect Javier Senosiain is it. Built in 1984 in Naucalpan, Mexico, Casa Orgánica was the first...

Photographers of Democracy: Part Two Elections by Jeff Jacobson, Callie Shell, David Burnett, and more.
“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.” –H.L. Mencken At no time in history is the character of a nation brought into more vivid relief than during elections. And no medium...

High Anxiety: A Conversation with Karen Finley
I have an ongoing conversation with Karen Finley that operates on several levels, one of which is simply her public conversation; i.e., the level on which her work has made its enduring imprint on the culture and more specifically the phenomenon of cultural trauma....

Alex Anderson: Just Like Gold Just Like Gold
It takes a lot of guts to title your solo show “Little Black Boy Makes Imperial Porcelains,” and then it takes a lot of talent to pull off a show with that loaded marquee. Alex Anderson managed to do just that at Gavlak gallery this summer, in a show (March 14–July...

Marie Thibeault: Views of the Harbor
When I first saw Marie Thibeault’s hybrid landscapes that merge abstraction with representational figures, I was struck by her bold use of color and unusual iconography, in which organic and industrial shapes are combined, many inspired by the Port of Los Angeles near...