Articles
THE GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTS IN LOS ANGELES Photographs by Lara Jo Regan
The uprisings and protests over the death of George Floyd erupted in Los Angeles not unlike its legendary wildfires. The flare-ups were largely spontaneous and unpredictable, some small and contained, others massive and out-of-control. Yet all were fueled with an...
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
Set on a six-acre site overlooking downtown Montgomery and, most significantly, the Alabama State Capitol, The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened in April 2018, is dedicated to the over 4,400 known victims of racial terrorism who were murdered by...
In Conversation: Kesha Bruce Step One to Afrofuture
A good white American friend can be hard to find, so I appreciate and cherish mine. It’s June 2020, a month that will probably go down in history as one of the most pivotal, enraging, disgusting, hypocritical, amazing months in American history. And one by one, these...
Brandy Eve Allen: Connection in Isolation
Los Angeles–based photographer Brandy Eve Allen has responded uniquely to the isolation of the COVID social distancing period with a new series of portraits, shot from the street, of isolators in their homes. The subjects of the photos, who Allen found on Nextdoor...
Lynn Hershman Leeson Political and Hopeful
Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been an artist simultaneously ahead of her time and very much a product of the present moment. From her revolutionary Breathing Machines in the early 1960s—the first sculpture works which incorporated sound—to her most recent video...
The Power of Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe Proverbial Portraiture
When I talk with Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, his smiling face lights up the video conference window as he speaks of joy. He hopes to bring joy to the subjects of his portraits, and to those that view them. Picking up the range of tonality in Blackness, his portraits...
St. Elmo Village Thrives Today A Safe Space
Hidden in a quiet Mid-City tract is a Los Angeles art institution. Not that you’d know it if you didn’t slow down and really look for the five-lot compound on this quiet residential street. Otherwise you could easily miss the sign: “St. Elmo Village,” half hidden by...
HOPPING ONLINE Virtual Viewing has its Virtues
During these last three months art galleries have been tripping over themselves to create virtual viewing rooms and walkthroughs, and to join collective ventures in online selling such as GALLERYPLATFORM.LA and FAIR (from New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA). Meanwhile,...
POEMS "Gomorrah" by Eddi Saladoe; "Iron Anniversary" by John Tottenham
Gomorrah by Eddi Saladoe Right when I believed that I was finally free from the angry longing and a need to hear your voice just one more time you come to me in dreams like smoke sneaking under a bedroom door the innocent sleepers unaware that the civilization...
COMICS Above, The Law
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Seafoam Green
Editor’s Note: In lieu of our usual reviews and gallery rounds, we will be running a special SHELTER-IN-PLACE series for the duration of social distancing. This series will focus on that which can be enjoyed from home: musings on stream-able films, online art, and...
LA’s Strange Still Beauty Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill Tool Around the Empty Streets
Dani Dodge and Diane Cockerill are two very different artists, both working in the photographic medium during Los Angeles’ great exile inward from the onslaught of the COVID-19 virus. Their recording of this time is both surreal and sublime; capturing these frozen...
Building Bridges with Julian Bermudez
I met Julian Bermudez at his gallery, Bermudez Projects, a spare, light-filled space in the Cypress Park area of Northeast Los Angeles. Bermudez was attired in art-world black and sported a thin, pointed mustache. He was bright, energetic and articulate. He started...
The Met Loses $100 Million! A Mere Pittance
The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported on March 12th that, as a result of closing until July due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they would take up to a $100 million loss and are considering the furlough or layoff of many of its staff members. This, for many in...
Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram, 1955–59
No wonder your president has to be an actor. He's gotta look good on television. Emmett Lathrop "Doc" Brown, Ph.D. Back to the Future, 1985 It stands triumphantly—a voracious junkyard goat surmounting a catafalque of the written word, a bier of...
The Online Life: Photos to Cringe By
The day I sat down to write this opinion piece, I was moved to do so by a feature in The New York Times that both irritated and alarmed me. “Now Virtual and in Video, Museum Websites Shake Off the Dust” the headline read, and the text informed me that the Louvre, our...
SHOPTALK
Pomp & Zoom Spring usually heralds a spate of art-school grad ceremonies and shows—the equivalent of debutante balls for young artists and designers trained at our august art schools. This year with shelter-at-home and social-distancing mandates in place, there...
Roll Call: Blast from the Past
Delight in past photos from the LA art openings from January thru May 2019. Please tag yourself in these photos our our Facebook page. Enjoy the thrill of seeing people getting together and perhaps little by little we will start to rewind and begin to see art in the...
SHELTER-IN-PLACE: Remarks on Oxblood
Red is a color that should never be messed with, diluted, bastardized, cross-pollinated or otherwise appropriated, which calls into question the reason the color oxblood exists at all. If you cut open the belly of an ox, would the seepage of viscera reveal this...
Movements: Battles and Solidarity
On the weekend before everything locked down in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to catch the exhibition "To View a Plastic Flower" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and to hear one of the featured artists, Vietnamese American artist T. Kim-Trang Tran,...