Articles
Mindful Parking: 5 Car Garage
5 Car Garage is located in an alleyway in a residential neighborhood in Santa Monica. While it is not far from Bergamot Station, visitors to 5 Car Garage make the trek because the experience is homey and friendly, and the art on view is often engaging in unexpected...
Going the Distance
Los Angeles, being what it is—a big, sprawling desert grid with almost as many art galleries these days as there are Starbucks—can seem overwhelming when it comes to actually hopping in the car and making the point to go and see some art. Let’s face it, we sometimes...
Colorizing the Art World
There is still a sense of shock over racially charged policies out of Washington that feel out of line with the West Coast’s progressive ethos. Los Angeles’ major art institutions are trying to counteract this as best they can by presenting more exhibitions by people...
Hot Summer in the City
Summer festivities abound in the warmer weather. There’s New York’s Shakespeare in the Park, the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, and Cinespia Cemetery Screenings at LA’s own Hollywood Forever. Museums are no exceptions putting on events. LACMA used to host summer...
Man on the Moon
The Moon landing’s 50th anniversary can’t be avoided. Waxing at full, it feels like the last gasp. The defining moment for some in the baby boom generation, what does the Apollo 11 landing obscure? The moon shadow cast by one artist’s timely work points the way....
The Living Dead
There’s something undeniably seductive about Andreas Mühe’s spare, yet sumptuous photographs. A superb technician and gifted storyteller, Mühe uses both formal and narrative elements with concentrated, yet restrained intensity to create images of arresting beauty and...
Whitney Biennial: Speaking Softly
A wise person once said that if you want to catch people’s attention, speak softly. The curators of the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Rujeko Hockley and Jane Panetta, seem to have taken this advice to heart, assembling a show that doesn’t hit you over the head with gimmick...
ON A COUNTRY ROAD: Glenstone
In a short drive into the countryside of Maryland, about half an hour outside Washington, DC, is an exceptional private museum sited on 230 rolling acres, with buildings and outdoor sculpture thoughtfully tucked into the landscape. The Glenstone is the brainchild of...
Bilbao Guggenheim: Fuck the Box
I had wanted to see the Guggenheim Bilbao since it first opened. Ed Moses and I had once met up, completely by accident, in London. He had flown in from San Francisco and I from Los Angeles, arriving within the same hour. Ed invited me to stay with him, saying he had...
APOCALYPSE NOW: Venice Biennale
The malaise of our times is encapsulated and iterated over and over in this year’s Venice Biennale—whether racial conflict, gender redefinition, women’s rights, immigration, environmental threats, or any combination thereof. One begins to wonder, as one wanders...
Mexico City: Bursting with Vitality
On a narrow one-way street in San Miguel Chapultepec, it’s impossible to miss the disparate wood-paneled exterior of Kurimanzutto. Surrounded by modernist apartment buildings in a rich palette of burnt sienna, robin’s-egg blue and royal yellow, the gallery’s presence...
No Vacancy
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to spend a night in a gallery or a small museum, and wished you could walk down a motel hallway and see original murals on your way to the ice machine instead of prints that could have—and possibly did—come from a Walmart...
Paradise Found
“I paint almost every day,” says Rich Untermann, owner of the Spanish Garden Inn in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara. “When I like a painting, I frame it, and hang it someplace in the hotel. I shift them around until they feel comfortable—it is in a constant...
COMICS
Slide into Decay
There are indeed ghost towns, despite the well-known edict by Daniel Burnham. Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical...
Traveling Salesperson
You consider yourself an influencer. A few thousand Instagram followers agree. Photos of your cocktails, your midcentury furniture, your body moving through museums, through notable cities, sitting in international airports. It’s February, and @you are landing back in...
American Monument
The University Art Museum (UAM) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) recently hosted artist lauren woods’ (lower case intentional, per the artist) project, American Monument 25/2018, an ongoing intermedia monument to Black lives taken by police...
Food Justice For All!
In 1969, the Black Panther Party began its Free Breakfast for Children Program in Oakland, CA, providing healthy meals to hungry school kids in disenfranchized black neighborhoods. It quickly grew into a nationwide program and proved so successful that then FBI head...
Blurring the Border
In concurrent exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza resist political declarations of border wall funding emergencies that reflect converging agendas and legacies of colonialism, nationalism, racism and capitalism....
Zombie Newspapers
Imagine you check your mailbox to find a neatly folded copy of The New York Times waiting for you, its headline reading, “Herr Hitler’s Nazis Hear an Echo of World Opinion.” Wait. What? A double-take ensues as you encounter Susan Silton’s most recent work of art. As...