Articles
Jason Gottlieb: A Healthier Approach to Cannibalism
Cannibalism is now a regular thing in the art world. I’m not being metaphorical by referring to the cutthroat competition of an art market mirroring the inhumanity of its elite clientele. I’m talking about actual artists eating people. In 1996 the artist Marco...
The Personal and Political Landscapes of Narsiso Martinez
Narsiso Martinez shapes richly detailed images of farm workers in oil, charcoal and ink wash—with discarded produce boxes as his canvas. A simple trip to Costco for pizza proved revelatory for the artist, when he found a purple-and-yellow banana box at the store. When...
Michael’s Restaurant
Known as a pioneer of the farm-to-table dining movement, Michael McCarty founded his first restaurant, Michael’s, in Santa Monica in 1979. Ten years later he would open his second location in Midtown Manhattan. Michael and his wife, the artist Kim McCarty, would...
ARTXFOOD: A Case of Cross-Cultural Indigestion
When is a painting high art, and when is it just nice wallpaper? On May 10, I learned the answer to this question when attending ARTXFOOD’s inaugural art-themed dinner, Hallowed Ground. ARTXFOOD is produced by ArtCubed Los Angeles, which hosted a “part salon, part...
Summer Picnic Spread
Food allures our ocular faculties as much as it gratifies our alimentary and salivary organs. We devour visual stimuli with our eyes just as we ingest edibles through our mouths. It thus seems felicitous that the word “taste” applies to aesthetic predilections as well...
COMICS: DEAD OR ALIVE
Queer Biennial: “What If Utopia?”
June is LGBT+ Pride month, and it also marks the month of the third annual Los Angeles-based Queer Biennial, founded and curated by Ruben Esparza, which opened on June 1, titled “What if Utopia?" I have to admit that I am disappointed by this queer biennial, unlike...
Judie Bamber: The Place Where Something Happens
It’s an uncharacteristically cool, rainy afternoon when I climb the steps to Judie Bamber’s home and studio in a neighborhood off Sunset. As I enter her studio—a surprisingly spare and self-contained space—a rectangle of golden light seems to float on an easel set up...
Beyond Binary: Thinh Nguyen
Shuffle the cards. Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me. — Claude Cahun Thinh Nguyen is a non-binary artist who calls our attention to the constructed nature of our ideas about race and gender. Nguyen...
Carmen Argote: Riding It Out
When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her...
April Bey: Black to the Future
Los Angeles–based artist April Bey fuses her fine arts education with a background in design to create rule-based hybrid works that intertwine a host of materials such as caulking, resin and wood along with low quality sewing needles, thread and Hitarget wax fabric,...
Beautiful Mutant: Young Joon Kwak
On the evening of June 25, 2016, a group of gorgeous mutants rushed out of The Broad museum and began loving themselves and each other on South Grand Avenue. This band of performers, known collectively as Mutant Salon, is run by the LA-based visionary artist Young...
OP-ED: In the Age of #MeToo
The wave of women coming forward with accounts of sexual harassment and assault has swept the art world like the Santa Ana winds in a California brush fire, and all I have to say is “Finally.” Historically, women have served as objects of sexual desire within the...
RECONNOITER
Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds has made a practice of illuminating Native-American life against dominant culture erasure. In his recent LA-area exhibitions at Garis & Hahn and the Pitzer College Galleries, he focused on activism and history. You tell...
COMICS: Jeff Jones
FILM: Isle of Dogs
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus...
The Educated Outsider: John Tottenham
“We’ll play to 700?” John Tottenham asks, but really it’s more of a demand than a question. It’s my second week of trying to combine an interview with him on his drawings of the Manson girls (as he insists, “You don’t have to focus on that series”) and our weekly game...
Seeing Reality: Abel Alejandre and Others
Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you’re looking at more clearly. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory—where it stays—it’s transmitted by your hands....
Sitting for Don Bachardy
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with...
The Wild Ride of Eli Langer
If one were to Google Canadian artist Eli Langer, most of the results would reference a convoluted legal case against his first show (held at Toronto’s Mercer Union Gallery in 1993) that proclaimed the subject matter not simply to be pornography but child...