Articles
COMICS: Icono Clast
ONE YEAR of Living Dangerously: Political Art Comes of Age in LA
An exhibition curated by artists Joey Forsyte, Lawrence Gipe and Alexander Kritselis, in conjunction with Brand Exhibition Supervisor, Shannon Currie Holmes. [gallery...
Really? Curated by Beth Rudin DeWoody
Last Sunday afternoon, artists, gallerists—and anyone who matters in the Los Angeles art world—piled into the crowded Wilding Cran Gallery to check out the excellent show curated by art collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. I wasn't going to have one of those appetizing...
Tectonic Shift at Nevada Museum of Art
Perhaps the best way to think about “Unsettled,” the ambitious fall exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, is from a planetary perspective. As a complement, a separate project concurrently on view suggests and reinforces that viewpoint. A one-to-one scale model of a...
The Problem with Jorge Pardo
This past August I decided to brave the coastal traffic to make a visit to the Lux Art Institute near San Diego. I was on deadline and woke up with a cold, but I had been notified that mega-artist and LA expat Jorge Pardo was scheduled to speak as his...
Zak Smith in conversation with Cosey Fanni Tutti
You find out about Cosey Fanni Tutti’s various bodies of work by rumor or implication—did you know that someone once did this? Did you know it was the same woman who did that? Cosey started out as a little girl named Christine Newby, in Hull, in the U.K., in 1951. She...
Meet Vaginal Davis: Film Scholar
Vaginal Davis is one of the better examples of somebody who mixes life with art. Her activities include performing, curating, composing, painting and writing. From the late 1970s to early aughts she manifested a series of bands, performances, publications, clubs and...
Latin Nights
Half the population of Los Angeles is now Latino, but its signature industry, the film business, fails to include a significant number of Latinos in feature films or deal with stories that may be especially relevant to their lives. This fall the Academy of Motion...
Beyond Escapism
Apocryphal notions, like northern superiority and European “discovery” of land already populated, pervade the Western Hemisphere. Even before Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, our so-named New World has been a locus for European fantasy projection. Currently on view at...
DEAD OR ALIVE: Sparky Schultz
Richard Turner: Air Becomes Breath
What do we have when those closest and dearest to us pass away and what do we do with the things that were once theirs? Richard Turner's installation Air Becomes Breath, 2017, takes that question on and has turned the clothing of his recently deceased wife, Sylvia,...
Karen Finley at REDCAT
Karen Finley’s The Expanded Unicorn Gratitude Mystery unfolds similarly to a dream that makes complete logical sense when experiencing it, but is difficult to piece together the linear structure upon waking. The one-woman show lasts for an hour and a half (no...
The 57th Venice Biennale: Old with the New
I have had the opportunity to visit the Venice Biennale on numerous occasions. In reflecting, I realize that what makes one trip stand out over another is the totality of the experience and not the specificity of the art. How can one not love Venice? Navigating...
Sandra de la Loza’s bookish, spirited activism
In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at...
Ana Serrano Shifts her Latino Neighborhoods
Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft...
Guadalajara artist Jose Dávila moves around LA
When I heard the title of Jose Dávila’s recent book, Daylight Found Me with No Answer, it sounded familiar. During the years I was living in Guadalajara, I frequently talked with Dávila and other mutual friends at endless parties that lasted until dawn. But I hadn’t...
The courageous photography of Laura Aguilar
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
PST: LA/LA Artillery Recommendations
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an...
Galerías en LA/LA
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm:...
