Articles
The Trisha Brown Dance Company’s “In Plain Site”
Maybe every gesture that you make can birth a fresh way of living. Perhaps by merely looking over your shoulder, or touching the ground, you can create a brand new philosophy or a radical break with reality. So argued the dancers in the Trisha Brown Dance Company at...
The Many Shades of Kerry James Marshall
It’s cold. He looks even larger in his winter coat. He is a large man. Tall and broad-shouldered. In football, he might be a tight end; I’ve stood next to several players for the Bears. He would not seem out of place among such large men except that the hair on his...
We Don’t Need No Stinking Wall
If there is anybody more unpopular in Mexico at the moment than President Enrique Peña Nieto, it is, of course, Donald J. Trump. After a long list of aggressions, rudeness and even “jokes” by Trump, and in the middle of a big domestic crisis—both political and...
Ana Teresa Fernandez Paints it Away
Five years ago, San Francisco–based painter, sculptor and performance artist Ana Teresa Fernández woke from a long night’s sleep with a sudden inspiration: She would erase the border fence that divides the United States and Mexico. It was June, 2011. That October,...
Women on the Verge of a Cultural Breakthrough
Kim Abeles’ studio doesn’t have enough chairs, so we have to sit in the adjacent gallery space at the front entrance of the building. Even though it’s glaringly sunny outside, it’s freezing inside the space as attendees spill into the room and sit down on rolling...
Nan Goldin: Diving for Pearls
Nan Goldin, to borrow a phrase from her friend and fellow-artist David Wojnarowicz, has always lived and worked “close to the knives.” Her most recent published collection, Diving for Pearls, can only intensify our appreciation for her images of that pain and that...
The Water Bar is Open
A lot has changed over the last two years in the world of water. The high level of lead found in children living in Flint, Michigan—exposed by consuming and bathing in Flint River tap water—was brought to the nation’s attention. And last fall, over 10,000 Keystone...
COMICS
Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present
Tony Conrad is one of the unlikeliest figures to be the subject of the kind of late-career historical recontextualization that authenticity-starved hipster youth have made their simulacral avant-garde. Don’t get me wrong. His bona fides are all in place; a pivotal...
Toba Khedoori: Making it your Own
“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly...
Leo Garcia: My Alien Abduction
Every now and then an artist pops above the horizon line with a private cosmology like the late Mati Klarwein whose Aleph Sanctuary in the 1970s was a marvel of jewel-like paintings. An artist like Alex Grey known for his visionary painting and his "Chapel of Sacred...
Zona Maco Art Fair Report
As every year, since 2004, Zona Maco, one of the most important Latin American art fairs, was carried last week in Mexico City with the participation of more than 150 galleries. Founded by Mexican Zélika García, Zona Maco is such a big and social event in a city...
Hudson Marquez at La Luz de Jesus
Hudson Marquez, alumni of the art group Ant Farm and creator of The Cadillac Ranch, wants to make your sex life better—and it’s not by meds or therapy—it’s with his paintings of women’s stiletto high heel shoes. Marquez’ exhibition, "Welcome to Stiletto," at La Luz de...
Exploring the Queer Self
As of late, queer art exhibitions have been popping up all over America. One such art show is “How Do I Look?: Shifting Representations in Queer Identifications,” which is on display at the Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia. In this review, I will surface the...
Stella Still Intriguing
Half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. —Donald Judd, Specific Objects 1965 When Donald Judd spoke of work that is a hybrid of painting and sculpture, one of the artists he was undoubtedly referring to was Frank...
Molly Jo Shea: Driven By Fear
Los Angeles performance artist Molly Jo Shea knows that you’ve got some genuine feelings, you’re just scared to reveal them. If you attend one of her shows, maybe you should be afraid. Shea operates as a doula of the emotions and she will barf blood or take a tough...
Osceola Refetoff: A Room with a View
An austere flat horizon is blanketed by intensely blue sky and bracketed by the remnants of an orange window frame, its rectilinear quiet slyly evoking Rothko. Gauzy clouds, piled atop a low mountain, are seen Magritte-like, through a thick wooden square—maybe a...
BEST IN SHOW 2016
“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we...
Melanie Pullen: Pictures of Passion
Melanie Pullen invites me into her sunny apartment as she cleans up from a party the night before, “This is why I left New York!” she says, gesturing to full-length windows with a sweeping view of Koreatown. “All this room!”Pullen’s enthusiasm for Los Angeles is apt,...
Taking a Trump
It’s worth considering why it’s so easy to caricature Donald Trump. He looks strange—with his fake tan, anus-like pout, signature comb-over—topped with a bright red, race-baiting ball cap. Like any President-to-be, he’s the focus of boundless criticism and ridicule,...