Articles
POEMS "Chalk Poem" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Chalk Poem The long cool freedom pure as a stick of chalk powdering against the edge of jealousy hard and green, also cool a tongue in your mouth an equation in your mind about where purity goes as it’s clapped against a tree trunk, the side of a building leaving...
COMICS Sinbad's Voyage
STAYING INSIDE THE LINES Painting AI's Possible Future
Many consider the AARON project the earliest use of AI in artwork. If AI is the most recent and advanced example of humans using automated processes to make art, then its history goes back much further. So why all the fuss now? Is AI so different than John Cage...
FURIOUSLY JUMPED UP Poor Things Delivers Visceral and Cerebral Thrills
"And when we know the world, the world is ours.” —Bella Baxter What is it exactly that makes a being human?” Is it the presence of a human body or a human mind? Or is it some incommensurable, uncanny union between the two? For the philosopher Descartes, the answer was...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Welcome, Year of the Dragon
It’s the Year of the Dragon in the Chinese lunar calendar, which began February 10, and several museums are featuring Asian/Asian-American artists. Appropriately timed, or maybe just high time to feature them. For those who did not grow up Chinese, or are not Bruce...
POEMS "What's Available for Happy Hour" and "Cowardly New World"
What's Available for Happy Hour? “Nothing, happy hour is from four till five.” “Really?” “It’s a literal hour.” “So, by extension all other hours are unhappy?” “Not necessarily. There are sad hours, bored hours, angry hours, even ecstatic hours, though some forms of...
COMICS Puppets on Strike!
“If Memory Serves: Photography, Recollections and Vision” at Brand Library and Art Center Q&A with Aline Smithson
Aline Smithson’s conceptual works begin where photographic materials and processes encounter lost and found moments. She has been exploring our complicated relationships with our memories and the devices we use to capture them, our self-presentation and surrounding,...
COMPASSIONATE VISIONS The Los Angeles Poverty Department Brings Attention to Skid Row Artists
The Skid Row History Museum and Archive (SRHMA), founded by artist John Malpede and directed by Henriëtte Brouwers, is located at 250 South Broadway. It is a unique community art center, as well as a museum and archive for the historical displacement of people in Los...
BEYOND PORTRAITURE Danie Cansino: Seeing LA Through Her Lens
High drama and Baroque chiaroscuro meet tattoo art in Danie Cansino’s elaborate paintings of Los Angeles and Chicanx culture. The artist and educator draws from her own life—family, friends and the neighborhoods she knows best, including East LA and Boyle Heights....
ACCESS TO ABSTRACTION Anne Libby and Anna Rosen Find Freedom in Collaboration
Communal and collaborative art practices have long appealed to artists as a means of disrupting the patriarchal mythology behind the solitary creative genius, and escaping the art-market matrix of competition and authorship. For the two Los Angeles–based artists...
THE HERE AND NOW OF IT Acaye Kerunen Finds Purpose and Community in a Scarred Landscape
You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The...
THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer
They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce...
ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT "William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty
William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the...
POEMS "Stealing Life" and "The Lugubrious Game"
Stealing Life Closer and closer to fifty, years turn months, weeks, days, and I have trouble staying asleep. Around two I get up to read in the living room, then lie down, this time on the couch, turning the transistor radio to KGO, distracting myself, returning, life...
COMICS Community Standard
BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN
Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums,...
Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023 Fantasy Takes the Lead
What a year for feature films this has been, both rich and strange. Indeed, fantasy seemed to have taken the lead, as we emerge from the fever of the COVID epidemic and try to find the new normal. These were not the usual escapist fantasies, but fantasies that spoke...
Miami Art Week Report: Day 4 New Art Dealers Alliance Fair and a very Miami party
As Art Week races to a close, yesterday I headed downtown across the dreaded, traffic-filled bridge to the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for my final full day here in Miami. While the fair opened on Tuesday, the busy week of competing events prevented me from...
Miami Art Week Report: Day 3 A day at the fairs and a look inside the after dark events
Artillery is back with Day 3 in Miami Beach. The fairs are in full swing, the collectors are fighting for first access, and the tiny glasses of overpriced champagne are on offer at every opportunity. Yesterday, we started with the design highlight of the week: Design...