Articles

Miami Art Week Report: Day 2 Elevate Española highlights the importance of public art, and the fairs begin
After a weekend filled with art and philanthropy in Palm Beach, we’re officially ready for the parties, fairs, and people-watching of Miami Art Week. Yesterday, Untitled Art and the New Art Dealers Alliance fairs opened to VIPs, and the heavy-hitting Art Basel Miami...

Miami Art Week Report: Day 1 New Wave Art Wknd Takes Over Palm Beach
Miami Art Week is back, which means the crowds are on the way to enjoy the beach, the sun, the stunning hotels, and the most coveted art the market has to offer. For those of us visiting from New York, the warm weather couldn’t have come at a better time. Throughout...

WOVEN VISIONS Diedrick Brackens Explores Identity with Innovative Technique and Unusual Tenderness
Even with the growing inclusion of textile art in textbooks, surveys and biennials, one doesn’t normally think of weaving as a cutting-edge contemporary art medium. Diedrick Brackens is out to change that. A breakout star of the 2018 Hammer “Made in L.A.” biennial,...

EDGES AND PLURALITIES Melissa Joseph Brings Craft Into the Future
For Melissa Joseph, all things relate to edges. Her practice exists on several of them: painting, felting, craft, utility, art … the list continues. She works in a unique dry-felting medium to create imagery based on her own photography and that of her family. While...

NEEDLEWORK IN THE SERVICE OF SUBVERSION "Iron Halo" by Sal Salandra
For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog...

FABRICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS Ahree Lee Weaves Seamlessly Between Art and Technology
Multidisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Ahree Lee started her career focused on video work. In 2001, she took on her first major long-term project employing the repetitive and somewhat pedestrian habit of taking a daily selfie. The resulting images were transformed...

POEMS "free country" and "STILL THE SAME"
free country your voice on the phone in the dream is disinterested I miss you I say It’s a free country a moth falls through the door drunk on light the same one that flies out of my wallet how have I never seen him I think coming home —Evan Laffer STILL THE SAME...

COMICS Ancient Chinese Ceramics

Metro Art THROUGH A GLASS LIGHTLY
Visiting the three new Downtown LA Metro stations recently, I found myself intrigued with how artists commissioned by Metro Art use the transparency of glass to design artworks. The street level of the stations is enclosed by glass, both to allow natural light in and...

ON TOP OF THE WORLD Mercedes Dorame Reverses Power Structures With Spirituality
At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all. “Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre...

COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT "Redaction" by Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar
A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both...

FUCKING WITH AUTOBIOGRAPHY The Films of Martine Syms
How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017,...

MALKA GERMANIA Yael Bartana's Jungian Journey Into the Past and Present
In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation,...

The Complex Stuff is the Best Keith Haring at The Broad
“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...

POEMS "Cowsong" and "Yellow Touchings"
Cowsong Guide me into the depths, where the lack of oxygen intercepts the thing no human accepts. Yet here I am, alive: a joke the wind might contrive. Underneath the beat of your blood, feet in the stars, face in the mud. I can hear your brains beat and your heart...

COMICS The Seven Deadly Ads

New Art in the Metro System
With the opening of Metro’s Regional Connector on June 16, three new Downtown Los Angeles stations have site-responsive art installations by eight artists in them. The artists were carefully chosen through a multi-stage process, and their designs became integral parts...

THE BURDEN OF MISREPRESENTATION Documentaries Trumped by Biopics
Artists and the art world are a source of endless fascination for the movies. They seem inherently romantic or scandalous—or both—and in the past these movies usually featured white guys such as Michelangelo, van Gogh or Jackson Pollock in postures of tragic genius....

GENOCIDE AND GENIUS "Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History" by Benjamin Balint
Bruno Schulz’s fantastic stories mesh familial dysfunction, metamorphosis and metaphor, complemented by a body of visual artwork filled with sexually charged imagery with a masochistic perspective. Benjamin Balint presents an impassioned narrative in Bruno Schulz: An...

PAINTER OF DARKNESS Cracking the Kinkade Vault
Shortly after Thomas Kinkade died tragically from an overdose of Valium and booze in April 2012, LA artist Jeffrey Vallance had a dream in which Kinkade showed him a secret vault of disturbing artwork that ran counter to the wholesome, uplifting image cultivated...