Articles
POEMS "Apple," "Jackson Pollock," "The Tao," and "Unrealized"
Apple Every day an anxious man appears in my apple and offers me a Magritte. Jackson Pollock Sometimes the Americans form a circle around something awful that has happened. Sometimes it is a painting. The Tao It’s easy to have no path and no plans, but it isn’t very...
COMICS AL Jaffee FOLD-IN!
ART THAT TRANSPORTS Three New Metro Stations Featuring Eight Installations
The Regional Connector will open June 16, and it’s really good news for those of us who take Metro, because it will reduce time and station changes in getting around on LA’s ever-expanding light rail. I'm also looking forward to the public art—some of the most...
Village Mindset Innovative Community-Building at Art + Practice
It has long been the rule for nonprofits of all kinds to create and maintain paternalistic relationships with the causes and communities they claim to serve. Unfortunately, there are several arts nonprofits that fit this bill. So it’s refreshing to catch up with an...
Extra Flavor Desert X Breathes New Life
In another sign of an unusually wet winter in Southern California, the desert and foothills of Coachella Valley are painted a lush green, the tops of the San Jacinto Mountains dusted with a few inches of stark white snow. It is against this startlingly serene backdrop...
Commerce and Culture Andy Freeberg's Cheekily Captured Art-World Inequalities
Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. —Susan Sontag, "On Photography" Photographer Andy Freeberg has become something of an inadvertent cultural sociologist. Born in New...
Unknown Landscapes Jessica Taylor Bellamy Explores the Wetlands
“Can you smell the earth exhaling? I love the smell of moisture coming out of the ground,” exclaims artist Jessica Taylor Bellamy, inhaling the sweetness after the drizzling rain as we embark on our Sunday afternoon hike through the wetlands of South Los Angeles. As...
Of Murals and Mullahs The Revolutionary Graffiti of Iran
It began with marker on concrete: “Dear Zhina, you will not die. Your name will be a symbol.” Zhina was the Kurdish name of Mahsa Amini. On September 13, 2022, the 22-year-old was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for wearing her headscarf too loosely. While in...
“Britt Ransom: Arise and Seek” at Pitzer College Art Galleries
When stepping into Britt Ransom’s solo exhibition, you face an archway. This reproduction, created with 3D scans, prints and a CNC machine, revives a signature piece of the Tawawa Chimney Corner house in Wilberforce, Ohio. Today, only the arch’s stone pillars remain,...
POEMS "Reservoir" and "Dead Men Don't Marry"
Reservoir You take the back lane, following the curve of street until it meets the steps to the reservoir. At the top, triumphant, you stop for a cigarette, puffing smoke in the face of legs and lungs. Let them burn this day before your cross- examination. In England,...
COMICS Amelia Clipart for the Testudian Foundation
Zak Smith and Making Art for A World That Is Falling Down An Unburnt Witch: Zak Smith Drawings — Torrance Art Museum - March 25, - May 6, 2023
Full disclosure up-front: I am well-acquainted with Zak Smith as an artist. Before we met (in 2010), I was aware of his work only because of his inclusion in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and not incidentally because his work for that show had (what was for me) an...
All That Glitters The Transformative Portraiture of Jamie Vasta
One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of myself at the age of five or so, composed by my father. Along with my siblings’ pictures and beyond the sentimentality, these portraits have become distinctive family emblems and historical markers, wrought at a time of...
Brilliant Veils Amir H. Fallah Creates Vibrant Artworks That Question Cultural Boundaries
Entering a room of portraits by Amir H. Fallah, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t see their faces: the figures are cloaked. In one, the subject sits draped in a richly patterned blue-and-purple shawl, cradling what looks like a gilded African head in its...
On the Nose Helen Chung Talks Anatomy
The afternoon we agree to meet for a quick Q&A over drinks, Helen Chung arrives at the restaurant slightly late (though not much later than me)—fittingly enough, from a commissioned portrait sitting. Engaged by the process, conversation and the resulting portrait...
Frames Within Frames The Photography of Grant Mudford
Grant Mudford is a photographer with an extensive publication and exhibition history. Born in Sydney, Australia, in 1944, he studied architecture at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and moved to Los Angeles in 1977. Since the 1980s he has functioned as a...
Spiritual Healing Luis Sahagun's Cathartic Family Portraits
As a practitioner of curanderismo, an ancient Meso-American system of folk medicine, Mexican-born, Chicago-based Luis Sahagun regularly performs limpias, traditional cleansing or “soul-retrieving” rituals. As an artist, he has applied this practice to the creation of...
Africa Around Town “Adornment | Artifact,” Curated by jill moniz
The Getty Villa’s exhibition, “Nubia: Jewels of Ancient Sudan,” offers a stunning display of jewelry and items of personal adornment excavated from burials of royalty and aristocratic individuals from a region that spans what is today southern Egypt and northern...
POEMS "Vincent's Blackberries" and "Belated Start, Premature Conclusion"
Vincent's Blackberries Buying blackberries, you held out on me in Hollywood Erewhon. Tonight is Friday, Christmas lives on and on. Vincent was out in Aries eyes and feeling good, wanting to meet people: other people who buy blackberries I was by myself in mascara and...
