Articles
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...
MICHELANGELO WHO? "The Story of Art Without Men" by Katy Hessel
Any project that attempts to recontextualize history is embarking on a daunting, arduous task. There’s a fine balance between providing too much detail and too little, in particular when the temporal scope of the story is ambitious. Embracing these challenges with...
THE BOOK AS BOOKWORK Luis Delgado's Physicality as a Thing
Luis Delgado, prolific photographer, documentarian and inveterate bookmaker seemingly operates under the radar—even after a nearly 50-year run. A recent Los Angeles transplant, he was born and educated in Mexico City to a Mexican father and American mother —immersed...
ENVIRONMENT MAKING Malaya Malandro on Collaboration
Created by Francis Kanai and Malaya Malandro, Everything Is a Self-Portrait is a collection of photographs and poetry produced from years of phone calls and emails between their respective homes in Japan and the US. More than a simple display of two artists’ works,...
CELEBRATORY AND MOURNFUL Clay Biennial at Craft Contemporary
One expects certain things from a good ceramic biennial: personal visions, agile skill sets, revelatory juxtapositions, and an insightful contemporary theme to weave them all together. Happily, this third iteration of the clay biennial at the Craft Contemporary,...
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,...
