In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to...
Sporting an orange kaftan shirt and a wide-brimmed black hat perched atop his head, poet Stephen Kalinich looked more like he was ready for a wild trip than for a reading. “I, the poet, write this plea to the world,” he began the evening, noting that he first...
County fairs usually aren't noted for their art; but this year's is an exception, with Millard Sheets Art Center hosting a fine PST LA/LA exhibition, "Judithe Hernández and Patssi Valdez: One Path Two Journeys." Hernández and Valdez were, respectively, members of...
There are two points of entry into Fran Siegel's exquisite exhibition, "Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil." One is purely visual: admiring the unique way the individual drawings and collages are sewn together and suspended from the ceiling; noticing...
Dear Reader, This new Fall art season takes off with a bang in Southern California, as the Getty’s second installment of Pacific Standard Time (PST) gets under way all over Los Angeles. PST: LA/LA spotlights Latin American art and Latino art. Once we started digging...
In Sandra de la Loza’s art, research—what she calls “the archive”—is central to her process. Treating archival material as mutable; she relies on it to expand narratives about history. She is also involved in community activism. Not everything she does is art, or at...
Ana Serrano’s colorful cardboard sculptures of cityscapes and buildings, inspired by Latin American vernacular architecture, will be featured prominently this fall in two PST: LA/LA exhibitions. “The US-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft...
When I heard the title of Jose Dávila’s recent book, Daylight Found Me with No Answer, it sounded familiar. During the years I was living in Guadalajara, I frequently talked with Dávila and other mutual friends at endless parties that lasted until dawn. But I hadn’t...
Every morning I wake up and see At Home with the Nortes (1990). In this black-and-white photograph, a family sits in the living room watching television. This could be construed as a typical family activity, but the family is hardly typical in Laura Aguilar’s...
Even more than its predecessor, the first Getty Pacific Standard Time initiative that ignited Los Angeles’ arterati six years ago, PST: LA/LA conjures a kind of Aleph-like quality in its ambition to encapsulate at its widest points the art of an entire continent, an...
Mid-Wilshire 1301PE Jorge Mendez Blake 0/9–10/21/17 1301pe.com Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles David Lamelas: “Time as Activity” 9/7–10/21/17 spruethmagers.com The Loft at Liz’s “South of the Border” 10/8: 7–9pm: author Eileen Truax panel discussion 10/17: 7–9pm:...
“Before I went to the U.K. I had already decided to make a dress called Queen to honor the journey.” In the wake of LACMA’s highly successful retrospective (2011) “Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987,” Asco founding member Patssi Valdez was invited...
In the past two years two art museums endowed by Los Angeles billionaires have opened. Eli Broad opened The Broad museum in 2015 and the owners of Guess Jeans, the Marciano Brothers, opened the Marciano Art Foundation in May of this year. While this is a huge boost to...
“Regrettably, the provocative nature of your content is likely unsuitable for our audience at this time.” It may shock you to discover that artists still get told this. It may shock you to discover that—in the fine arts, in Los Angeles, California, in 2017—shock still...
Avant-garde artistic movements have a funny way of morphing into the mainstream—witness the fridge-magnet ubiquity of Impressionist paintings, or the integral role of appropriated samples in contemporary pop music. Perhaps the least-known but most influential of these...
Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...
With all of the recent hysteria about immigration, it seemed like a good time to explore the original American immigrants. There is quite a rich history of movies about settlers (a word that is still used in some parts of the world) doing battle with people who were...
I GET NO KICK FROM CHAMPAGNE Dear Babs, Recently I was invited to a private art preview and cocktail party, co-hosted by a prestigious Los Angeles gallery and art museum. The event was in the desert, so most likely attendees would be traveling at least two hours from...