Apocryphal notions, like northern superiority and European “discovery” of land already populated, pervade the Western Hemisphere. Even before Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, our so-named New World has been a locus for European fantasy projection. Currently on view at...
Mimi Pond is a legendary figure in LA—part of the generation of independently-minded cartoonists nurtured—then dumped—by the alternative media, she also wrote the first-aired episode of The Simpsons (before being expelled from the bullpen) as well as contributing to...
We all know The Blue Boy (c. 1770) by Thomas Gainsborough, and for some of us there is a special attachment, while others only know it because it is famous. What most people don’t know is who the blue boy in the painting is, and that’s because it isn’t important....
Dear Babs, I like Artillery because there is a variety of art and articles. Most recently I was shocked (kind of) like you when Anonymous, Los Angeles wrote you with the title “I Get No Kick From Champagne.” The writer explained “I was invited to a private art preview...
Wendy Watriss is an award-winning photographer, journalist, curator and co-founder and artistic director of Houston’s FotoFest. In the wake of a season of climate disasters unfurling across the Gulf and Caribbean following only a year after FotoFest’s 2016 biennial,...
The singularly remarkable thing about Ken Gonzales-Day’s re-creation of his breakthrough 1993-96 photographic project, “Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River,” is the infinitely expansive temporal envelope it seems to occupy. This is more than...
Much like the Jorge Luis Borges book after which it is named, the 18th Street Arts Center’s PST: LA/LA exhibition addresses history and its delineations, whether entirely or partially fictitious, in order to question the role of master narratives in general, and...
“The Collective Memory of the Worst Place to Live in the World Today If You Are Not White” is a small but nicely arranged exhibition comprised of Alejandro Cartagena’s current and previous work, contrasting Santa Barbara, California with Monterrey, Mexico. The main...
Densely fretted and motion activated and crying out for every metaphorical use of the word string from art to design, music to physics, three new bodies of work by Brian Wills expand and deepen his relationship to his material muse—colored thread. A star in the...
Mark Steven Greenfield’s works explore the complexities of the African American experience, speaking to personal as well as universal themes. While earlier works explored stereotypes characterized by black cartoon characters and Blackface minstrels, in his current...
“Revolution and Ritual,” while very narrowly focused on three Mexican women photographers, seeks to address in broad strokes changes in ideas about Mexican identity through the work of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero, whose careers together span...
Kinetic Art, like so many postwar movements, arose simultaneously in several disparate corners of the world, coalesced in the late 1950s and early ’60s, and derived from prewar tendencies whose revolutionary aesthetics and idealistic spirit seemed appropriate to a...
Brazilian artist Valeska Soares’ mid-career survey at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, her first solo museum exhibit in the western United States, seamlessly expresses the ephemeral qualities of love and longing, in harmony with and opposition to the weighted—and...
“Memories of Underdevelopment” is a sweeping exhibition composed of 400 objects from more than 50 artists from eight countries throughout Latin America. It shares its title with the 1968 movie directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about the Cuban revolution and associated...
Right as you cross the threshold into Ahrong Kim’s show “Internal Voice” at the Clay Studio, you’re met by five pairs of eyes set into brightly colored teapots resting at eye level on plinths jutting from the wall. The eyes, embedded into fragmented faces, exposed...
So I was on the phone with my pal Mary the other day and we were talking about how, between our respective work deadlines and obligations, and taking care of our quadruped loved ones, we essentially never went out anymore. “I mean it’s not as if we’ll ever catch up on...
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