My art-sister-in-arms and I headed out to Craft and Folk Art Museum Saturday evening to take in their survey show of Betye Saar’s washboard assemblages. Spanning the course of 20 years, from 1997 to present, this specific exhibition references the domestic, spiritual...
Mercifully averted, the television writers’ strike was urgent news in Los Angeles, where total triviality-immersion is our raison d’être, and its media coverage was breathless. This would have wryly charmed Neil Postman, author of Amusing Ourselves to Death. His 1985...
There’s an enormous tension between the two shows currently on view at the Craft & Folk Art Museum; yet each resonates all the more powerfully for the juxtaposition. While Material As Metaphor is emphatically abstract, and Keepin’ It Clean explicitly grounded in...
We see the future differently in recent years, as the future presses relentlessly into the present – way beyond ‘future-shock,’ as termed by the futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, into a kind of ‘present shock.’ This manifests in any number of ways, including the way...
There was a cool sense of relief walking into David Kordansky's gallery and seeing that the great turn out for Mai-Thu Perret’s "Féminaire" and Lesley Vance's "12 Paintings" was still abuzz. With much to take in, simply retaining all the beauty of each individual...
From the moment the stage lights go up for The Monster Builder, the audience is caught in a whirlwind of over-the-top sophisticated banter, much of it addressing architecture. The first scene reveals an ultra modern glass house with inhabitants, Gregor, the...
Jessie Homer French's paintings nullify categories like sophistication and naiveté; embodying aspects of both, they fit into neither. As implied by the show's title, "Food Chain," harsh realities figure prominently in French's depictions of subjects that include...
The epicenter of the downtown LA Arts District can be a bit overwhelming at times and “getting there is half the fun” is no fiction for people navigating Los Angeles. We gravitated towards Derek Boshier’s “On the Road,” curated by Jamie Kenyon at Night Gallery and Jim...
Not long ago, I recommended a show, entitled, Concrete Islands (plural), which, although it didn’t exactly shy from the allusion to J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel of contemporary urban life, was more specifically inspired by Marcel Broodthaers and the concrete...
The art world as we know it is in a constant state of reinvention and definition, continually seeking relevance. In this quarter of the great game, the self-intentioned academics are running with the ball. Global societal, biological and environmental issues are king...
The exhibition equivalent of grandmother’s tablespoon of castor oil, It is obvious from the map is unpleasant to consume but leaves one feeling positively virtuous (if in the vein of sadder-but-wiser) for having endured it. Visually, it displays more virtue than...
Lowbrow began in the early 1980s as an art movement that embraced the attitudes and iconography of distinctly American subcultures, embracing demolition derbies and surfing instead of “highbrow” French Impressionist painting or Italian operas. Although there were...
Architect John Bohn rolled into the parking lot off 4th Street and Traction Avenue, where the security guard acknowledged him with a subtle nod as he drove through the gate. Bohn is on the faculty of SCI-Arc, the country’s hippest architecture school, located in the...
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...
Manuel Ocampo and Irene Iré accomplish the often-difficult task of formulating a joint show that appears cohesive without sacrificing the styles of either artist. Their different styles of abstract and figurative, colorful and subdued seem to be engaged in a...
Tate Britain today announced the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2017. The artists are (in alphabetical order): Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner, Lubaina Himid and Rosalind Nashashibi. This year an exhibition of work by the four shortlisted...
I’ve heard of the phenomenon of art fatigue—getting so sick of looking at art that one more derivative Franz Kline-esque painting will turn you into a raging honey badger. The first two hours of the Brewery Art Walk on Saturday were delightful, browsing studios tucked...
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