President Trump’s proposed plan for a $54 billion increase in the defense budget would be paid for by drastically cutting many agency budgets, including the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) with its relatively modest annual budget of...
The He-Man Action Movie Appreciation Society meets regularly to interrogate promising high-budget mainstream shoot-’em-ups in the context for which they were designed—big, loud movie theaters. The Society’s inaugural screening resulted in my report “Is Jason Bourne a...
Yes sir, every Saturday, the Post magazine would come to our door and I would squeal silently with delight because on the cover was yet another Norman Rockwell painting and I got what the painting was saying. It was funny, but not like a Dick Tracy cartoon: It was...
One of the best ways to gauge how the mainstream views artists is by looking at the movies. Before people associated artists with money, artists were an exotic species. If an artist had any degree of success, they were a newspaper illustrator, or had a job with an ad...
“Home exterior decorating tips: What to do with excess plastic toy trash!”
Most customers at Trader Joe’s have food on their minds. Not Ann Weber. While others grab favorite items off the shelves, the intrepid artist heads for the dumpsters. Perpetually on the lookout for cardboard boxes to transform into sculpture, she has an eye for...
In the 1980s, Pam and Steve Nagler founded the performance ensemble Shrimps, which toured nationally and performed locally at venues like LACE. Over the years Shrimps’ iterations included Martin Kersels, Weba Garretson and Ryan Hill. The couple recently retired from...
Chicano art is at once a unified cultural expression and an ever-changing record of social and geographic situation. But regional inflections invariably emerge—and, certainly in the case of Chicano art in Los Angeles, regional inflection has profoundly impacted...
Amir Zaki’s lushly photographed black-and-white landscapes introduce tension between formalist notions of timeless beauty and suspicions of digital photography’s reliability—or lack thereof. These photos of California’s coast, drawn from a series aptly named “Rocks,”...
The origins of Color Field—one of the more intriguing forms of contemporary abstract painting—seem to lie in 19th-century Romanticism, particularly in a few radically reductive watercolors by J.M.W. Turner. In 2015, when some of these were exhibited at the Getty...
Emblazoned in cursive neon light, the affirming phrase “we deserve to see ourselves elevated, as well as grounded” guides EJ Hill’s installation of objects and paintings, which structurally suggests both sublime ascension and children’s playgrounds. The locations of...
Arne Quinze’s jubilantly comely show, “Jungle Cities,” propounds fundamental questions about the problematic relationship between culture and nature. These questions align with the artist’s generally stated ambitions; however, the most urgent of them are posed...
Given the current political climate, one in which President Donald Trump in February withdrew Federal guidelines allowing transgender students to use restrooms matching their chosen gender, “Masculine-Feminine” offers a timely and relevant examination of gender...
Wake Me Up When It’s Over is a compelling and timely installation featuring selected works from 1998–2016 by the London-based duo Thomson & Craighead. Jon Thomson and Allison Craighead, who have been working together since the mid 1990s, utilize data, information...
Long dedicated to an elegant abstraction reliant on repeated forms and broken, almost prismatic, visual fields, all rendered in limpid colors, Peter Zaleski has recently sought to brace that graceful approach with a greater stringency—limiting the recurring figures,...
“Knock-Kneed and Bow-Legged,” on view at Oakland’s Johansson Projects, stakes out territory in a harsh but brilliant realm where contradiction is the order of the day, and logical assumptions must be checked at the door. The works of painter Matt Kleberg imply a...
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