Tony Conrad is one of the unlikeliest figures to be the subject of the kind of late-career historical recontextualization that authenticity-starved hipster youth have made their simulacral avant-garde. Don’t get me wrong. His bona fides are all in place; a pivotal...
Like many artists who have spent most or a significant portion of their career outside the U.S. or U.K. or the major art capitals, Jimmie Durham may be less than familiar to many of us who (until now) have had only the most fleeting (or even anonymous) contact with...
Last week’s online political art exhibition was a hit! (Click here to see the exhibition.) However, I failed to put a deadline on the call for entries and I’m still getting submissions. So we’re going to do Part 2 next week. Here’s the info, this time with a deadline:...
It is the area between downtown LA and the Valley, between suburbia and superstition, and it lies between the strip of Halloween stores and the summit of Griffith Park. This is the dimension of imagination, it is an area which we call Burbank, and we're at the Bearded...
"Creature" springs from the same Latin root as creation, yet the two conjure polarities. The former suggests a beast, a lower animal, or if human then a distinctly lower form of human; a savage, a bestial Mr. Hyde. The latter implies a divine force, a desire or idea...
“She’s famous for her use of negative space.” The security guard’s soft voice wafted over to me from the corner of the gallery. I stood in the white cathedral of LACMA’s Broad Contemporary building, narrowing my eyes at a huge expanse of what looked like nearly...
The Los Angeles Opera’s co-production of Mozart’s The Abduction From the Seraglio (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), which closed February 19th, updated the action of this singspiel from its original mid- to late-18th century Ottoman Turkish setting, when the Ottoman...
Every now and then an artist pops above the horizon line with a private cosmology like the late Mati Klarwein whose Aleph Sanctuary in the 1970s was a marvel of jewel-like paintings. An artist like Alex Grey known for his visionary painting and his "Chapel of Sacred...
Arriving at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel last Saturday night for Jason Rhoades’ retrospective wasn’t much different from arriving to an amusement park. Experiencing his six immersive installations was like finally getting to enjoy the rides at the park. There’s a bunch...
Sometimes a powerful image is enough – not simply to focus and arrest attention, but to shift the narrative, move the world, or certainly the viewer’s perspective on it. A great image can re-make that world or deliver an entirely new one. The watch word at this moment...
Welcome to the blog’s first curated online exhibition! The call for entries was for work that had been inspired by recent politics. I’ve selected 12 from the many responses I received. They represent a variety of media and include work that was meant to be overtly...
Artist-run gallery spaces perform a unique balancing act. They offer less established artists the chance to refine the nuances of exhibiting work, develop a reputation for reliability, court the other gallerists and curators, and occasionally receive feedback. They’re...
As every year, since 2004, Zona Maco, one of the most important Latin American art fairs, was carried last week in Mexico City with the participation of more than 150 galleries. Founded by Mexican Zélika García, Zona Maco is such a big and social event in a city...
Saturday night we went to the LA Art Association’s “Make America” Show at Gallery 825. The original plan was to begin at Wallspace LA, a commercial gallery that typically represents street artists who sold their souls, but after one glance through the windows, we...
If there is a single word that could sum up the the career of László Moholy-Nagy, it would probably be refraction. The refraction of light is an obvious key, both with respect to Moholy’s overall formal approach and technical approach to his preferred media (and not...
Hudson Marquez, alumni of the art group Ant Farm and creator of The Cadillac Ranch, wants to make your sex life better—and it’s not by meds or therapy—it’s with his paintings of women’s stiletto high heel shoes. Marquez’ exhibition, "Welcome to Stiletto," at La Luz de...
Thanks to everyone who responded to last week’s survey about how politics is affecting you. According to the survey, a whole lot of us -- 84% -- are running around with our hair on fire! SurveyMonkey generates a word cloud based on text responses -- the more often a...
Gisela Colon’s “HYPER-MINIMAL” is a psychedelic futurist’s dream come true. The spacious Diane Rosenstein gallery is divided into a handful of rooms displaying fifteen new works. The works include two freestanding pieces, one of which is the Untitled (Monolith Silver)...
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