DEAD OR ALIVE: Jack T. Chick
RECONNOITER
Carolyn Merino Mullin is the Founder And Executive Director of The Animal Museum whose new space opened December 3rd in the heart of LA’s Downtown Arts District.ARTILLERY: What inspired you to start an animal museum? MERINO MULLIN: Other social movements—women’s...
RETROSPECT
We talk about this art and that art, and then we either start seeing influences or start making them up. A popular one is the Asian influence on the Impressionists, who we like to consider our greatest artists but we really mean most popular. However, comparing these...
Roy Lichtenstein
The standard museum retrospective brims with artworks supported with biographical and thematic information. “Roy Lichtenstein: Pop for the People” brims with biographical and thematic information supported with artworks. Neither the selection nor installation of the...
Vijat Mohindra
Well known as a fashion photographer, Vijat Mohindra has made a career of photographing artsy spreads and celebrity fashion shoots for glossy magazines. He is known also as a chronicler of pop-imp/provocateur Miley Cyrus. His perspective in “Always Believe that...
Genevieve Gaignard
Although Genevieve Gaignard’s fair complexion and red hair enabled her to blend in with her white contemporaries while growing up in a Massachusetts’ mill town, her solo show at the California African American Museum reflects the internal conflict she experienced...
Erika Rothenberg
Erika Rothenberg’s “House of Cards” is as timely now as it was when it was first shown in 1992. In our changing political climate, Rothenberg’s satirical, ironic wit and insightful commentary resonate on multiple levels. Organized by themes, the hand-crafted greeting...
Mickalene Thomas
In 2008, Michelle Obama commissioned Mickalene Thomas to paint her official portrait, the first portrait of a First Lady who is a person of color. As a portraitist, Thomas knows that a pose is a performance—a deliberate, affected presentation of the sitter, their...
Allison Miller
Allison Miller’s oeuvre is firmly and unequivocally rooted in the painting tradition, and yet is built upon a conviction, evident in her output over the past decade or so, to explore every inch of the possibilities, conditions and inherited clichés of painting. It...
Bruce Conner
In the darkened gallery, a single row of seats faces a large screen on which a series of images loop. These images run by in rapid succession with all of the characteristic flashes of light, scratches and stuttering of an acetate film. Transitions from one scene to...
Teresa Braun
In this era of information overkill, one may absorb endless volumes, yet the impact of each tale remains a solitary and private event, each word soaking in, one at a time, to imprint its distinctive mark on one’s being.A somber family legend took root in the mind of...
James Hoff
Even in December, the trees on Delancey Street have a coppery glow. It is not the glow of fall foliage, not on a Lower East Side thoroughfare better known for traffic than for signs of life. At least one gallery has bricked up its glass façade to keep out the sights...
ON OUR COVER: Tom Knechtel
Tom Knechtel is one of the top ten "best of Los Angeles" shows in 2016, selected by staff writer Ezrha Jean Black.
Happy New Year! I hope you had a wonderful holiday and didn’t over-eat as much as I did! I want to start the new year off with a couple of announcements.First, you may have noticed that the name of this blog has changed to Jane Chafin: Offramp. The name references the...
MAMA Gallery: Jordan Sullivan
Jordan Sullivan’s “The Divine Nothing” is clearly an indulgence in color and aesthetics, and it isn’t a bad thing. Sullivan’s work is strikingly painterly. The large format C-prints appear more like washes of watercolors than photographs, with their blissfully...
Sometime between the morning of November 9th and the current holiday season, there was an interruption in the more or less weekly postings in this space. It’s not like it’s never happened before. I do drop out of sight now and again; and there are those intervals when...
Radio Imagination: Artists in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
