So, somehow I wound up teaching a couple of Modern Art History classes, right? I’m not exactly thrilled with the default textbooks, so I’m keeping my eyes open for a replacement. So when Thames & Hudson recently issued the revised second edition of Art Since 1900...
One of the things that always troubled me about Andy Warhol’s legacy was the matter of people who got elevated and left behind. It is quite one thing to sign your name to a found object, but a whole other matter to treat people as found art.Warhol could be quite mean...
UNDEREXPOSEDDear Babs, Please help me. I am currently living in a desolate land and deprived of adequate art exposure (and God knows how I love to expose myself to art). I once knew a wonderful artist who helped me with my art education but she left town several...
“I trust in the intelligence of the audience,” says artist and filmmaker David Shapiro, whose elliptical, complex documentary film, Missing People, had its debut screening at Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in April and will have its...
A trip to New Orleans is a voyage through time, through a history thick with contradictory layers, heated by much tragedy and some absurdity. Hurricane Katrina wasn’t the first tragedy that disrupted the city, and it won’t be the last. It’s no accident that Tennessee...
To attempt to improve upon nature can mean creating a monster, something we are quite accustomed to in the plastic surgery industry, as we are in love with artificiality. How did this happen? Boredom with nature? Love of our own capabilities? Maybe it’s not a bad...
Fabien Castanier is a native of Paris, where he previously worked in the TV and film industries. He moved to LA in 2002 to focus on his true passion—art—and established the Fabien Castanier Gallery.ARTILLERY: What’s the one thing all the artists you show have in...
Los Angeles has lost one of its most important and influential artists: Rachel Rosenthal. A pioneer of avant-garde theater and performance art, Rosenthal inspired several generations of actors, artists and activists. She was also a good friend and spiritual mother to...
It’s a long way, spatially, temporally and culturally from the cavernous interior of The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA to the idyllic rolling landscape of the Civil War battle field near Bull Run Creek in northern Virginia. But it is precisely that distance (among...
The first exhibition at Art+Practice, which recently opened in the historic Leimert Park district, is a site-specific installation by veteran conceptual artist, Charles Gaines. “Librettos: Manuel de Falla/Stokely Carmichael” (2015) consists of 23 acrylic box frames...
Ed Templeton has expressed his obsession with watching people who walk along the sidewalks and hang out at the waterfront in Huntington Beach, California. He is equally fascinated by young girls and old men, their modes of dress or undress, and the details of their...
I try to avoid reading too much into titles of paintings because they can rarely be more than the most tenuous captions for something effectively functioning in a language of its own. Occasionally a show’s title underscores a certain theme resonating through the...
Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie’s work is clearly indebted to that of his artistic forbearers. Not since Anselm Kiefer has a painter dealt so explicitly with the heavy, fraught history of 20th century Europe, and like Francis Bacon, his visages are rendered as...
Carol Es has long drawn upon two major factors in her personal history—factors that she recognizes that she shares with many others, but perhaps not in quite the same way. Strongly identifying as Jewish, Es has emphasized the cultural and historical aspects of her...
Phyllis Green’s “Walking the Walk” consists of sculptural works that also function as garments and performance props. Their use as such is documented by photographs by Ave Pildas with the artist posing and modeling each of the artworks. Toying with the idea of a high...
Harkening to the grace of bygone days when those who wished to communicate with one another would do so by putting pen to paper, East Bay-based artist Gail Tarantino’s “Hand Written” draws content from letters written by the artist to astronomers, naturalists and...
A trio of sepia-toned photographs, displayed at the entrance of the Leila Heller Gallery, documenting four naked men followed by Western soldiers in a rundown village instantly evokes the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The jarring scene—American soldiers humiliating local...
Julia von Eichel’s wall sculptures (all 2014) are oddly unsettling, with innards that seem to strain against their outer skin and an overall configuration suggesting movement or attenuated growth. It’s tempting to see naturally occurring phenomenon like spores,...
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