SIGHTS UNSCENE
Provenance: Senga Nengudi’s Public Rituals Ceremony for Freeway Fets (1978)
What makes some spaces private and others public, if not rituals? In Los Angeles, a complex series of rituals reify our belief in private property. Property deeds, for instance, give physical form to a political notion; signing a deed a symbolic ritual that shapes...
Book Review: Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II By Elizabeth Rodini ABJECT OBJECT
Elizabeth Rodini’s Gentile Bellini’s Portrait of Sultan Mehmed II (2020) landed on my radar through meeting Rodini last year at the American Academy in Rome, where she is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director. Rodini’s recent object biography investigates a number of...
Back in the U.S.S.R. Bunker Vision
If you’re under 40 years old, it might be hard to understand the passion some boomers have about the evils of socialism. Scandinavia seems like a cool place to live. For all of its socialism, Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the United States, and even attracts...
ASK BABS For Your Eyes Only
Dear Babs, My spouse stopped making art after getting her BFA in painting 10 years ago and hasn’t touched a brush to canvas in the five years we’ve been married, but the pandemic got her painting again, and I’ve never seen her happier. I know nothing about art, but I...
Poems
I Could Have Written That By John Tottenham Like you, I am tired of my own voice, these incessant I’s and me’s. But what’s the alternative? I don’t have the audacity to employ another he or she or We. Nothing could be worse, psycholinguistically, than that sententious...
COMICS The Ajax Parody Warehouse Presents: Hermitage
Reconnoiter: Miranda Garno Nesler Interview with the director of Women’s Literature & History for Whitmore Rare Books
Miranda Garno Nesler earned her PhD from Vanderbilt University and serves as the director of Women’s Literature & History for Whitmore Rare Books in Pasadena. ARTILLERY: How did you get started in dealing with rare books? GARNO NESLER: Books have always been there...
CODE ORANGE May-June 2021 Winner & Finalists
Congratulations to our winner Eric Axene and our finalists. Eric's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the May/June online and print edition of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see the info below on how to enter for our...
Brenna Youngblood Roberts Projects
How we balance our individual experiences within the larger scope of our lives in many ways determines who we are, and how we understand and relate to the world around us. Reflecting on the dense and often traumatic events of the past year, which included a global...
Stephen Neidich Wilding Cran Gallery
Upon entering Stephen Neidich’s solo show, “five more minutes please,” everything is stock still, until the clattering begins. It immediately becomes clear that one’s movements cause the Venetian blinds—hanging from the ceiling or against the gallery walls—to raise or...
Amy Sherald Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles
Painter Amy Sherald became a household name in 2018 when her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art. Sherald’s unique approach to studio portraiture and practice of universally rendering Black skin in grisaille (an...
Lucy Bull David Kordansky Gallery
There almost certainly are figures both human and animal, as well as a plenitude of botanical, arboreal, avian and possibly extraterrestrial apparitions inhabiting and defining the landscape-like spaces of Lucy Bull’s paintings. But closer contemplation makes it...
Loosely Stated ROSEGALLERY
With a large grouping of esteemed photographers—Jo Ann Callis, Tania Franco Klein, Kennedi Carter, Graciela Iturbide, Katsumi Watanabe and others— it’s the curator, not the artists, who moderates the conversation. In a world defined by schisms and polarities, and a...
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman Murmurs
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s solo exhibition “Sighs and Leers and Crocodile Tears,” at first seems to be a curious series of clichés, but a story begins to unfold—through Silverman’s attention to detail—about the history of power, erasure, hierarchy and otherness that...
Johanna Breiding Ochi Projects
Johanna Breiding’s show of photography and ceramics at Ochi Projects defied singular characterization in favor of an enveloping tsunami of empathic correspondence—a tidal progression of images both intimate yet nothing less than oceanic. The exhibition’s slightly coy...
Tarik Garrett Hunter Shaw Fine Art
Tarik Garrett’s compelling show addresses how the past intersects with the present. This minimal, mixed-media installation brings together appropriated documents, Polaroid photographs, junked wood, metal fragments, a partial tree trunk equipped with speakers and a...
Vonn Sumner and Holly Elander KP Projects
Artists Vonn Sumner and Holly Elander each offer astonishing exhibitions of intensely personal artworks, that coupled with intimacy also present a prescient commentary on current socio-political times. Sumner’s solo show, “Burning Down the House,” features oil...
