"Skin Deep: Then and Now" at The Loft at Liz's offers a vital visual conversation about race in America. The powerful subject brings together the same eight artists who comprised an original exhibition ten years ago, with pieces still available from the initial...
Gallery Rounds: Skin Deep: Then and Now
Gallery Rounds: Jim Adams Luis De Jesus Los Angeles
“Eternal Witness” is a show emblematic of the endless pertinence of history. Adams maintains that history is just as relevant today as it ever was when it was happening. The scenarios may change but he pursues the notion that the ideas driving humanity, for instance,...
Remarks on Color: Khaki Green January's Hue
Khaki Green loves to talk. Her friends call her “Yacky Khaki,” and sometimes when they’re feeling annoyed, “Quacky Khaki.” But really, it’s a compulsion as at 5 AM every morning Khaki Green begins her rants – everything from contesting this year’s champion at the...
Gallery Rounds: The Shape of Life Wonzimer
Curated by Gary Brewer and on exhibit both online and IRL at Wonzimer Gallery in DTLA, "The Shape of Life," is a dazzlingly lovely show. The nine-artist exhibition includes works by Brewer, Tim Hawkinson, Aline Mare, Cheyann Washington, Jeff Colson, Mercedes Dorame,...
Audrey Chan’s LA Mural for ACLU
When Audrey Chan began at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California in October 2019 as their inaugural Artist in Residence, she and the flagship ACLU affiliate had envisioned the creation of a mural commemorating their centennial on their Los Angeles...
In Memory of Roland Reiss (1929-2020)
We are saddened to announce the death of Roland Reiss, artist and educator, loving husband, father, and grandfather, who passed away on Sunday, December 13, of natural causes in Los Angeles, at his home and studio at The Brewery Artist Lofts. He was 91. Reiss is...
Ezrha Jean Black: My Favorite Things of 2020
“Jesus, you know, it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Even if it strikes me now as having been inevitable….” “I want to know what it will be like once all this (all this: the inexorable, the inexpressible) has become distant memory. I’ve always hated the way...
Pick of the Week: Hosai Matsubayashi & Trevor Shimizu Nonaka-Hill
There is a natural tension drawn between old and new, conservative and progressive. Often times, it can feel that between those two positions there can be no resolution. Even in art, it can be difficult to fit the opposing ideals together; though when it happens, the...
Gallery Rounds: Brie Ruais
Brie Ruais' stunning ceramic sculptures have a visceral quality. Though created in her Brooklyn studio, they stem from private, site-specific performances in the desert where the naked Ruais uses her entire body to shape clay into large geometric formations that meld...
From the Editor January-February 2021; Issue 3, Volume 15
Dear Reader, I was going to start this letter with a Happy New Year! I should, right? It will be 2021 when this January/February issue comes out. We will have brought in the New Year, albeit with less fanfare than usual—it doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that...
On Math Bass “Got a Light?”
If one wanted to be very art historical about it, Math Bass’ work resembles Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875) with its beautiful detritus and bones and dust and longing bodies and skin-as-paint-as-floor and new life emerging from every crevice. The...
Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz
In visiting Yasmine Nasser Diaz’ show, “soft powers” at Ochi Projects, I had the rich pleasure of speaking with the artist about her process, intimate spaces and how soft powers are not only a cause for hope, but are—and always have been—a female superpower. “Soft...
The World Needs Dynasty Handbag A Voice of Unreason for Uncertain Times
I sat down recently to chat with comedian, performer and artist Jibz Cameron over Zoom about—what else?—making art during a pandemic. Cameron’s stage persona and alter ego, Dynasty Handbag, has been giving vaudevillian performances that fly in the face of social...
A Reckoning: Monument Lab, Joel Garcia, Ken Lum, and Paul Farber
Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, and founded by curator Paul Farber and artist Ken Lum, is a public art and history studio whose moment has arrived. Defining monuments as “a statement of power and presence in public” they’ve intersected with the active national...
Finding a Place (for art) in Skid Row The LA Poverty Department and The Box Gallery
The Skid Row neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles remains emblematic of the city’s ongoing epidemic of housing deprivation. More than 66,400 people were estimated to wake up each morning without stable housing in LA County as of LA Homeless Services Authority’s annual...
SHOPTALK SoCal Museum News, Pantone Color of the Year, and more.
SoCal’s Museums Museums have been shut down (again), which doesn’t effect the city of Los Angeles too much as museums weren’t reopened except for a very short week or so. Neither LACMA nor the Hammer ever reopened after mid-March shutdowns and, alas, the...
Decoder Just Give Me the Minimum
I don’t want to paint anymore. I want to go to a big gallery or a museum. It doesn’t even need a roof anymore—I would go to a courtyard at this point. Not a nice one, necessarily; it can have one end open to a field of that grass that precedes that kind of boring line...
Art Brief The Art World Gets Woke, Part II
In last issue’s column I discussed the influence of the Woke movement in shaking up stodgy art museums to diversify their staff and fill gaps in their collections caused by decades of turning a blind eye to artwork made by minorities and women. Sure enough, a backlash...