In a suite of charcoal, acrylic and 24K leaf paintings on canvas, Ferrari Sheppard blends compositional citations from the Western art historical canon with an affecting, humanistic narrative of diasporic Black life. Across the mostly large-scale works, Sheppard...
Ferrari Sheppard
Camilla Taylor Track 16 Gallery
In her solo show “Your Words in My Mouth,” Camilla Taylor has created a body of work which, beautiful as it is, aches with bitterness and sorrow. While the sculptural works are ebony, white and gray standouts, the exhibit’s opening salvo includes a series of 10 x 8”...
Francesca Lalanne Galerie Lakaye
In the world of appointment-only gallery visits, many have bemoaned the more restricted experience, and galleries themselves have completely reinvented the way that they conduct themselves. They are no longer able to attract visitors off the street nor draw large...
Colleen Hargaden Hunter Shaw Fine Art
Colleen Hargaden’s latest exhibition at Hunter Shaw Fine Art is many things: a tool kit to survivalism and self-reliance in reaction to the ever-intensifying symptoms of a dying planet, and a prompt to question what the future of art-making may look like by combining...
Film: Hometown Proud Debut Documentary by Tyler Stallings and Naida Osline
Hometown Proud, the debut documentary by Tyler Stallings and Naida Osline, speaks volumes to our current political and cultural environment. The project grew out of their interest in exploring social issues through their individual practices, for Stallings, as a...
Remarks on Color: Flamingo’s Dream Pink
Flamingo’s Dream has never missed a church social, eats all the watermelon at the weekly buffet, shoving the rinds in her purse to take home to her poodle. Flamingo never goes out without makeup, “putting her face on,” hoping to catch the eye of a bad boy, a...
Pick of the Week: Peter Alexander Cirrus Gallery
It’s not that difficult to be contemporary. Be it through art, or writing, or simply conversation, we’re almost always discussing what’s right in front of us. It’s another thing all together to create something which takes on an entirely new meaning decades after...
Gallery Rounds: Sam Durant Blum & Poe
What stories do monuments tell? Is there more than one story, more than one point of view? Can monuments be moved from one location and placed in another? Confederate statues taken away from the Kentucky capital go where? How can they be recontextualized? During the...
Max Presneill Rio Hondo College Gallery
Careening from a blotted and splattered background into what almost appeared to be real objects floating on the surface, the paintings cavort around a plethora of meanings in Max Presneill's latest body of work titled "In Case of Emergency." The overall sense is that...
Pick of the Week: Wanda Koop & Michelle Rawlings Night Gallery
The two shows currently on view at the Night Gallery – Wanda Koop’s “Heartbeat Bots” and Michelle Rawlings’ “In the Garden” – represent opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary art. The larger show, “Heartbeat Bots,” introduces us to a fantastically vibrant and...
Pick of the Week: Amir H. Fallah Shulamit Nazarian
There are many stories that we have told ourselves in order to make our world make sense. These modern myths range from Columbus’ “discovery” of this continent to the very idea of the American Dream. These stories are taught to us from birth, intrinsically attached to...
Ed Clark Hauser & Wirth
Ed Clark "Expanding The Image" marks the first time Hauser & Wirth has shown the abstract painter's work at their Los Angeles location. The exhibition consists of Clark's formative work from the 1960s and 1970s, and complements an exhibition Hauser & Wirth...
Robb Putnam and John Bankston Walter Maciel Gallery
In Robb Putnam's "Unattended Creatures," sad-faced bears and rabbits, some with no faces at all, make up most the sculptural works, while another exhibition at Walter Maciel Gallery, "Escape," by John Bankston, combines several different series of paintings and mixed...
Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokno Dominating Minds with Art
We catch up with Nadezdha Tolokonnikova by phone while she’s in LA recording. “Pussy Riot is a movement and we have different creative initiatives,” she says. One of them involves the group getting more seriously into music leading to an album slated for sometime in...
Venturing Out for Art
Catalina Island Museum has the distinct honor of being the first Southern California museum to successfully extract me far from my quarantine pod with the promise of engaging art in situ. The irony of a relatively risky and difficult choice for my inaugural post-COVID...
2 Ceramics Shows: Joakim Ojanen & Max Maslansky Richard Heller Gallery & Five Car Garage
Stockholm-based artist Joakim Ojanen's delightful exhibition of paintings, drawings, and ceramics at Richard Heller Gallery is aptly titled: "A Show for the Lonely Distant Baby Souls." According to the artist, it is "a celebration of the human being." He goes on to...
Pick of the Week: Ferrari Sheppard Wilding Cran Gallery
I’ve always had a deep love for art that dripped with symbolism. Art that encodes stories within their frame or form, all while being aesthetically appealing, draws you into a dialogue with the artist and your fellow viewer. It’s a bit like an inside joke; if you...
ANDY WARHOL: HUMAN BEING Book Review: Blake Gopnik's New Biography
Near the end of his new biography of Andy Warhol, where he is discussing his legacy, Blake Gopnik mentions that there have been at least 500 books about Andy Warhol. This might logically lead one to ask: Why should there be another one? Besides the fact that this one...