The former Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park has always been an object of fascination—an imposing landmark designed in the modernist style by Millard Sheets in the 1960s, it displays mysterious Masonic symbols etched onto its walls. After the Masons...
Sylvia Fein’s exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum (#275 in their MATRIX series running Nov 13, 2019–March 1, 2020) gave us the rare opportunity to see the work of an artist who has forged her own path for over 75 years. The exhibition is a concise, thrilling...
For the traveler in Japan with a day near Okayama to spare, Naoshima Island’s Art House Project is well worth the journey. Since the late 1990s, contemporary artists and architects from Japan and elsewhere have taken over a number of structures, all located within...
Many artists, we’ve been told, are obsessed. The way they repeat a subject, or a theme, their attention to detail or to finish, or just the impressive volume of work they produce, can only be explained by obsession. They think about feet or toast or red a lot—maybe...
Before a few weeks ago, as far as I know, I had never had direct communication with anyone who’d even heard of The Rev. Dr. Fred Lane (though I’m sure some of the LAFMS folk could prove me wrong). Lane hasn’t released anything since 1986 when Shimmy Disc dropped his...
Labor relations are a natural topic for film and documentaries. From the earliest days of cinema, there have been grouchy bosses. The most famous of these might be Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989). Strikes always provide a great context to explore the viewpoints of...
LA Fair Report The fairs are bursting out all over in February—and I just have time to jot down a few notes before deadline. Photo LA (Jan. 30–Feb. 2) is going strong for its second year back on the westside, in the Barker Hangar. This is LA’s longest running fair, in...
Given his outsize influence on Conceptual art, it’s surprising that Piero Manzoni is just now getting his first official biography. By the time he died in 1963 at the early age of 29 from a heart attack, he had pioneered a genre of painting without color, canned his...
Dear Babs, I really liked Hans Haacke’s retrospective at The New Museum, specifically his polls that asked viewers their opinions about current news and events. It’s cool he wants his audience to interact with his art. But it got me thinking, why can’t I contact him...
The trail you blazed was a well-worn path. Narcissistic heroics, with one eye on posterity. Until the time rolled around to reverse into the antithesis of what you once so convincingly pretended to be: stripped of the trappings of excess, climbing the twelve steps on...
Architectural critics have been quick to celebrate midcentury modern architects for their pointed sensitivity to a building’s environs, noting that it was this development more than any other that distinguished California modernism from other modernist movements. But...
Isabelle Lutterodt is the director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. O’BRIEN: I know you started your activities as an artist but are now involved in administration and curation as the director of the Barnsdall Municipal Art Gallery. How did your life take...
The urgency of revisiting an archive is found in challenging its presumed objectivity and totalizing vision, thus exposing cracks, biased ideologies, contradictions and gaps to make way for fracturing, reinterpreting, enlarging or otherwise revising our understanding....
Perusing the 37 paintings by various Ghanaian artists in “Praise Portraits from Ghana: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly...!” feels like peering into an exotic parallel dimension of popular culture. At a glance, these depictions of mostly American actors, singers,...
Whitney Bedford’s landscapes and oceanic vistas were emotional, elusive, uncommon, sometimes based in story, or sweetly teetering on the verge of collapse. Her relationship to the paintings—and by extension ours—was both dualistic and deeply personal. Precisely drawn...
Tomashi Jackson’s new solo exhibition, Forever My Lady, is an exploration of propaganda, democracy and civil rights in the United States. Her collaged, sculptural objects combine elements from American and Greek elections—candidate signs, ballots, campaign buttons—and...
I Am Shelley DuVall frames the inimitable ‘80s actress as a queer icon, whose tragic life and captivating personality has always vacillated between human and extraterrestrial planes. The exhibition functions as a hybridized gallery/clothing store that also raises...
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