jill moniz has been a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and is now principal of her own downtown gallery, Quotidian. She curated the current exhibition “LA Blacksmith” at CAAM. I understand that you have a PhD in cultural anthropology—how and...
“You’ve caught me in a really good mood,” said Jeffrey Poe, as he sidled up to the bar of an upscale West Hollywood restaurant. “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “I was hoping to play up the ‘lonely at the top’ angle and find a backhanded way of comparing your...
Go Directly to Go The fall art season has taken off like a steeplechase, with so many openings on the weekends that one can take in barely a fraction of them. In addition to the shows at galleries and museums (Lari Pittman at the Hammer and Echiko Ohira at Craft...
Congratulations to our winner Laura Cohen and our finalists. Cohen's photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery in the November/December issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists. Please see info below how to enter for our next...
Kristy Edmunds took over the reins of performing arts at UCLA at a time (2010–11) when the kind of avant-garde international theater and festival programming it was famous for seemed to be all but dropping from UCLA’s sightlines. But Edmunds’ purpose and seriousness...
Three of the most storied artists in recent Los Angeles history were the subject of “Disappearing—California c. 1970” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (May 10–Aug 11, 2019), the show’s only venue. Despite the tight focus on just three artists, the exhibition...
In September during a visit to Paris, I got lost in the Louvre, a common occurrence caused by its diabolical mazelike layout (maps are useless) and I found myself in the museum’s Oriental Antiquities wing. After viewing hundreds of paintings in the French and Italian...
Everything about the way we talk about art in public is vestigial, left over from the birth of print. Once upon a time this conversation was done entirely with ink: ink was expensive, photographs of art were more expensive and photos in color were even more expensive...
You always hear about how we’re living in a golden age of TV, but you rarely hear the same thing about comic books. Which is weird, since comic books have taken over the film industry, further fueling the current golden age of TV. But far below the Olympian economics...
Shortly after I installed the YouTube channel, I found my official “sport.” I went for weeks not knowing what this wonderful thing that I was watching was called. Even though I had seen Paris is Burning and watched a season of Pose, I didn’t immediately make the...
DEAR BABS: "I’ve been an artist for a long time and I want to get rid of my old art. I don’t want it anymore and I don’t want to try and sell it, but I feel bad just throwing it in the dumpster. What’s the best way to get rid of my art?” Bernard, Los Angeles Dear...
“Blessed are the meek…” – Gospel of Matthew, 5:5 Has Theaster Gates truly “upcycled” his entire wardrobe as a spiritual gesture and a means of achieving transcendence? Perhaps he has. But in the most literal sense, Gates has taken the raw material of his sartorial...
The 22 representational paintings, drawings and prints comprising Vincent Valdez’ show, “It Was Never Yours,” symbolize American decline and apprehension with varying degrees of overtness. The Houston-based artist’s occasional flirtations with obvious content, such as...
It is hard to imagine living in Los Angeles and not being acquainted with the work of Kenny Scharf. His comic style, painted murals of interlocking faces, often derived from television and pop culture icons have adorned numerous buildings as well as individual’s cars...
References to narrations from the Old and New Testaments are hard to miss in the paintings of Naudline Pierre, as the fabulist spiritualism of her compositions presents an iconography of winged beings, gardens, serpents and sunrise convocations. More than one work...
Elyse Pignolet’s “You Should Calm Down” at Track 16 is a wry call-out of the misogynistic and patriarchal culture in the U.S. and the barrage of passive-aggressive phrases that women in our society frequently hear. It’s a collection of works that are distinctly of the...