In Brandon Landers’ debut solo exhibition at M+B, the Bakersfield-based, LA-born and raised artist delivers a collection of expressionistic and loosely narrative paintings that draw from his experiences growing up in South Central Los Angeles, yet the works retain an...
Holly Elander
Holly Elander's quiet Los Angeles cityscapes exude a strong presence. Desolation brings out the personalities of inanimate features that would otherwise be easily overlooked in neglected byways. This exhibition includes 21 acrylic-on-panel paintings from two divergent...
August Art is Hot!
We headed up to MOAH on Saturday, where it wasn’t just the summer wind that was hot in Lancaster. While Snezana Saraswati Petrovic continued her lush ocean-centric installation at MOAH: Cedar, the main museum featured a diverse collection of painterly curation in...
Heather James Palm Desert: : Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, and Rodney McMillian
A group exhibition at Heather James Palm Desert, "Material and Abstraction: Theaster Gates, Sam Gilliam, and Rodney McMillian," explores abstraction and non-representation, inviting the viewer to move beyond “either/or” assumptions about art-making, and to embrace...
REDCAT’s New Original Works Festival 2019
The Roy and Edna Disney / CALARTS Theatre (REDCAT) hosted the 16th Annual New Original Works Festival over the last three consecutive weekends, inviting audience members to step outside our comfort zone to experience three new contemporary dance, theater, music or...
HEY MISTER, WANNA BUY A BANKSY?
In May this year, a Millennial identifying himself as the You Tuber Reckless Ben Schneider entered a Los Angeles gallery and told the art dealer there that he had a Banksy painting with him. The LA Art Dealer said he’d like to check it out, so Schneider pulled a...
Jasmine Little; Robert Nava
Jasmine Little's ceramics and Robert Nava's paintings both incorporate breezily limned imagery of fantastic creatures and people. At a distance, the large stoneware vessels in Little's show, "Retrograde," appear deceptively old-fashioned; their brown-and-white palette...
Gavlak Los Angeles: : Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.)
Detention, deportation, refugee, criminal, other: these are terms that have blanketed the news in the last few years, and are thematically central to a solo exhibition by Jose Alvarez (D.O.P.A.) at Gavlak Los Angeles. Alvarez, who lives in South Florida, came to the...
Man on the Moon
The Moon landing’s 50th anniversary can’t be avoided. Waxing at full, it feels like the last gasp. The defining moment for some in the baby boom generation, what does the Apollo 11 landing obscure? The moon shadow cast by one artist’s timely work points the way....
Sizzling Art Summer
The summer sizzles when it comes to art in LA, with a wonderfully eclectic collection of art events this past weekend. Saturday night began at the Louis Stern Gallery in Beverly Hills, where Veda B. Kaya held forth with a beautiful, motion-filled series of works that...
Armando G. Cortés; Hande Sever
Wilmington-based artist Armando G. Cortés has incorporated realities and legends from his birthplace, Urequío, a small farming town in Michoacán, Mexico, into a captivating installation titled "Reverberante." Natural springs run through some Urequío adobe homes' clay...
LA Louver: : Terry Allen
Terry Allen rocks. In two sold out concerts at the Frogtown club Zebulon, presented in conjunction with his exhibition, “The Exact Moment it Happens in the West,” Allen and his Panhandle Mystery Band had audiences cheering and dancing as they sang along to his...
All That Jazz
Last week we had the delight of attending The Broad museum’s “Black Fire Sessions.” Before even stepping through the doors, it was clear the night was in full swing. An outdoor garden was filled with enthused attendees who enjoyed a stocked bar of wines and cocktails...
Orkideh Torabi
Orkideh Torabi's painted burlesques of men offer sardonic commentary on patriarchal oppression of women in Iran and beyond. The Tehran-born, Chicago-based artist's 2017 LA show featured mostly frontal portraits of caricatural men whose stark, formal poses against...
The Living Dead
There’s something undeniably seductive about Andreas Mühe’s spare, yet sumptuous photographs. A superb technician and gifted storyteller, Mühe uses both formal and narrative elements with concentrated, yet restrained intensity to create images of arresting beauty and...
Craft Contemporary: : The RIDDLE Effect
Walking into the 3rd floor gallery of Craft Contemporary, which is filled with disparate objects and images, what a viewer is likely to notice first is what a broad spectrum of art is on exhibit there. John T. Riddle, the artist who is the focus of this show, was a...
CURATING THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
On July 4th, CNN’s website featured photographs of drawings done by several ten-year-old migrant children who had been separated from their parents by US Customs and Border Protection. After their release from CBP, the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center,...
Eileen Cowin; “Group Show: Drawings and Other Works on Paper”
Eileen Cowin's solo exhibition at As Is comprises eight photographic works chosen from two series, "Mad Love," and "Kafka's Diary." Each of Cowin's pictures cleverly pairs two disparate photos whose strange vertical abutment evokes emotion and suggests open-ended...