In concurrent exhibitions at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and Rafa Esparza resist political declarations of border wall funding emergencies that reflect converging agendas and legacies of colonialism, nationalism, racism and capitalism....
Imagine you check your mailbox to find a neatly folded copy of The New York Times waiting for you, its headline reading, “Herr Hitler’s Nazis Hear an Echo of World Opinion.” Wait. What? A double-take ensues as you encounter Susan Silton’s most recent work of art. As...
On February 15, 2019, President Donald Trump issued a fake declaration of a national emergency at the southern border of the U.S., claiming that criminals and drugs were infiltrating into the country at record levels—a blatant lie. In fact, illegal border crossings...
Eighties nostalgia is a sad and sick thing. In Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s early-’90s exercise in ’70s nostalgia, the character Cynthia (played by Beck’s future wife!) explains her Every Other Decade theory thusly: “The ’50s were boring. The ’60s rocked....
You know the photo. Times Square. 1945. V-Day. A male sailor hugging and kissing a female nurse in fervent joy over the end of World War II. An immense sculpture of the kiss seen ‘round the world, Unconditional Surrender, would later settle in Sarasota, Florida. In...
Ron Ormond is not the sort of filmmaker who usually gets prestigious restorations. His most famous work was a series of Lash LaRue films. He made forgettable low budget films and produced roller derby for television in the 1960s. When he grew tired of that, he started...
DEAR BABS: If an artist wants to make a work of art, say put something up in public, or appropriate an image, or orchestrate a prank, or just... ya know... do something that’s likely to draw attention from the police, what should they do if they need legal advice?...
Irene Tsatsos is the director of exhibition programs and chief curator at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Sandra de la Loza’s current beautiful photographic exhibition “Mi Casa Es Su Casa” seems highly prescient. How did it come about, and how do you feel...
How do you disappear when you’re already invisible? The unnamed narrator/protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) would answer by instead choosing to reappear to awaken sleepwalkers from their racist straightjacket. Similarly, selected artists in the...
While the underlying engineering of Tim Hawkinson’s artworks appears to be of an extraordinarily complex order, the raw materials with which they are made, taken from everyday objects that are typically discarded after the substance in them is extracted, structure a...
“The aim of the dreamer…is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world… But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.” This quote from James Baldwin’s 1962 novel Another Country is on the wall of...
“Many years ago,” Maggie Nelson writes in her memoir, The Argonauts, “[the poet Anne] Carson gave a lecture ...at which she introduced (to me) the concept of leaving a space empty so that God could rush in ...” Nelson writes that she “fastened” to the idea, which she...
Featuring over 60 works on paper and seven films, “Sara Kathryn Arledge: Serene for the Moment” discloses the brilliance of one singular artist who never should have been forgotten. This enthralling retrospective begins with a room of early drawings, archives and a...
Three immersive films from Africa about political and cultural resistance use tropes of the Imaginary from Fanon to Lacan to challenge inherited postcolonial mindsets. Kudzanai Chiurai presents a gorgeous, disorienting series of seven tableaux dramatizing the agony of...
Sometimes there is that rare and ineffable dialogue between artists that resists being quantified or easily understood. It’s like snow or the first time you fall in love. It works for no apparent reason, and is wonderful to behold. The current exhibition “Flora &...
A lot happens in the room at the Lowell Ryan group show Color Out of Space, so much that it seeps into more than one dimension. In large-scale mixed-media paintings and sculptures that take the very idea of mixed media to new places, five artists address not only...
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