You consider yourself an influencer. A few thousand Instagram followers agree. Photos of your cocktails, your midcentury furniture, your body moving through museums, through notable cities, sitting in international airports. It’s February, and @you are landing back in...
Congratulations to our winner Lisa Adams and our finalists. Adams photo is seen above and first in our photo gallery. Her image is also printed in our May/June issue of Artillery. The following photographs are the finalists from our May/June contest. Please see info...
The University Art Museum (UAM) at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) recently hosted artist lauren woods’ (lower case intentional, per the artist) project, American Monument 25/2018, an ongoing intermedia monument to Black lives taken by police...
In 1969, the Black Panther Party began its Free Breakfast for Children Program in Oakland, CA, providing healthy meals to hungry school kids in disenfranchized black neighborhoods. It quickly grew into a nationwide program and proved so successful that then FBI head...
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....
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says...
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...