In Branden W. Joseph’s book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, Joseph precipitates his excursion into the minutiae of the early ’60s New York City avant-garde on Mike Kelley’s concept-like-thing of Minor Histories—a sort of...
This year, the veteran LA gallery ltd los angeles marked the start of its 10th season. In some ways, the gallery’s program looks more like that of a nonprofit than a commercial gallery. They don’t represent artists, per se. Instead of having a roster of 12 to 20...
Outsider artists, or untrained artists, have been variously labeled Primitive, Naïve, Visionary and Self-Taught. One of the things I like most about such artists is their distinct and fully-imagined worldview, a consciousness that exists without being overly precious...
“Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”—intended to be the most important show of Chinese dissident art in recent years—limped into California late last year. The show traveled to the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, Spain and New York before its display at the...
By the time my studio visit with Francesca Gabbiani is winding up, the conversation has turned to Griffith Park. We talk about our respective walks, and various neglected areas of the Park—the depleted bird sanctuary and abandoned spaces and cages near the Zoo—and the...
Leaving my converted-garage AirBnb near Little Havana, I was charmed to find the walkway was blocked by wheat posters and spray cans. It was 9 a.m. on the second day of Art Basel Miami Beach and artist Fiest was putting the finishing sprays on a series of his RIP LOVE...
If you have any awareness of the New York underground, you have probably encountered the name Penny Arcade. Her resume is so diverse, that until she finishes her autobiography, it will be hard to comprehend the breadth of her activities. Those activities include...
There is a myth, subscribed to by all ambitious but unsuccessful artists, that they will be discovered posthumously, and their work revered by future generations. That may be cold comfort, but when it comes to fame, the SoCal artist Robert Williams doubles down with...
In 2016, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Kim SchoeNstadt launched her “Now Be Here” project in Los Angeles where 733 contemporary women artists gathered for a group photo at Hauser & Wirth. Tell me about how you started the project, Now Be Here. Hauser Wirth...
Why, exactly, is Laura Owens’ art so compelling? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since I was in art school. Elusiveness seems intrinsic to her work’s magic, which in my mind boils down to two intertwined notions: possibility and freedom. Owens’ eclectic art...
Cécile B. Evans’ stand alone installation, “Something Tactical is Coming,” generates a deliciously satisfying SciFi dystopian theatricality. The bulk of the installation at Chateau Shatto is comprised of a production set from the second episode of her three-part video...
It is not as simple as a pixels-for-brushstrokes exchange, but there’s no getting around how Petra Cortright’s new digital compositions are in a heated conversation with paintings. Yes, the gestures she enacts on her computer or touch-screen tablet function in the...
Helen Rae’s lavishly executed drawings, saturated with colors, patterns and prints, exemplify the power of mere visuals to communicate. Rae, who was born deaf and is nonverbal, speaks vibrantly and voluminously through her evocative drawings currently exhibiting at...
At first glance the passionately colored mandala-like images of June Edmonds and the softly nuanced black-and-white drawings on photographs by A.M. Rousseau couldn’t appear to be more distant from one another. Underlying both of these artists’ work however is an...
The term “Valley Girl” was introduced to popular culture in the early 1980s via a record by Frank Zappa and a film starring Nicolas Cage. It referred to young women from the San Fernando Valley who were portrayed as “ditzy,” “airheaded,” and committed to conspicuous...
Sara Gernsbacher’s wall works are not paintings. They are compositions of simple colors and shapes that suggest, rather than indicate, juxtapositions, combinations, interconnections, meldings and separations. Spray painted, trimmed and further layered, they evoke a...
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