Whatever one’s disposition, “ONE YEAR: The Art of Politics in Los Angeles” at Glendale’s Brand Library & Art Center provides fuel for thought and stimulus to action. Negotiating the polemics of the current political climate and the overarching sense of anxiety...
Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles: : Ellen Gallagher
There’s a lot to learn from Ellen Gallagher’s new exhibition. For example, it turns out Herman Melville was an Afrofuturist. And that the Atlantic Ocean is the original abstract expressionist. Also, that it is possible to make a map of something you can never see. On...
CAAM: : Black Radical Women
Rallying against overwhelmingly white, male perspectives in art history, “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the California African American Museum (CAAM) is not to be missed. The exhibition highlights the stylistically varied work of over 30...
Empathy Through Technology: Re-examining Vulnerability
The provocation of vulnerability has long been a mainstay of impactful art. Video and film media, given their reliance on the staging of exposure and emotional confrontation, are no exception. An exhibition...
Honor Fraser: : Miriam Schapiro
Admirers of feminist artist Miriam Schapiro’s (1923-2015) work may be surprised to learn that this influential woman who founded the Feminist Art program at CalArts with artist Judy Chicago and helped organize Womanhouse (1972), an installation project with over 25...
Night Gallery: : Wanda Koop
In her first exhibition in Los Angeles, Winnipeg-based artist Wanda Koop investigates the idea of dislocation. This dislocation is reflected in the exhibition title, In Absentia, and results from the fact that Koop’s paintings of New York City where actually created...
Camera Obscura: Duchamp’s Tortured Nude
Who knew that Nude Descending a Staircase landed flat on her back? Who knew, too, that an artist who did so much to bring Cubism to America ended up a purveyor of something between porn and schlock? At least it felt that way at his death in 1968, when others...
USC Fisher Museum: : James hd Brown
USC Fisher Museum's "James hd Brown: Life and Work in Mexico" is one of the few PST: LA/LA shows devoted to a SoCal-born expatriate. Born in Glendale in 1951, Brown settled in Oaxaca in 1995 after having lived in Europe and New York. This exhibition is ingrained with...
REDCAT: : León Ferrari
In a letter to a fellow Argentine artist living in Paris, León Ferrari wrote, “We produce culture for our ideological enemies, and they gobble everything up, the pretty paintings and the protest paintings alike.” That is the continuing crisis for art that is built...
Bermudez Projects: : Cody Norris
"Still Remains" is a small but provocative installation of twenty contemporary landscape paintings by Cody Norris in which the artist responds to the epic disfigurations and loss of wild nature due to extreme weather. Employing a neo-fumage technique, Norris’ work...
proyectosLA: : Focus on PST: LA/LA
Along a lonely stretch of Main Street extending from Union Station to the Brewery Arts Complex, largely defined by seafood warehouses and girded by railroad tracks, sits Werkartz, a co-working pop-up venue and production space aligned with a new gig economy in which...
Richard Heller Gallery: : Kajahl
Kajahl's paintings vivify ancient statues, presenting them as dignified, mysterious multicultural personae. Embodying Western clichés from bygone eras, the characters in his current show titled "Unearthed Entities" include alchemists, explorers and conquerors. While...
Santa Monica College: : Joseph Dumbacher and John Dumbacher
In “line-of-site,” Joseph Dumbacher and John Dumbacher have crafted an installation about geometry and perception. It is minimal and simultaneously maximal, suggesting expansive possibilities with limited materials. The brothers (who are fraternal twins) have filled...
Gallery 825: : Flora Kao
Sometimes a drawing is not a drawing. For example, when an artist transcends rendering and goes for something entirely more direct. In the case of Flora Kao and her unique, evocative architectural rubbings, her method of depiction is itself a tactile, durational,...
Nicodim Gallery: : Simphiwe Ndzube
"Bhabharosi," the title of Simphiwe Ndzube's show and several works therein, is a neologism the artist coined from the words "barbarous" and "rose" in isiXhosa, his native language, to refer to his protagonists. As insinuated, a mood of bittersweetness transfuses the...
KP Projects: : Scott Hove
Known for his immersive cake-like installations, Scott Hove’s latest makings offer wry commentary upon the demise of today’s political, economic, and ecological landscapes in “Last Ticket for the Beauty Train,” a two-part exhibition presented by KP Projects. On...
Fowler Museum at UCLA: : Fran Siegel
There are two points of entry into Fran Siegel's exquisite exhibition, "Lineage Through Landscape: Tracing Egun in Brazil." One is purely visual: admiring the unique way the individual drawings and collages are sewn together and suspended from the ceiling; noticing...
CAAM Summer Nights and The Institute for Art and Olfaction
I linked up with my homegirl and creative partner, filmmaker Niki Williams, and we Uber Pool-ed it to CAAM to check out their event “Summer Nights” and the silent films they’re screening as part of their “African American Women in Silent Race Films” exhibit. I had the...