For the past few weeks, Iron Halo, a catalog of Sal Salandra’s art, has occupied my coffee table, stopping everyone who sees it in their tracks. The cover is a detail from a work called Human Ashtray: an ultramarine background surrounds a bearded man wearing a dog...
Multidisciplinary Los Angeles–based artist Ahree Lee started her career focused on video work. In 2001, she took on her first major long-term project employing the repetitive and somewhat pedestrian habit of taking a daily selfie. The resulting images were transformed...
When you talk about utilitarian art, the elephant in the room is always fashion. As fashion houses expand to encompass lifestyle brands, most art with a utilitarian function might fall into the fashion category. It is not uncommon to see museum retrospectives now for...
Lisa Schiff, among the top ranks of New York art advisors, who faces multiple lawsuits by clients and art dealers, put her company, SFA Advisory (with another office in London), into bankruptcy in May. Schiff, 53, who counted the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio among her...
There are moments in history, moments in which the tide can turn based on the will and actions of few. We are currently in one of those moments regarding the acceptance of NFTs in the mainstream art world. As best-selling author Malcom Gladwell would describe far...
Raised in and around Washington DC, with two degrees in painting, Matthew Rosenquist now makes sculptures, albeit with some paint applied. How did that happen? I ask him. After grad school in the South, he took an entry-level job at the Smithsonian with duties that...
Made in L.A. 2023 The Hammer’s “Made in L.A.” just opened (through Dec. 31), and it is now clearly THE art biennial of SoCal. It’s also the best one yet, I think. This year’s theme, “Acts of Living,” allows for a diverse range of work from 39 artists while giving the...
Dear Babs, I’m sick of the BS-way people in the art world talk so that most of us can’t understand them. Why can’t they just be okay with calling stuff beautiful and cool? Has the art world always been like this? Is it just to be exclusive, or is there a point I’m...
free country your voice on the phone in the dream is disinterested I miss you I say It’s a free country a moth falls through the door drunk on light the same one that flies out of my wallet how have I never seen him I think coming home —Evan Laffer STILL THE SAME...
Titled "Soft Moves," Casey Baden's show of bright and emotive paintings blends figures with abstracted organic backgrounds; her subjects' skin tones range from blues and purples to deep oranges reminiscent of Kirchner, and the plants and nature are reduced to...
The Converge 45 biennial initiative exists to forge a regional, national, and international artistic discourse, and to intentionally center certain aspects of those conversations within the Pacific Northwest arts ecosystem. Showcasing some 50 local, national, and...
I’ve always found the word “gilded” to be slippery. On a literal level, it refers to the application of paper-thin sheets of gold leaf, a technique that’s been around for millennia. Not only does the process coat and protect ordinary materials like wood or stone, but...
Nobody walks in Los Angeles but ducking out of the overheated concrete jungle and into “Between past and present/ Between appearance and memory,”—Soumya Netrabile’s vivid exhibition of wildlife, texture, line and color at Anat Ebgi—may inspire the urge to lace up your...
One could see the LA-based artist Jesse Mockrin’s decision to name her first solo exhibition in New York City and at James Cohan—“The Venus Effect,” after the art historical term, motif, and visual effect—as itself a gesture towards acknowledging, even inviting...
This September, the Academy Museum opened its John Waters retrospective entitled “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” shortly followed by Waters' induction into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The exhibit includes the glasses Mink Stole wore in Pink Flamingos (1972), costumes by...
It’s no secret, Gerald Ford could throw, and his famed football remembers him fondly, so singular and ever so brown, careening across the Michigan sky. He ran the country the way he assembled the field—one play at a time and always with the endgame in mind, but his...
With artificial flowers attached to motorized objects (such as massagers and exercise devices), Rachel Youn’s animated sculptures are hypnotic and strangely erotic, the rhythmic sounds of both the machines and the movements of the plants pulsating throughout the...
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