“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...
The Complex Stuff is the Best
BUNKER VISION The Power of Lust
If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a built-in component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from...
ART BRIEF Supreme Court Levels The Playing Field For Artists
The 2022–23 term has been a disaster for the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. disgraced himself by spurning demands from Congress and the public that the Court adopt a code of ethics similar to the one covering all other federal jurists. If such...
THE DIGITAL Dream Big: Remember Where You Came From
Memory is a funny thing. Do you remember skinning your knee when you were a kid, or do you just look down at the scar and think of the stories you’ve heard? As you drive down the first street you lived on, do you remember the market on the corner where you would get...
PEER REVIEW Fin Simonetti on Ambera Wellmann
A stone sculptor and stained-glass artist (among many other things), Fin Simonetti approaches demanding classical mediums with cultural critique and tender ambiguity. The New York–based Canadian artist has become known for her stone carvings of canine body parts—such...
SHOPTALK: LA ART NEWS Coachella and New York
Melrose Hill or Bust We now have critical culture-mass in the area of Western Avenue between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard: half a dozen galleries have settled in, to be joined by LAXART any time now (the latter was supposed to have opened last year). This area...
ASK BABS The Name Game
Dear Babs, I’m a mid-career painter who’s carved out a decent professional career. I’m not famous, and frankly, I don’t want to be. My problem is that I have a unique name I thought would never be confused with another artist. Recently another, young painter with my...
POEMS "Cowsong" and "Yellow Touchings"
Cowsong Guide me into the depths, where the lack of oxygen intercepts the thing no human accepts. Yet here I am, alive: a joke the wind might contrive. Underneath the beat of your blood, feet in the stars, face in the mud. I can hear your brains beat and your heart...
COMICS The Seven Deadly Ads
GALLERY ROUNDS: Ken Taylor Reynaga at The Mistake Room
Ken Taylor Reynaga’s exhibition, “A Mano,” features a wide array of paintings and ceramics that speak to the personal and shared experience of cultural duality, and interrogate the belief that being multicultural places one in an identity limbo. Using his own...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: Laura Larraz Chris Sharp
In these bright, gestural paintings, Laura Larraz explores ranging depictions of femininity, from notions of purity and domesticity to the idea of witches. At first glance, her paintings have a clear sense of humor; in Beware of Holy Whore, two pink cherubs hover over...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Myrlande Constant The Fowler Museum at UCLA
“Lush” and “riveting” are words that best describe Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s exhibition “The Work of Radiance” at The Fowler Museum. Constant creates astonishingly beautiful mosaics out of fabric and beads, leaning on skills she developed as a young girl...
OUTSIDE LA: Susan Chen Rachel Uffner Gallery
After three years of experiencing artwork, exhibitions, podcasts, and news reports related to Covid-19, it seemed there could be nothing left to consume that is new, inspiring or even interesting. Enter Susan Chen. In a surprisingly refreshing and engaging solo show,...
PUBLISHER’S EYE: “Strong Winds Ahead” François Ghebaly
In this expansive group show featuring the works of 18 artists, curator Lekha Jandhyala creates a strange, almost dystopian environment, both primordial and futuristic, of works that imply destruction and rebirth; in dialogue with each other, Ragini Bhow’s floor...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Sarah Miska Night Gallery
Pulsing with energy and light, exuding a sense of dynamic motion, Sarah Miska uses the world of horse racing as her subject and the compelling need for control, risk-taking and forward motion as her themes. Her current exhibition “High Stakes” features large-scale,...
OUTSIDE LA: Anselm Kiefer White Cube
It’s difficult to really appreciate the extent to which Anselm Kiefer has transformed the space of White Cube Bermondsey London for his exhibition “Finnegan’s Wake” unless one is familiar with what the gallery looks like under more “normal” circumstances. An absolute...
GALLERY ROUNDS: Linda Arreola Avenue 50 Studio Gallery
Linda Arreola has been quite busy as her nearly sold-out show of new abstract paintings at Avenue 50 Studio Gallery attests. Curated by Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia, the exhibition comprises the artist’s strongest work to date. The presentation of nine paintings—some in...
OUTSIDE LA: Gordon Matta-Clark Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City
Over the course of a single day, a man saws a house in half. A silent and extremely filmic flickering of light and shadow, hand-held shake, spliced establishing and detail shots, and occasional shirtless cameos by the artist and his assistant, filthy with house-innard...