You’re in an otherwise familiar room or space, struck by how unusually airy and refreshed it seems. At the same time, wafting through the interior that constitutes your “mind’s eye,” you’re struck by a sense that, in one way or another, you’ve been here before. The...
They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce...
William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the...
Decades before there was a public internet, people were using the post office and self-published magazines to build communities. An interesting example of this was heterosexual men who liked to cross-dress. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was completely illegal for men to...
Billionaire founder of private equity firm Apollo Management, Leon Black, was at the top of his game in 2021 both as a Wall Street financier and as one of the world’s leading art collectors, owning works valued at more than $1 billion (he paid $120 million for a...
As with most endings, there exists introspection. The show is done, the crates have been shipped, the pieces have been sold—or not. Regardless of the success or accolades, regardless of the critic’s opinions, reality is now filled with days of waking up sans deadline....
A standout artist in 2023’s “Made in L.A.” biennial, Ishi Glinsky often plays with scale in his sculptures, paintings and drawings that reflect the customs of his tribe, the Tohono O’odham Nation. Fusing the past with the present, Glinsky examines pieces from his...
L.A. FAIRS IN THE NEW YEAR The fairs are coming again, and the leader of the pack is, of course, Frieze Los Angeles (Feb. 29–March 3, 2024), returning once more to the Santa Monica Airport. There will be more than 95 exhibitors, with about half from the greater LA...
One wouldn’t expect the prelude to a screening of David Byrne’s American Utopia to be a conversation—facilitated by the polymath—on affordable housing, but that’s what happened this past November at the Tomorrow Theater in Portland, Oregon. For one hour Byrne, joined...
Dear Babs, Dear Babs, How do you feel about an artist selling prints of an original artwork that hasn’t been shown or sold yet? Since it’s a print, the cost will be more affordable to the average buyer. Do you think this lowers the value of owning the actual piece of...
Stealing Life Closer and closer to fifty, years turn months, weeks, days, and I have trouble staying asleep. Around two I get up to read in the living room, then lie down, this time on the couch, turning the transistor radio to KGO, distracting myself, returning, life...
As with many works of contemporary art, Claudia Keep’s compact paintings first entered my field of vision on social media, where her imagery retains its appeal, even as her textured, varicolored and economical brushstrokes are flattened out. Keep often makes blunt...
As our rushing descent into global environmental catastrophe continues, we are inundated with images of our planet's suffering. We’ve all seen the snapshots—a man up to his neck in water pushing children on a downed satellite dish during the 2022 flooding of...
I first encountered Sombreuil’s work about 10 years ago—the coolest woman I had met in New York was wearing a pair of Come Tees screen-printed jeans, the legs bleached from the hip down, covered with bold drawings of red and blue faces and text reading, “The whole...
Spectacular and sinuous, Ann Weber’s large-scale sculptures create a mythic world, one that viewers step within and explore as if moving through a strange and lovely forest of anthropomorphic shapes. Created entirely from cardboard strips, the sculptures are woven...
The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, this group show of ten artists considers the tenderness of objects through various materials and scales, balancing between historical and futuristic sensibilities, as the exhibition title suggests. Spanning two floors and multiple...
Global pandemics democratize pain, suffering and loss. Therefore, who does one turn to when inquiring about world-reshaping events that impact the interpersonal and economic fabric of society? The answer is artists as they function as visual ethnographic historians....
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